The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  When I got into The Simpsons’ writing room it was like joining the Chicago Bulls at their peak and watching guys hit three-point shots from all over the court. I felt like I didn’t belong there, like I should have been selling Amway instead.

  I didn’t know anything about how animation works, and on my first day we all sat down and watched the show, and I thought, I’m really getting paid to watch cartoons. But it turned out there were a few jokes they wanted to fix. There was a Homer line, and it was too late to change the animation, but we didn’t like the joke. So we were pitching jokes that had to fit the syllable rhythm of how he was speaking. It seemed like such a crazy thing to have to do. I just remember these eight geniuses in the room with me, all pitching jokes that had the exact same syllabic format. That was the moment I really began to despair.

  How a writer arrives at a particular joke defies description, but the process of contribution, and the very mood that lends itself to a room of writers collaborating on a script, can be fascinating.

  RICHARD APPEL: You always felt it if an idea started generating a lot of buzz. If an idea just hangs there, no one has to say, “That’s no good.” You just know it, if you don’t hear that crackle of voices. Any run on the show that makes you laugh started with someone pitching something that got people in the room to laugh and then start pitching on top of it.

  The best scripts are rewritten 30 to 40 percent in the writers room. For [the episode when] Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger were moving into town, we were going through what they call “tabling a script,” which is preparing it for the table read. I had put in something about how Homer had been sent a congratulatory muffin basket from the Gersh Agency. The Gersh Agency is one of the most respected and powerful talent agencies for actors. At the time, though, I had no idea who they were. But I always saw these ads in Variety with “The Gersh Agency Congratulates …”

  When we were tabling that, it was in a part of the script where Homer had violated Alec and Kim’s trust and told some of their secrets. So I had it that Homer had to confess a secret. And we were pitching on what that secret should be. At one point it was decided that his secret was that he couldn’t read. And everyone was cracking up and then there were all sorts of pitches about going through the seasons and all the times Homer had read, and we were thinking, Oh, my God, can we really say that he can’t read? And then I burst out laughing, because not only in other episodes had he read, but four lines before, he had read the card from the Gersh Agency. And then George Meyer spit out, in Homer’s voice, “I recognized their logo.” That run would not have happened if it had been only one writer working by himself. Just the crackle of the table, that people were enjoying it, let you know that there was going to be something funny in this area.

  BRENT FORRESTER: Then there was the joke about the comedy pants. I remember Mirkin used to think this was quite funny. If somebody pitched something hacky, there was this idea that some kind of old-fashioned clown pants would actually appear on your body. Somebody would pitch a joke, then someone else would say, “Here come the pants!”

  TOM MARTIN: One day during a dead spot, we were waiting for something, and it was discussed how many girls each of these guys [the writers] —we called them the millionaire nerds club—had been with. One by one all the guys went around the room and admitted the number of women they had had sex with. Let’s just say it was surprisingly low in many cases. And it pointed to the fact that this is a group of people who could solve any mathematical problem, any story problem, probably cure cancer, but hadn’t figured out the mystery of how to get laid. That equation hadn’t been solved.

  TIM LONG: The funniest stuff is unrelated to the show, just crazy stuff about people’s dating experiences, or their ridiculous families. One time Mike Reiss was telling a story, that I’m afraid I can’t tell, about one of his cousins, and I remember laughing so hard, my face lying on the table, water pouring out of my eyes, and I remember thinking, I have to stop, otherwise I’m going to have a stroke … I could die here. I’m six minutes into this laugh and it’s not ending. That’s not an atypical experience. And I’m not an easy laugh.

  In later years, the writers were aware that the show could never come close to what it had been under the supervision of the original writing room (plus Conan, Josh, and Bill). After the original room dissipated, later writers considered themselves less pioneers than keepers of the grail. It was their job to try and keep the show up to the incredible standard established by the first four seasons.

  BRENT FORRESTER: There was a sense that it had become the greatest show ever, and that it was our job to be guardians of it. And we felt that we were failing, for the most part. And then sometimes we’d go, “Oh, you know what? That one’s up there with the best.” There was that sense of, We have an obligation to fans like ourselves to keep this thing at the top of its game. And I did feel that we were doing that, you know, some percentage of the time. Certainly not 100 percent of the time, not even close. Maybe 30 percent of the time, or 25 percent? So that was definitely the big motivating factor. And we felt that we were struggling to do so.

  As with any collaboration, where there is passion, there is the occasional conflict, though nothing close to the maelstrom of the early days, with Matt Groening and Sam Simon’s war.

  DONICK CARY: There were different kinds of writers there. And occasionally there’d be, writers about whom you were thinking, Jeez, I don’t like his style, really. But that was the nice thing about the balance of the show. I’m sure there were people who didn’t like my style of jokes. But, ultimately, at the end of the show, you have twenty different styles of jokes in there. It’s a pretty rich, full, fun thing.

  Well, there are a lot of Harvard guys, guys who had been lawyers. But then you’d be talking about a joke, and suddenly you’d realize it’s not about the joke anymore—it’s about winning the court case. And you’re like, “Okay, guys. This doesn’t matter anymore—let’s get back to work.”

  TOM MARTIN: It was like big Irish family kind of stuff. I think the first time I met Dan [Greaney], I wanted to punch him in the face, but eventually he became one of my best friends. He can’t help himself from being too brutally honest. And most people are pretty polite to George [Meyer] because he’s earned it and he’s older and he’s usually in a place of authority. But Dan would go after George, and I think they have this intense rivalry and intense respect for each other, but it did get very heated at times between those two.

  DONICK CARY: I love ’em both, Dan Greaney and George Meyer. Somehow the two of them together had a way of really getting under each other’s skin. And, you know, it was definitely like, Oh, Mom and Dad are fighting. Greaney’s a former lawyer, and George is a supersmart guy who wants, logically, to argue out a point. And if those two hit on a topic that they disagreed on, we could spend hours of tense talking it through.

  TOM MARTIN: I think that they almost came to blows at one point, but again, it wasn’t while I was there. While I was there, it was just two brilliant guys trying to one-up each other with hilarious comments.

  Another witness, who could not recall the subject of the debate, remembers a time when he was thankful there was a wide table between Meyer and Greaney, because he was certain that Meyer (a dedicated pacifist) was ready to reach across and throttle Greaney. For his part, Greaney is remembered as a pit bull, someone who just could not stand down from a challenge. Once, during his days at Harvard, a gang of townies accosted Greaney and threw a bottle, which smashed near where he was walking. Greaney could not resist yelling something back. He woke up in the hospital—and has a large scar on his head as a souvenir of the incident.

  Former staffers remember the conflicts between Meyer and Greaney as a rivalry that at times got heated, but nothing more, and the two men remain friends. Overall, the atmosphere at The Simpsons was occasionally tense, sometimes boring, more often rigorous, and regularly hilarious.

  One story that found its way out of the writers room involves a showru
nner having to side with his wife, who had mistakenly sent an e-mail to the wife of another Simpsons writer, in which the former had called the latter a “cunt.” The first writer’s wife claimed that she had never written the e-mail, that her e-mail account had been the victim of a hacker from France. Back in the writers room, where the story was making the rounds, the showrunner had to back up his wife’s hacker story, which sounded, as a former Simpsons writer described to me, like “a crazy lie.” The other writers at the show delighted in the affair, dubbing it “cuntgate.”

  TIM LONG: You kind of get used to it. Like I’ll be driving home and I’ll think, Well that was just a normal day, but then I’ll start thinking about it and I realize there were a couple moments during the day when I laughed until I cried. How many people can say that about their job?

  The Simpsons is just the best place in the world to work. Sometimes I remind myself, “I have the best job in North America, and I’m still not that happy a person. What is wrong with me?”

  TOM MARTIN: It was like getting on the Lakers, but it was like getting on the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq, but also on the same team were Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain. No one ever left, so it was very hard to get the ball, and that was one of the problems with being a newer guy and not one of the older guys. It’s tough to make an impact, though that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I mean, Matt Selman certainly did it and Tim Long did it, but it makes it a little tough.

  TIM LONG: I’m one of the executive producers. As people stay at The Simpsons, their titles get higher and higher, so there is just a tsunami of co-executive and executive producers. It’s one of those places that once you get there, there’s no point in leaving. What are you going to do after The Simpsons? Are you going to write jokes for According to Jim?

  ELEVEN

  Conan

  In which a dead bird makes us rethink signs from God … a very nervous writer gives a security guard a heart attack and Selma Bouvier a baby … and Fox trades the next Johnny Carson for $100,000 worth of hair gel.

  If there is a single example of The Simpsons’ writing room’s influence on television, it is its most prominent alumnus: Conan O’Brien. Since taking over from David Letterman as the host of Late Night in 1993, O’Brien’s 12:30–1:30 hour of edgy, smart comedy has been the best television has to offer, post–prime time. In 2008, it was announced that O’Brien would follow the footsteps of Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson to succeed Jay Leno as the host of The Tonight Show. Conan’s sharp yet convivial and self-deprecating style has won him legions of fans, among them many of the celebrities who appear on his show. And like Carson, he’s promoted more than his share of young, progressive comedians (Andy Richter, Dave Attell, Will Ferrell, and Demetri Martin, to name a few), developing a reputation as one of TV’s most insightful, generous, and genuinely nice people and becoming a true titan of the airwaves.

  His unlikely trajectory through Springfield began on a familiar course: the Harvard Lampoon, a stint writing on another comedy show (SNL), and then The Simpsons’ writing room. Of course, after his three years with Bart and Homer, O’Brien’s path would deviate drastically. “Nobody becomes that famous unless he shoots a president,” says his friend and fellow Simpsons writer Jay Kogen. It’s hardly presumptuous to suggest that O’Brien brought his experience from The Simpsons with him to Late Night, and then The Tonight Show, spreading elements of its unique comedic voice to millions of viewers every night (without discounting O’Brien’s amazingly singular style).

  O’Brien was fresh from writing for Saturday Night Live when he joined The Simpsons. When not cracking up his fellow writers and contributing to their scripts, he managed to craft memorable episodes, such as “Marge vs. the Monorail” (a takeoff on The Music Man, in which a straw-hatted shyster sells Springfield a dilapidated monorail) and “Homer Goes to College” (Homer lives out his college fantasies, which have been informed entirely by eighties Animal House rip-offs). One of his fellow writers ventured that if Conan hadn’t left to do Late Night, he was a shoo-in to take over as showrunner on The Simpsons.

  BRENT FORRESTER, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1993–97); writer/producer, King of the Hill, The Office: Conan was famous among comedy writers. He’s maybe one of the only guys I’ve ever known in the writing community who could be famous just as a writer.

  CONAN O’BRIEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–93): I was working at Saturday Night Live. It was fall of ’91 and it was time for all the writers to come back on Saturday Night Live, and I just realized I was burnt out. [New York magazine reported that, at the time, O’Brien’s self-esteem was at an all-time low: a sitcom pilot he’d made had not been picked up, and his engagement to be married had fallen through].

  I told Lorne Michaels I couldn’t come back to work and I just needed to do something else. I had no plan whatsoever. I was literally in this big transition phase in my life where I decided, I’ll just walk around New York City, and an idea will come to me.

  And this is one of those stories that aspiring TV writers everywhere must hate, but my phone rang, and it was Mike Reiss and Al Jean, and they said, “We heard that you just left Saturday Night Live. Would you be interested in working at The Simpsons?” So I said, “Yes!” The Simpsons was sort of notorious at the time. I think they had done a couple of seasons. Everyone wanted to be on that show, but they never hired. I think they were still going off the original crew. I told them, “Look, I’ve never written a Simpsons episode. I’ve never written a sitcom script,” but I had a good reputation at that point, so I think on the strength of that they just said, “Well, come on.”

  It was such a quick thing. I quit Saturday Night Live and I went out and bought a ’92 Ford Taurus, the SHO (Super High Output), by the way—I don’t want you to get the wrong idea—a stick-shift model; the ladies go crazy for it. I had just bought it when the call came, and I thought, Well that’s all right. I’ll have a really cool time, I’ll tell them I can’t be there for like five weeks, and I’ll do like a cool, Jack-Kerouac-in-a-Ford-Taurus, driving cross-country, and I’ll grow a beard and wear an eye patch. I had all these romantic ideas, and they said, “No. We need you here in two days.” So I was depressed about that and I remember driving out to Waltham, Massachusetts, and driving the Taurus onto the back of one of those big trucks that will ship it across country, and then getting on a plane.

  And when I showed up, Jeff Martin was away doing something and they temporarily gave me his office. I was very nervous about this new job. I knew a bunch of the people on the show, but just by reputation. I had never really worked with many of them. I was self-conscious and worried. Could I do it? Am I going to embarrass myself in front of these people? Because I had never worked with Mike Reiss and Al Jean, I had never worked with George Meyer, Vitti, Swartzwelder. It’s an intimidating collection of people if you’re a comedy writer.

  I was very nervous when I started. They showed me into this office and told me to start writing down some ideas. They left me alone in that office. I left after five minutes to go get a cup of coffee. I heard a crash. I walked back to the office, and there was a hole in the window and a dead bird on the floor. Literally, in my first ten minutes at The Simpsons, a bird had flown through the glass of my window, hit the far wall, broken its neck, and fallen dead on the floor. George Meyer came in and looked at it, and said, “Man, this is some kind of weird omen.”

  WALLACE WOLODARSKY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): He was already a little bit of a legend, of being one of the funniest people. I think it came from his days at the Lampoon and then Saturday Night Live.

  JOSH WEINSTEIN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–97): Some of the best memories from the show are with Conan. Every day Conan was in the room it was like a ten-hour Conan show, nonstop.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: In the Dick Van Dyke analogy I might have been Morey Amsterdam. I think when I first got there I stood out a bit because everyone sat still in the room and t
hought, and it wasn’t too long before I was climbing on furniture. I would pitch the characters in their voices because I thought that’s just what people did, but then Mike Reiss told me nobody does that.

  ROBERT COHEN, production assistant, The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons (1989–92): He was really smart, and pop culture–wise he knew everything—I just remember he was so quick. The guy was lightning fast, and I think infused that room with some great comedic energy.

  WALLACE WOLODARSKY: Conan used to do this thing called the Nervous Writer that involved him opening a can of Diet Coke and then nervously pitching a joke. He would spray Diet Coke all over himself, and that was always a source of endless amusement among us.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: There were different bits that I would do, and the writers would call for them. There was one where I would go to the refrigerator and I’d get a Coke and I’d fill my mouth with Coke and then I’d start twitching, wildly of course, and vibrating my head and the Coke would foam up and come out of my mouth and it looked like I was having this horrible fit. And I don’t know why—it doesn’t sound funny—but people really enjoyed it.