The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

While every Simpsons episode has a writer—the scribe or pair of scribes who penned the episode’s first draft—each final script is the result of input from a room full of writers and many, many edits. When discussing staff writers, two names are repeated constantly, taking on near mythological significance in The Simpsons’ world: George Meyer and John Swartzwelder.

  Meyer, a writer whose status merited a profile in The New Yorker, “Taking Humor Seriously: The Funniest Man Behind the Funniest Show on TV,” is considered the godfather of the rewrite room1 (The Los Angeles Times called him “the great and powerful Oz behind The Simpsons”). While he’s never taken the job of showrunner, Meyer was seen as the show’s principal architect, before leaving in 2004.

  JON VITTI, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–2004) (to The New Yorker, March 13, 2000): A show that you have the writer’s credit for will run, and the next day people will come up to you and tell you how great it was. Then they’ll mention their two favorite lines, and both of them will be George’s.

  BRENT FORRESTER, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1993–97); writer/producer, King of the Hill, The Office: In great part, you were pitching for George. If George said something was good, then it was good. That was as close to objectivity as you could get on The Simpsons.

  David Owen’s New Yorker profile, which I quote extensively but is well worth reading in its entirety, claims that Meyer has “so thoroughly shaped the program that by now the comedic sensibility of The Simpsons can be seen as mostly his.”

  Meyer was raised Catholic in a large family—he is the oldest of eight—in Arizona. An altar boy, Eagle Scout, and editor of his high school’s student newspaper, Meyer was also an avid fan of MAD magazine, which other Simpsons writers describe as a significant figure in the show’s pedigree. Like Groening’s, Meyer’s own comedic pedigree can be traced back to feelings of subjugation to authority figures. While for Groening it was evil teachers who tore up his drawings, in Meyer’s case, it was the Catholic church and its agents.

  GEORGE MEYER (to The New Yorker, March 13, 2000): People talk about how horrible it is to be brought up Catholic, and it’s all true. The main thing was that there was no sense of proportion … Once, I was sent to the principal’s office, and when I went in my parents were sitting there. They had been summoned somehow. God, that was scary. I would have been very unhappy, but not particularly surprised, if they had said, “This time you have gone too far. Now you must die.” … That’s why one of my favorite forms of black humor is the casual cruelty of bureaucrats and doctors—like, “Here’s the rod we’re going to put in your spine.”

  Meyer attended Harvard, where he majored in biochemistry and found like minds at the Lampoon. There he was made a staff writer and was eventually elected president (surviving a coup from his fellow Lampoonians, who felt he was not responsible enough to run the magazine).

  GEORGE MEYER (to The New Yorker, March 13, 2000): I don’t think most people like to laugh as much as I do. Most people, sure, they like to laugh, but it’s down on their list, like No. 8. At the Lampoon, though, people took humor very seriously … That changed my life.

  Meyer’s time at Harvard wasn’t all laughs, though. Depression has been a major theme in the writer’s life (other writers on the show commented on how “dark” Meyer can be, but never without mentioning his levity and positivity that balanced the darkness), and he admitted in 2004 that for a long period of time while he was at The Simpsons, he was suicidal.

  After graduating in 1978, Meyer tried substitute teaching, retail, being a Jeopardy! contestant, and working in a cancer research lab—he had been accepted to medical school but didn’t go. “What Meyer really liked doing was just hanging out with the guys, cracking jokes,” noted Los Angeles magazine, “and there just aren’t that many funny scientists.”

  In 1981, Meyer was tracked down by producers who were looking for writers for a new late-night talk show hosted by someone named David Letterman. Letterman had heard about Meyer from his Harvard Lampoon pals Tom Gammill and Max Pross (who would later write for Seinfeld and The Simpsons) and was wowed by Meyer’s work.

  After two years, Meyer left Letterman to work on Lorne Michaels’s The New Show, a doomed attempt to repeat the success of Saturday Night Live. After The New Show was canceled, Meyer joined the regular writing staff at SNL in 1985.

  GEORGE MEYER (to The New Yorker, March 13, 2000): My stuff wasn’t very popular at Saturday Night … It was regarded as really fringey, and a lot of times my sketches would get cut. Sometimes they would get cut after dress rehearsal, and I would have the horrible experience of looking out and seeing a painter carefully touching up my set and getting it all ready to be smashed to pieces and sent to a landfill in Brooklyn.

  Bored with SNL, he moved to Boulder, Colorado, to reconnect with “whatever made life worth living.”2 Letterman recommended him to write the script for a film the talk-show host had agreed to star in for Disney, which Meyer is said to have titled “Going Coconuts.” Letterman had little real interest in doing a movie and it was never produced. Yet the script is considered a “masterpiece” by those who have seen it.3

  WALLACE WOLODARSKY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): We all admired George’s work from before, particularly this thing called Army Man, which was famous among comedy writers of that generation.

  While figuring out his life in Boulder, Meyer printed three issues of a comedy magazine called Army Man: America’s Only Magazine. It was just a few photocopied pages, with pieces from comedy writing geniuses like John Swartzwelder, Ian Frazier, Andy Borowitz, and Meyer himself, distributed to a few hundred of Meyer’s friends and colleagues.

  Some examples from Army Man:

  ARMY MAN #1—ASTONISHINGLY PRIMITIVE DEBUT ISSUE!

  Why I Love America

  Why do I love America? Well, maybe “love” is a little strong … I mean, I think it’s a good country. Definitely. But a lot of that is ’cause I was born here, and haven’t seen that many other countries. Canada and Mexico, that’s about it. I hear Sweden is really great. Man, I’d move there in a second. Just don’t have the bucks.

  If God were my co-pilot, I think I’d let Him handle almost all the routine flying. I might do the landings … I’m pretty good at those.

  Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey

  Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess was why several of us died of tuberculosis.

  Meyer started Army Man out of boredom, and the fact that he wasn’t doing very well with women at the time. He thought it would help him get girls. It didn’t. A contributor to Army Man imitated the typical response to George from women: “What? You run a self-published magazine with two hundred issues every time? No, that’s okay.”

  GEORGE MEYER (to The New Yorker, March 13, 2000): The only rule was that the stuff had to be funny and pretty short … To me, the quintessential Army Man joke was one of John Swartzwelder’s: “They can kill the Kennedys. Why can’t they make a cup of coffee that tastes good?” It’s a horrifying idea juxtaposed with something really banal—and yet there’s a kind of logic to it. It’s illuminating because it’s kind of how Americans see things: Life’s a big jumble, but somehow it leads to something I can consume. I love that.

  Like the original South Park video a decade later, Army Man made the rounds of Hollywood, becoming a must-have among comedy writers, including Sam Simon. “Sam got quite a bit of his writing staff from the list of credits of Army Man,” a Simpsons writer told David Owen. “In a sense, that little magazine was the father of the show.”

  JAY KOGEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): I’d always heard great things about George Meyer and I’d read Army Man. It was just this weird little magazine. It was almost like a little college comedy paper, ironic little pieces. I thought, I respect anybody who’s putting this together.

  JOSH WEINSTEIN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–97): Army Man is like an early genesis of The Simpsons. You can see glimmers of what became Simpsons-style stuf
f in that.

  GEORGE MEYER (to The Believer, 2004): I have no idea how it got so big. I was just trying to find something to do while I was living in Boulder, Colorado, which isn’t really a funny town. There are a lot of smart people there, but comedy isn’t at the forefront of their minds. For most of Boulder, comedy is just something you see at the multiplex every week or so. To me, it’s like oxygen. When the National Lampoon entered its slow-motion death, it really hurt me. It was like losing a friend. There were very few publications that were just trying to be funny. Even Spy magazine, which was in some ways its successor, was not primarily funny. It was subsersive and satirical, but I don’t think its goal was to provoke belly laughs. So I tried to make something that had no agenda other than to make you laugh.

  Army Man ceased publication after the third issue (Meyer was busy with The Simpsons, deluged with submissions from his friends—which he hated rejecting—and was being approached to turn it into something bigger, like a TV show). With the final issue, he included a letter, dated July 22, 1990: “Dear Reader, I have some news for you, and I’m not even going to sugar-coat it. I might varnish it … no, I’m not going to varnish it. Army Man is suspending publication … To paraphrase Gen. Douglas MacArthur, ‘I shall, if circumstances permit, and no one objects too strenuously, return.’ Love, George.”

  RICHARD APPEL, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1995–99): One thing George does, in any room he’s in, is set the bar high just by being in it. One of the best things to have in a writers room is a sense that you’re trying to make the best person in the room laugh. And George was always that at The Simpsons in my time there, and I don’t think it’s presumptuous to say that’s what he was before I got there and after I left.

  CONAN O’BRIEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–93): George Meyer has just such a discerning comedy mind, your biggest fear is saying something hackneyed or contrived.

  WALLACE WOLODARSKY: There’s a darkness and lightness in George, both of which are surprising. For someone who could pitch such dark material, he also had a kind of hippie lightness of spirit that you wouldn’t necessarily think go together.

  BOB KUSHELL: There was once an incident where George wrote on a piece of paper a list of everybody on the show and he asked me to number them based on who I thought was the most insane. We were sitting there while everybody else was either breaking stories or punching things up, and we were going through everybody in the room, ranking them based on who we thought was the, literally, most insane, clinically, in the room.

  And it was just such a refreshing thing, and for somebody who took the show so seriously, he would have these flights of fancy that were spectacular. I was the crazy, wacky character and George was a real intellectual, I felt. But at the same time he was an intellectual with a kid’s heart.

  BILL OAKLEY: [when he and writing partner Josh Weinstein were trying to get hired on the show] We talked to George over the phone and he said he would look at our sample material. And we sent it to George and he said it was really funny. But, you know, nothing ever came of it. Four years later, when we were running The Simpsons, he was cleaning out his office. He brought our sample material back to me with a note on it that said, “Very funny, you’re hired.”

  BRIAN ROBERTS: A funny little story about George Meyer: He has something like eight sisters and they’re all really good-looking, and he was constantly trying to pawn off his sisters on the writing staff. And actually Jon Vitti married one of them.

  GEORGE MEYER (to The Believer): For me, marriage is a grotesque, unforgiving, clunky contrivance. Yet society pushes it as a shimmering ideal. It’s as if medicine came up with the iron lung, then stood back and said, “At last! Our work is done.” Men often struggle with their attraction to other women. They don’t quite understand why they have to be with the same woman forever. Marriage has a compassionate answer for them: “Oh, shut up, you selfish crybaby.” Is it any wonder men have to be pressured into this nasty, lopsided arrangement?

  Meyer, who is now in his early fifties, is still not officially married, but he lives with his girlfriend since 1990, TV writer and novelist Maria Semple, whose credits include Mad About You, Ellen, and Arrested Development. They have a daughter. Meyer looks like a scruffy hippie, or Deadhead (which, for years, he was); he’s an adherent to vegetarianism, yoga, and environmentalism. If Lisa is the social conscience of the Simpson family, Meyer may have been the conscience of their writers room. “I’m an animal lover who wears leather shoes; a vegetarian who can’t resist smoked salmon,” Meyer wrote in an op-ed for the BBC News website in 2006. The article was a plea for like-minded folks to join the environmental movement, an acknowledgment that participation in Earth’s destruction was no excuse not to try and save it. “Are we really gonna wreck the whole planet? ’Cause that’s a big move. That’s like something a crazy stripper would do,” he continued. He managed to include some of his favorite targets in the critique: “I would enjoy watching dazed stockbrokers and ad men clawing at the dirt for edible roots. I’d remind them that they’d been warned of their folly, right here on the BBC website. And they’d all grunt ruefully, and make me their king.”4

  Despite his work for an industry that makes much of its money from ad revenues, Meyer reserves special contempt for advertising. “I hate it because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then leaves the debris of that process out there in the culture,” he told The Believer. “An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.”

  A giant sports fan, Meyer bought Wilt Chamberlain’s house in Los Angeles (he has since moved to Washington State). In it he constructed a shrine to Jerry Garcia, whom David Owen described as “the closest thing in Meyer’s life to a spiritual figure.”

  GEORGE MEYER (to The Believer): I have a deep suspicion of social institutions and tradition in general … I got very good grades in school, I was an Eagle Scout, and I believed in all of it. But I eventually realized that these institutions didn’t care about me … I do have a baby … and that’s a religion in itself … I was agnostic for most of my adult life, but then Mike Reiss started giving me grief about it. He said, “Oh, come on. Dive in. Go all the way. Be an atheist. The water’s fine.” I guess I started to realize that being an agnostic was such a wimpy position.

  Meyer’s disdain for authority extends far past the nuns who persecuted him, and their church. If you look at the episodes he’s written, you can see a deep current of his distrust of many of society’s institutions, which has become a Simpsons institution. For instance, in “Bart vs. Thanksgiving,” where Bart, having ruined Thanksgiving dinner by destroying Lisa’s centerpiece, runs away, Meyer attacked the Thanksgiving tradition (both the idea of families truly uniting for a day chosen arbitrarily, as well as the spurious roots of the Thanksgiving myth).l

  Meyer satirized government corruption in “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” where Lisa’s winning essay brings her and the Simpsons to Washington, D.C., and Lisa overhears a bribe to a congressman taking place.

  And in “Bart’s Inner Child,” the town becomes enamored with a self-help guru, who holds Bart up as an example and convinces all of Springfield’s inhabitants to “be like the boy.” The disastrous results pilloried the self-help industry, those who follow it, and the quickfix, money-grubbing Dr. Phils and Pat Robertsons of the world, who are, depressingly, an institution in their own right.

  ROB COHEN: One conversation from back then really sticks out. He was telling me that he was trying to be the largest personal holder of silver in the United States. He definitely is the second or the third. I think it was the Hunt brothers and him. But he was buying up silver at a crazy rate and kept telling me that I should buy silver because it was going to be the new gold.

  BRENT FORRESTER: George was investing in gold ever since I knew him. At one point I said to him, “George, by betting on gold, you’re sort of betting against humanity, aren’t you?” And he said, �
�Yes.” The whole idea was that “if and when all goes to hell, that’s when people really go for gold.” He had incredibly persuasive arguments for investing in gold. He once made his arguments to [fellow writer] Greg Daniels, and he got Greg so fired up that Greg ran to the telephone to call his broker. He was gonna invest, you know, untold sums in gold. But he couldn’t get to a broker in time, and he was gonna have to invest the next day, etc. And then, overnight, gold went through the floor. He would have lost everything that he invested. He was like, “What the hell am I listening to George Meyer for?” But George’s day finally came with gold. [In 1995, when the writers would have been having this discussion, gold hovered around $380 an ounce. Today it trades at prices near $1,000 an ounce.]

  BOB KUSHELL: I was fortunate enough to share a couch with George Meyer [Meyer later recommended Kushell to the producers of 3rd Rock from the Sun, who hired Kushell as a top writer]. One night I was leaving the room with George and he was very frustrated with a script. We came out into the parking lot together and he drop-kicked the script into fifty-three flying pages on a windy night and just walked to his car and didn’t say anything. He just let the pages spew all over the parking lot. And you know, the passion for what was good and bad, his passion for The Simpsons and what it could be, was infectious to everybody in the room.