by John Ortved
KENT BUTTERWORTH: Matt and Sam had different opinions about everything, and there was a lot of debate about every detail. I remember there was an extensive discussion about what kind of underwear Homer wore—this went on for weeks! Matt would come by the studio every week or so to talk with the artists. Gabor would walk around the artists telling them to “make it funn-key.”
BRIAN ROBERTS: I was there when they recorded the theme song, which was amazing. They took one of the last great remaining orchestra recording stages, which happens to be located at Fox, and an eightypiece orchestra came in and the choir was there, and Danny Elfman was conducting, and I’ll fucking never forget it. It was our first look at the opening title of the show. We’d never seen it before and of course we’d never heard Danny’s score. He conducted this orchestra right through that really complex opening theme song, which is sort of a mix of The Jetsons and The Flintstones, and Danny Elfman blended it all together.
To me, that was part of TV history.
For the series, they would require more voice actors to fill out the remaining roles of Springfield’s citizens. Brooks’s casting agent and producer, Bonnie Pietila, decided on Hank Azaria (Moe, Chief Wiggum, Apu), Pamela Hayden (Milhouse, Jimbo), Tress MacNeille (Agnes Skinner, Dolph), Maggie Roswell (Maude Flanders, Miss Hoover), Harry Shearer (Principal Skinner, Kent Brockman, Mr. Burns), Russi Taylor (Martin Prince, Terri), and Marcia Wallace (Mrs. Krabappel). Employing top improvisational actors as voice talent was just one of the innovations that enabled The Simpsons to assert itself as something that was progressive as well as wholly original.
JAMES L. BROOKS (to The Washington Post, October 11, 1990): On the shows where we’re doing the job right, you forget it’s animation. The characters are real to us.
GEORGE MEYER (to The New Yorker, March 13, 2000): When you and I were kids, the average TV comedy was about a witch, or a Martian, or a goofy frontier fort, or a comical Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. That was the mainstream. Now the average comedy is about a bunch of people who hang around in some generic urban setting having conversations and sniping at each other. I remember watching, in the sixties, an episode of Get Smart in which some angry Indians were aiming a sixty-foot arrow at Washington, and Max said something like “That’s the second-biggest arrow I’ve ever seen,” and I thought, Oh, great, shows are just going to keep getting nuttier and nuttier. I never dreamed that television comedy would turn in such a dreary direction, so that all you would see is people in living rooms putting each other down … One of the main reasons is the tyranny of live studio audiences, which I think have ruined television comedy. Leave It to Beaver, unlike most sitcoms today, was not taped in front of a live audience. If that show were in production now and Beaver made some kind of gentle, sweet remark about his collection of rocks, or whatever, that line wouldn’t get a laugh from the audience during rehearsal, and it would be cut. With a live audience, you always end up with hard-edged lines that the audience knows are jokes. Audiences hate it when they have to figure out whether something is funny or not—I think because people have an anxiety about laughing in the wrong place, almost like a fear of speaking in public. That’s why the biggest comedy stars tend to be people like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey, because audiences never have to guess when they’re trying to be funny.
MATT GROENING (to Charlie Rose, July 30, 2007): When we went to turn it into a TV series, Jim said, “We have to go for real emotion. We have to know what makes these people tick and we have to feel for them. I want people to forget they’re watching a cartoon.” And we did.
GEORGE MEYER (to The New Yorker, March 13, 2000): I think we can get away with a little more on The Simpsons because the setup is so traditional. The Simpsons are an intact family unit … I think it was a smart choice not to go in any really interesting direction with the core of the show—just to be very traditional, and then make the execution odd and quirky. Because people can take only so much before their heads explode.
CONAN O’BRIEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–93): There is a strong lack of sentimentality on The Simpsons, but there’s also something that’s important, which I know Sam Simon and Jim Brooks and Matt Groening stressed: this is a family. That kind of talk can start to sound pretty treacley, but it is a family and you can’t have an episode where Homer sells Bart or harvests his organs. You can’t do that. So I think one of the things that maybe works is that respect for that unit was always kept intact.
JAY KOGEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): The Simpsons are more than just cartoon characters; they’re relatable characters. I think the show, when it first began, certainly had a heart. Lisa was smart and stuck in a family that she was better than. Also Marge. The women in the family had more brains, and also more heart. But Homer’s heart was in the right place too. And as far as dysfunctional families go, it was a pretty good, smart dysfunctional family. And pretty funny.
A classic trope of traditional sitcom is that the family at its center is firmly rooted in a town or city that—with the exception of the occasional birth or boy down a well—never really changes. For The Simpsons this was Springfield, a traditional town with traditional values, turned completely on its head. Springfield is both landlocked and near an ocean, rich and in terrible economic decline, openminded yet completely subject to mob rule. It is, in short, whatever the writers need it to be.
MATT GROENING (to The Washington Post, May 13, 1993): The reason why the town is called Springfield is because when I was a kid I watched Father Knows Best, which took place in a town called Springfield. And I always assumed it was the next town over … We get letters from people all over the place telling me they know it’s their Springfield because their Springfield has a toxic waste dump and a nuclear power plant. It’s very sad, the number of letters we get like that.
There are forty-nine Springfields in the United States (there are more Lincolns, but Groening has said he thinks Springfield is a funnier name). In a move to promote The Simpsons Movie, a contest was held, in conjunction with USA Today, where competitors, who lived in real Springfields, made videos demonstrating their enthusiasm for The Simpsons, in order to determine which Springfield could call itself the “real” one. Although Springfield, Vermont, was named the winner and got to host The Simpsons Movie premiere, Matt Groening has said repeatedly that the real Springfield exists only “in your heart.” Early on, viewers’ hearts were captivated by one resident of Springfield above all others: a prepubescent hellion named Bart.
Bart Simpson started out as Dennis the Menace updated for the nineties: Dennis in the age of Ritalin, without a Ritalin prescription. He was a prankster, a daredevil, a smart-ass, and a wit. In the early years, he lived to subvert the authority abounding in his life: his principal, his teacher and, of course, his bumbling, caustic father, Homer. Bart was subversive, but he had heart—some of the show’s most touching early moments had the little hellion coming to terms with his bad behavior and reconciling with his family or friends. Later, as Homer became simpler, and the show moved its focus more toward him, Bart became, more often than not, his dad’s partner in crime.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): We used to Joke that Bart was the original Peck’s Bad Boy,h which was ancient reference. Bart was an amalgam of our childhoods smashed into one character. At the time there were no women on the staff, so it was very heavily skewed toward what boys thought was funny. When you’re a kid, you like to see adults getting away with stuff, because you hope to join them one day in anarchy and mayhem.
JENNIFER TILLY, actress, poker champion, ex-wife of Sam Simon: We were really young, and I didn’t want kids, and Sam didn’t want kids, but to make up for it, we had—as couples often do—this imaginary kid running around that was always getting into trouble. Our imaginary kid was always taking the Porsche out for a spin. Or we’d leave a store, and Sam would say to him, “What do you have? What are you holding?” He was this incorrigible kid who was always getting into trouble. And a lot
of the character of that kid that we had in our relationship as a running joke ended up being Bart.
GEORGE MEYER (to The New Yorker, March 13, 2000): The thing I like about Bart is that even though he will put on his grandfather’s dentures and bite the ceiling fan and spin around, he is not cruel or nasty.
Aside from being the star of the show (after Season 2), Homer Simpson has become one of the great characters in the history of entertainment. While he started out as a gruff parent and foil to Bart’s pranks, he has evolved into perhaps the most complete and complicated simpleton the Western canon has to offer. While working a dead-end job as the safety inspector at the local nuclear power plant—a job he is completely unqualified for—Homer manages to drunkenly stumble his way through each day, numbing the drudgery of life—with Duff beer and thoughtless, often dangerous antics—until he can crawl into bed with his beloved wife, Marge.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY: Homer always felt to me like a bigger, dumber version of Ralph Kramden. Ralph Kramden was always one of my favorite characters in television, because he’s trying so hard and always getting in his own way, so that kind of character is really fun to write. And because it’s telelvision, they needn’t ever get ahead, because every week you can start at the beginning again.
GEORGE MEYER (to The Believer): As in the real world, the most oblivious people are often the happiest. Someone like Chief Wiggum, for instance, who is pretty satisfied with his life despite being an absolutely catastrophic police chief. I also think Homer is pretty happy, if only because deep in his bones he realizes that he’s indestructible. There’s not much that can hurt him.
MATT GROENING (to Playboy, June 1, 2007): One of the great things about the character Homer … is that he is ruled by impulse. He wants whatever he wants at the moment, with all his heart.
GEORGE MEYER (to The Believer): I don’t think [Homer and Marge] have the greatest marriage. I’m always surprised at how that never comes across to some viewers. There’ll be an episode where Homer passes out drunk on Christmas, or sells his family to Gypsies, and people will say, “It was funny and you did your jokes, but that’s a family that really works. That’s a good marriage.” It blows my mind. They have to see that, even if it’s not there.
Marge Simpson is at once a clever and cynical twist on the classic housewife archetype. She is June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, Alice, Clair Huxtable, and Annie Camden all rolled into one (with an occasional hint of Lucille Ball and Gloria Steinem thrown in for good measure). Marge does the impossible: deals with Homer’s unpredictability, Bart’s troublemaking, Lisa’s perspicacity, and Maggie’s diapers. She revels in her role as supermom and yet feels the need to rebel sometimes. While The Simpsons’ writers admit that Marge is the hardest, and their least favorite, character to write for, what started out merely as the nagging voice of reason at 742 Evergreen Terrace has progressed—with the help of Julie Kavner’s enormous talents—to a more challenging, fleshed-out, adult female character.
GEORGE MEYER (to The Believer): Marge needs to have a loose-cannon guy in the house. She likes being the authority figure, and Homer gives her something to wag her finger at. And obviously Homer needs Marge to keep him alive.
JONATHAN GRAY, author, media critic: Marge is your sort of traditional sitcom mom who is surrounded by a real family. She can’t just tell the son, “Do this,” and the son does it. She actually has to deal with these real people. And so you get these moments where Marge is being asked to do everything and to hold everything together and she can’t. There are eight or nine episodes where Marge has one or another kind of meltdown—she gets addicted to steroids or she starts losing her hair or she freaks out in other ways. It’s showing that asking the moms to be these sort of superwomen was just too much.
And then there is Lisa. Poor, smart, underappreciated Lisa. Originally a little precocious for her age, Lisa’s IQ has expanded exponentially over the years, as has her role as the family’s moral center: its voice of reason, its critic, the single opposition to the consumerist, irrational behavior that defines the residents of 742 Evergeen Terrace and really all of Springfield. Hence, she is the perpetual outcast, often even within her own household. In later years, she’s a vegetarian, environmentalist, and all-around cause-head, but in the earlier days, while she certainly had that sensitive, questioning voice of right and wrong (it was fear of losing his daughter’s love that caused Homer to give up the free cable he stole in the second season), she also had the voice of an eight-year-old girl: unjaded, inquisitive, hungry for love, attention, and acceptance.
JEFF MARTIN (Season 3 DVD Commentary): I always liked Lisa episodes. I always find them the most effortlessly emotional and touching.
MATT GROENING (Season 3 DVD Commentary): I think Lisa’s a great character … She’s the one character not completely ruled by her impulses.
JEFF MARTIN (Season 3 DVD Commentary): And as a result, she’s in pain, all the time. Or it’s never far from the surface.
JONATHAN GRAY: I’d maintain that Lisa is probably the best and certainly longest-running feminist character that television has had. She’s the heart of the show and she quite often questions the gender politics.
But The Simpsons didn’t jump from the sketchy archetypes we saw on Ullman to the fully fleshed-out characters described above. To breathe life into this family, Sam Simon would assemble a writing team of television comedy’s best and brightest, complete with Harvard diplomas.
SIX
The Room
In which the West Side Pavilion Mall is the first Simpsons writing room … Conan O’Brien invents a sport … The Simpsons hires a black guy (not really) … and Jim Brooks wants blood.
He’s probably some geek Simpsons writer’s kid.
—Michael Bluth, Arrested Development
The Simpsons writers room, where scripts are devised, written, and edited, has come to be considered one of the great temples of comedy. Although many of the original writers had substantial television credits, Sam Simon plucked spectacular talent from nontraditional places, beginning a trend that would continue long after his departure (subsequent showrunners hired mathematicians and lawyers). Perhaps his key find was George Meyer, editor of the humor magazine Army Man—distributed sparingly in Hollywood in the late eighties and somewhat of a shibboleth in the comedy-writing community. In 1991, Conan O’Brien, one of many Harvard Lampoon veterans on the staff, Bill Oakley, and Josh Weinstein would be the first writers to be added to the original room.
Writing is important to any sitcom, but on an animated series there would be beautiful actors or topical humor to keep the viewers enthralled, so the writing room carried special significance at The Simpsons. It is important to remember that this was before the likes of David Chase (The Sopranos), Ricky Gervais (The Office), Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), Mitchell Hurwitz (Arrested Development), and Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) made television something closer to a respectable medium for writers. This was the era of Full House and Family Matters, where smart, incisive, funny writing was hardly prevalent. Late Night with David Letterman, Roseanne, and Cheers were anomalies in an otherwise dismal comedy landscape.
For the first four or five seasons Sam Simon’s writers room not only created the best episodes of The Simpsons but also established the show’s inimitable voice. Over the years, many of the show’s critics and commentators have tried to define that voice—a combination of rebellious, ironic, highbrow, silly, crude, intertextually hyperactive, iconoclastic, sly, witty, and retarded. The men in that room—Nell Scovell is the only woman with a writing credit from the initial seasons—built a family sitcom that was not only funny but also resonant, first with kids, then critics, and then everybody else, for the next twenty years. If The Simpsons has reshaped what we find funny and how we communicate, the writing room and its workings are worth examining, because it is the touchstone of The Simpsons’ universe.
The original room included Sam Simon, Al Jean, Mike Reiss, Jace Richdale, Jon Vitti, George Meyer, John Swartzw
elder, Jay Kogen, Wallace Wolodarsky, Jeff Martin, and Matt Groening (sort of).
CONAN O’BRIEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–93) (when he was asked to join the room after Season 2): It was as if that first Olympic Dream Team, with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, called and said, “Do you want to come shoot baskets with us?”
BILL OAKLEY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–97): It was like being hired at Saturday Night Live in 1977. It was like going to work at Your Show of Shows in 1955, when you had Mel Brooks and Neil Simon and all those guys there on the writing staff. The show was at its absolute height and it was all the original guys and Conan.
