by John Ortved
JAY KOGEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): We were on board even before there was a writers room. Wallace Wolodarsky and I would walk around the West Side Pavilion Mall with Matt Groening and Sam Simon and pitch out a show. Sometimes we’d go to lunch; it would just be the four of us.
DARIA PARIS, Sam Simon’s assistant, The Simpsons (1989–93): There’d be usually four or five writers in Sam’s office, and we’d go through the script and they would change things, pitch ideas, that kind of thing. And basically out of that they’d fashion a script. At the time, Jim Brooks was in Ireland, I think, and he would call in and we would take notes from him and then incorporate them. Jim was more of a consultant—he’d get a script, he’d call, he’d send notes or whatever. He was not usually in the room.
BRIAN ROBERTS, editor, The Simpsons (1989–92): Jim was never around a lot. Matt was around, but he was isolated and not really a part of the inside gang. Jim would come, though. And the thing that I really credit Jim with, and I don’t think there’s anybody who would argue with this, is that he would give the family some heart.
Jim’s thing was that deep down they really loved each other. Deep down, I think Jim understood that if they didn’t truly love each other, at the end of the day, nobody’s gonna watch.
And so he’d come in and he’d sprinkle his fairy dust in little places here and there, to the great improvement of the show. And that’s where I think Jim’s contribution begins and ends on The Simpsons. And that’s no small contribution.
HANK AZARIA, voice actor, The Simpsons (1989–present): Fox had two hits: they had The Simpsons and they had Married … with Children, and The Simpsons was very believable and Married … with Children was more like a cartoon. And there are episodes, I think particularly the Lisa episodes, where they really involve the journey of a little girl and what would realistically happen; those are beautiful, realistic little stories.
I think of Matt’s Life in Hell cartoon. It’s very cynical, but it’s got a lot of emotion at the same time. It’s usually very negative. Like those Jeff and Akbar cartoons: they’ll have very realistic arguments with each other about pretty deep, interesting issues, and they’re both kind of unattractive and yet we relate to them so much that we feel a lot for them. I think that’s what really what Matt brought. You know, the family of The Simpsons—they’re so flawed and kind of ugly that we all relate because we all have a dysfunctional family of our own.
SAM SIMON, creative consultant, The Simpsons (1989–93) (to Joe Morgenstern in the Los Angeles Times, 1990): If you bring up any subject in a story conference, if it’s a field trip, or what it’s like to go to the nurse’s office, or what it’s like to be called in by the principal, [Matt’s] recall is near total and astonishing. I think that’s a real rare talent.
WALLACE WOLODARKSY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): Matt had an incredible ability to recount events from his childhood and also events and feelings that were resonant with us from childhood. It made him an endless source of amusement. In the early days, we didn’t really care that much about stories, and Jim insisted that we tell real human stories, and so did Sam. What I cared about was telling jokes.
COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS, postproduction supervisor, The Simpsons (1989–97): George Meyer was this long-haired guy. Swartzwelder was this big tall Sasquatch sloppy guy. Vitti always was in cords and a nice shirt, almost looking like a substitute teacher. Al Jean wore high school basketball shorts like Cousy used to wear, and inappropriately tight clothes. You’d see all these guys and you had no idea; you would talk to them and have really intelligent conversations about politics and art. You’d go to parties with them and they were regular guys. If you talk to a writer on any show, somehow he’ll guide you toward, “What do you do? What show are you on?” And with The Simpsons’ writers, it was the opposite. They were guys who were having fun, doing what they were doing and making a good show, but they were the geekiest, most unassuming guys.
DARIA PARIS: It was usually the same people in the room. At the time it was a fairly small writing staff, and they were just great and very different. Jon Vitti, very quiet. John Swartzwelder wasn’t very quiet. And then everybody pitched in, including me. And the great thing about Sam as a showrunner was that no matter where it came from, if it was funny, he took it.
BRIAN ROBERTS: Jeff Martin was the go-to guy for all the jingles and he was brilliant at them. Mike Reiss is probably the nicest human being on planet Earth and absolutely hysterically funny. And then Al Jean, whose style is a little more reserved, is also just fucking funny.
These guys would throw lightning fastballs and it was after that experience that I got addicted to writers rooms because they’re just brilliant, fun places to be. ROBERT COHEN, production assistant, The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons (1989–92): It was very friendly. These guys seemed excited that they were creating this show and everybody was bringing something different to the table. I don’t think anybody was sitting there thinking, We are going to create groundbreaking television. I think they just wanted to do really funny shows. I’ve been in a lot of rooms since that did not have the same enjoyable mellow vibe.
BRIAN ROBERTS: The legend is that Cohen was the model for Milhouse, or the way he looked, anyway. And there’s all kinds of inside stuff like that in the show. I used to answer the telephone in the editing base like, “Bay of Pigs, Fidel here,” or “Joe’s Crematorium. You kill ’em, we grill ’em.” And the writers put that into one episode because they were probably bored with Bart’s prank phone calls for that day, so they used one of my lines. I remember feeling honored that somebody found that funny.
GEORGE MEYER (to The Believer): We’ll slip in references to “golden showers” or “glory holes,” stupid things that are only there to make us laugh. We had a “chloroform” run for a while. We just thought chloroform was funny, so we tried to include it in as many episodes as possible. Somebody was always pulling out a rag soaked in chloroform and using it to render somebody unconscious for no good reason. We get these crazes every now and then. There was a period when we were obsessed with hoboes. Specifically, hoboes and their bindles. In the boxing episode, Homer was fighting a hobo who kept turning to check on his bindle. [Laughs] Stuff like that is basically about wasting the audience’s time for our own amusement … My personal favorite internal gag that nobody outside of the show will ever see … [is a] hobo spinning a yarn, and Lisa interrupts with a story of her own. The hobo snaps, “Hey, who’s the hobo here?” And in the script, his dialogue note is “[ALL BUSINESS].” [Laughs] I love the idea that a hobo would be “all business.”
Rob Cohen was a PA in the original room. One of his jobs was to set up regular poker games, led by Sam Simon (Sam placed forty-first in 2008’s World Series of Poker, winning over $10,000.1 His ex-wife, Jennifer Tilly, won the tournament in 2005, and in 2008 placed thirtieth2).
ROB COHEN: The poker game started at The Tracey Ullman Show. My job was to basically arrange the poker game and get the food and secure the room. But then when I was at the game, I was one of the guys, one of the players. And it would be weird. Garth Ancier, who was running Fox at the time, he would play, and Jim Brooks would play, and these other guys. They had a lot more money than I did, but it was really cool; it was just playing cards with the guys. There was no pecking order during the game.
Sam’s leadership dictated the room’s atmosphere and ensured its variety.
JAY KOGEN: Sam Simon really led that process: the hiring process and also what the show should be. Sam can be tough, but he’s really, really funny. George can be bitter, but he’s also really funny. Al can be too logical, but he’s really, really funny. Jon Vitti can be too quiet, but he’s hysterically funny.
BILL OAKLEY: Jon Vitti, whom I believe to be the best first-draft writer in the history of The Simpsons, would often sit silently in the room for forty straight minutes, but then he would come up with a gem, whereas Conan would be talking all the time.
CONAN O’BRIEN: I actually
have a picture of me, Jeff Martin, Jon Vitti, Matt Groening, George Meyer, Al Jean, John Swartzwelder, David Stern, Mike Reiss sitting around that room, and it really is an accurate portrayal. People would be shocked. If this was a common room at a university, I think the students would sue. It was pretty small, and it didn’t really have a good air conditioner.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY: The room was like a dilapidated dorm study room. The garbage cans were always overflowing with Styrofoam containers of take-out food. Swartzwelder and Sam used to smoke, so there’d be overflowing ashtrays. There were empty cans of soda everywhere. Hygiene was not at a premium.
BILL OAKLEY: There was a crummy old shag carpet. There was some sort of haunted house pinball machine in the room. There was an old pink couch that people gradually tore apart.
JOSH WEINSTEIN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–97): It’s actually in a building that used to be the set of an old motel, and ironically it was called the New Writer’s Building, but it was really crummy, and the furniture looked like it had been there for a long time.
Even with all that talent, and fodder for scripts all around them, the writers could go a little stir-crazy. It is impossible to be funny all day long—you need a break or ten. Fittingly, the writers found uniquely hilarious ways to waste their time.
BILL OAKLEY: It’s not like Dick Van Dyke crazy gag after gag every second. There would be periods where an entire room of people were sitting silently for close to an hour trying to think of one funny gag.
CONAN O’BRIEN: So you’re there, and you’re trying to be creative, but over these long stretches of time. There were periods of time where you felt like, Gee, I think I lost my mind a little bit during certain stretches.
I used to walk around the Fox lot, and once I found two pieces of a broken pool cue in an alley. There were two pieces that screwed together, with a brass fitting, and then unscrewed. Jeff Martin and I developed a whole game around unscrewing it, flipping both pieces in opposite hands, and screwing it back together, and seeing how many times you can do that in one minute. And then we developed all these complicated rules involving how far your wrists had to be apart, and we took it really seriously.
It got to the point where Jeff had the record for forty-five flips in one minute, but then there was the time I broke it and got to forty-six; we were elated. And other people in the room would watch sometimes. I remember times where Jeff and I were doing it, and there was a circle of people around us watching, and it got very intense.
If you’re trapped on a deserted island, you can build an entire religion around a seashell. It was that feeling. That’s an illustration of how we were driven to the edge of something, I don’t know what.
Another time we took my Ford Taurus for a spin around the Fox lot. Imagine a Ford Taurus creeping around a completely empty Fox lot and Jon Vitti and I looking for scenes where they had shot episodes of Batman. That is about as low as it gets.
TIM LONG, writer/co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1999–present): I remember George Meyer—whom I consider the king of this business—saying he was going to try and figure out what the optimal ratio of goofing off to hard work is, and he concluded it’s about two-thirds goofing off. Even when you’re really under the deadline gun, there seems to be just this natural tendency to start betting on football. Remember when everyone got excited about dumping Mentos into Diet Coke? We saw that, and we got so excited. We sent the PAs out and we bought several hundred dollars’ worth of Mentos and Diet Coke, all of which came, I would hope, straight out of Rupert Murdoch’s pocket, and set them off. And that was a day we were facing some pretty significant deadlines, but there’s a really gratifying consensus that that stuff is important.
Speaking for myself, I can probably focus, at most, four minutes at a time, at which point I start thinking about food or my car, or just wanna take a nap.
No matter how much time they wasted, the fact that the room was composed of intelligent, articulate, educated people could not help but filter down into the scripts.
GARY PANTER, friend of Matt Groening’s; cartoonist: When you get a whole bunch of comedy writers together, it can get pretty mean. Because they’re really smart and they’re trying to entertain each other, and they’re trying to outdo each other. So I’m often surprised The Simpsons can back away from being as scary or outrageous as it could be.
BRAD BIRD, executive consultant, The Simpsons (1989–97); director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille. No matter how bizarre the situation is, there are recognizable emotions, and there’s a structure to the emotions. On the best episodes that I worked on, there was about forty-five minutes’ worth of material packed into twenty-two minutes. They were very sophisticated scripts and they moved along very quickly and they frequently took you by surprise. And as screwed up as Homer was, he did intend to do the right thing. I think that comedy works best when people connect with characters and understand the emotions.
GEORGE MEYER (to The Believer): [Fans] seem to believe that we have unlimited time and resources for each episode, and that we’re able to examine everything from every possible angle. And really, the show is more like a hurricane swirling around us. Every joke can’t be dazzling.
Although Sam would not add anyone to the original room until the third season, he did accept freelance scripts. Michael Carrington, who wrote “Homer’s Triple Bypass” with partner Gary Apple, was also asked to do voices on the show.
MICHAEL CARRINGTON, episode writer, The Simpsons; producer, That’s So Raven, Cory in the House: They liked my voice—they put me into a lot of episodes, which was great. I consider myself the minor black character. If you see a black character with fewer than five lines it’s usually me. I played Jimi Hendrix in an episode, Sideshow Raheem, I played a black stand-up comic. I’m the guy who says, “You know white people drive like this. Black people drive like this.”
It was a color-blind show. You know, they’re really cool. I’ve been the only black guy in the room on a lot of shows. Luckily, with the Simpsons, they’re yellow, so it really didn’t matter. But on a lot of shows they always ask me, “What would the black guy say?” Sometimes we just say hello. We don’t always have jive, you know.
The degree to which The Simpsons is color-blind may be up for debate. Carrington was never a staff writer. The few nonwhite staffers over The Simpsons’ twenty years include a single African-American man (Marc Wilmore), a single Asian-American man (Danny Chun), and a single Hispanic woman (Rachel Pulido).
There have been approximately ten female writers on staff at The Simpsons. One veteran writer attempted to explain it by saying that, generally, women are better at writing about human relationships, while men are more prone to being joke machines. At The Simpsons, the ability to come up with a fast, clever joke obviously was considered paramount, beginning with Sam Simon, who staffed his writers room with zero women.
BRENT FORRESTER, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1993–97); writer/producer, King of the Hill, The Office: It was all boys, yeah. I mean, there were no women hired. When I was there, there had only ever been one woman there. I forget her name now.
Bob Kushell found a novel way to get the producers’ attention: theft. Kushell eventually became a staff writer in Season 5, under David Mirkin, but he’d been trying to get on the show since before the first episode had even aired.
BOB KUSHELL, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1994–95): I was working at Fox on these non-Guild shows called Malibu Beach Party and Fox Across America [in the late eighties]. I was getting paid a few hundred dollars a week to write on these things and I knew that they were doing The Simpsons. I was such a huge fan of the interstitials on Tracey Ullman I had to become a part of it. I would sneak up into the executive offices in the middle of the day, while nobody was looking, and steal scripts. So I ended up having all of the original Simpsons scripts, from Wallace Wolodarsky and Jon Vitti. And I wrote a spec Simpsons based on those scripts. You know, literally four to five months prior to the show ever airing.
> Rob Cohen was a PA at The Simpsons, and I don’t know why he did it, but out of the goodness of his heart, he got my spec script to Jon Vitti. And Jon Vitti read it, and called to tell me how much he enjoyed the script. He was such a mensch, such a great guy, and I’ll never forget him for it.
Years later, when I ended up on The Simpsons, Jon Vitti came in to write an episode, and I mentioned my spec script to him. And he not only remembered it, he quoted a joke from it. Working with your heroes of comedy was unbelievable, but for Jon to have remembered that one joke in that one script I had written years earlier just meant the world to me.
Cohen’s karma came full circle. The writers encouraged the young talent, who had been a PA since the Ullman days, to get a script produced.
ROB COHEN: I started writing weird stuff on the side. When the music video for “Do the Bartman” came out, they needed somebody to write the intros: So I was getting all these weird side jobs, like they paid me $300 for that. And I guess they liked the job I did, so then I submitted a list with a bunch of crank calls that Bart would make and I got paid a little cash on the side for that. Then I decided to take a whack at writing a Simpsons episode. I think Die Hard had just come out, so I wrote a script that was kind of a Die Hard thing at Mr. Burns’s power plant. They really liked it, but because I was an employee of Gracie, and they had a policy there against buying from within, they didn’t want to buy the script from me.
