Springfield Confidential Read online

  Dedication

  To Matt Groening, Jim Brooks, and Al Jean—thanks for the greatest job in the world. Don’t fire me.

  —Mike Reiss

  Epigraph

  Welcome to the humiliating world of professional writing.

  —Homer Simpson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Judd Apatow

  Opening Credits

  * * *

  Burning Question: Where Is Springfield?

  Act One

  * * *

  Chapter One: It Begins . . .

  Chapter Two: A Brief History of Me

  Chapter Three: Funny for Money

  Act Two

  * * *

  Chapter Four: Meet the Writers

  Burning Question: Simpsons Songs: Who Writes Them, How Are They Written, and Why Are There So Goddamn Many?

  Chapter Five: Meet the Showrunners

  Chapter Six: Meet the Characters

  Chapter Seven: Meet the Cast

  Burning Question: Do You Read What Fans Post on Websites?

  Chapter Eight: Four Episodes That Changed the World (Kinda)

  Burning Question: What Do You Think of Family Guy?

  Chapter Nine: Meet the Fans

  Burning Question: What Do You Say to People Who Say the Show Has Gone Downhill?

  Chapter Ten: Seeing the World with The Simpsons

  Burning Question: Why Has the Show Lasted So Long?

  Act Three

  * * *

  Chapter Eleven: On Comedy

  Chapter Twelve: How Krusty Became The Critic

  Burning Question: What’s the Biggest Reason The Critic Failed?

  Chapter Thirteen: A Development Deal with the Devil

  Burning Question: What Is the Secret of The Simpsons’ Success?

  Chapter Fourteen: Doing Animated Films for Cash (Not Credit)

  Chapter Fifteen: The Sleazy, Nasty World of Children’s Books

  Chapter Sixteen: Gay for Pay

  Chapter Seventeen: Writing for Humans Again!

  Chapter Eighteen: Back to the Old Tire Fire

  The Tag

  * * *

  Chapter Nineteen: It Never Ends . . .

  The Final Burning Question: Why Are the Simpsons Yellow?

  Closing Credits

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  Answers to NPR Puzzles

  Glossary

  Image Credits

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  In the early ’90s I was a comedian and an aspiring writer. I made my living in three ways: During the day, I worked for Comic Relief, producing benefits for the homeless at comedy clubs, for which I was paid $200 a week. I did stand-up comedy at the Improv and on the road. And I wrote jokes for other comedians, such as Roseanne Barr, Tom Arnold, Jeff Dunham, George Wallace, Taylor Negron, and Garry Shandling.

  I was looking for my big break and it was not coming. Some of my friends were able to get jobs as staff writers on the TV show Roseanne, but I couldn’t seem to make that happen. Some of my other friends, such as David Spade and Rob Schneider, and later Adam Sandler, were hired to be writer/performers on Saturday Night Live, but I was never able to get them to hire me. Jim Carrey used to pay me out of his own pocket to write sketches with him for In Living Color, but I could never turn that into an official staff job.

  I was frustrated and needed to make a move, so I decided to write a spec script, which is basically a sample of writing, in the hopes of getting hired to write for a sitcom. My two favorite television programs at the time were The Simpsons and Chris Elliott’s Get a Life. I sat down over the course of a month or two and wrote one spec episode of each program. At the time, I thought they came out really well, but when I sent them around town, I didn’t get hired by any of the shows I applied to and was only able to get one meeting, which was with David Mirkin at Get a Life, but I think I only got that meeting because Garry Shandling forced him to meet with me.

  The only other feedback I got about my two spec scripts was from Mike Reiss and Al Jean, who were running The Simpsons. I was told that they had liked my scripts, but they didn’t need any writers at that moment. Even though it was a rejection, it did give me some self-esteem. The writers of my favorite show had said something positive. That wouldn’t pay my rent, but it was much better than the reaction I had gotten from every other show on television at the time, which was silence.

  Being unable to find a staff job, I started working on a variety of projects, eventually including The Ben Stiller Show. After the show was canceled, which was just a few months into our run, I got a call from Mike Reiss who told me that he and Al were creating a new show called The Critic, and he wanted to know if I would like to join their staff. I couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t just being nice when he’d said he liked my Simpsons spec. And twenty-two years later, Mike and Al called me and said they wanted to turn that spec into an actual Simpsons episode.

  I re-read it and it was pretty weak, with a few moments of promise. The fact that Mike could see that promise in me when I was still a kid and that he was excited about it was career-changing for me. I certainly didn’t deserve to be in that room. I didn’t know anything about writing stories. I hadn’t earned my way in. But he saw something in me and was very enthusiastic about my writing and my career. When you’re young, you’re so thrilled to get a job that you don’t think much about what an incredibly giving gesture it is for someone to champion you and open that door for you.

  When I was sitting in the writer’s room of The Critic, I was aware that I was sharing that space with some of the best comedy writers in the world. I was in awe on a daily basis. Most of all, I was in awe of Mike, who was endlessly funny and kind. Always in a great mood, he’d pitch line after line and was so funny that it made me scared to pitch at all, but I forced myself to and got an amazing comedy education from Mike, Al, and James Brooks. I have read and watched everything Mike has created, and he is an inspiration as a brilliant comic mind and as a genuinely fantastic person who has done nothing but make earth a happier place to live. God bless Mike Reiss.

  —Judd Apatow

  Opening Credits

  As good a place as any to start . . .

  Since season one, January 1990, each Simpsons episode begins with a joke that is missed by tens of millions of fans in hundreds of millions of viewings. When the Simpsons title card emerges from the clouds, you see the first half of the family’s name, “The Simps,” before the rest of the word. So what? Well, “Simps,” is short for simpletons—stupid people—like the ones you’re about to see in the show. If you never caught this, don’t feel bad; most of our current staff didn’t know it, either.

  (Other jokes you may have missed in life: Toy Story is a pun on “toy store;” the comedy Legally Blonde is a play on that hilarious term “legally blind”; and there’s a 31 hidden in the BR logo of Baskin-Robbins, referring to their “31 flavors” slogan. You’ve already learned four things, and this is just page 1!)

  At The Simpsons, we put as many jokes in our opening credits as some sitcoms put into an entire episode (or all eight seasons of Home Improvement). Our credits always open with a new “chalkboard gag,” where Bart writes a phrase repeatedly on the school blackboard, such as “NERVE GAS IS NOT A TOY.” And they always close with our “couch gag,” where the Simpsons pile onto the sofa and something surprising happens (e.g., the couch eats them). When the show went to hi-def in 2009, we added more gags: a “fly-by” (some Simpsons character zooms past the title in a weird contraption) and a video billboard. Li
sa’s sax solo in the theme also changes from week to week; lately, it hasn’t always been a sax—we’ve also had her play the harp and theremin.

  This whole idea for ever-changing credits came from an unlikely source: the 1950s’ Mickey Mouse Club. Its opening credits always ended with Donald Duck hitting a gong, and something catastrophic happening: the gong would explode, or Donald would vibrate uncontrollably . . . there were many variations, but they all ended with a duck getting maimed.

  Our first chalkboard gag was simple and self-referential: “I WILL NOT WASTE CHALK.” Great joke. But it went downhill fast from there: two episodes later the phrase became “I WILL NOT BURP IN CLASS.” While there have been plenty of good ones (“BEANS ARE NEITHER FRUIT NOR MUSICAL”), these gags are very hard to write because anything longer than ten words goes by too fast to read. Furthermore, when we drop them from the opening credits, which we do more and more, nobody complains. In fact, sixteen years ago we already had Bart writing on the chalkboard “NOBODY READS THESE ANYMORE.”

  The couch gags are a lot more fun . . . but a lot more work. We used to repeat every joke once a year, doing eleven couch gags for our twenty-two-episode season. But we quickly learned that if people saw an old couch gag, they thought the whole show was a repeat and tuned out. Now, virtually every episode gets its own couch gag.

  Generally, our credit jokes are written at the end of the day. If it looks like work might wrap early, say five thirty P.M., and there’s a chance the writers might get home to a hot dinner and nonsleeping children, the boss will tell us to come up with couch gags and chalkboards.

  Our couch gags have parodied other shows’ opening credits: The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones, and Breaking Bad. One time the Simpsons were crushed by the giant foot from the opening credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Showrunner David Mirkin made sure we used the exact foot Python used: it’s from The Allegory of Venus and Cupid by Agnolo Bronzino.

  A few couch jokes are mini epics. In just seventy seconds, we recapped all of human history, starting with an amoeba that evolves into an ape, then a caveman, then devolves slightly to Homer Simpson. We condensed the Lord of the Rings trilogy to a minute thirty-nine.

  Sometimes we don’t even have to do the work, because guest artists do it for us! This has given us a chance to work with animators we admire, like Bill Plympton, Don Hertzfeldt, and the teams from Robot Chicken and Rick and Morty. Guillermo del Toro did a three-minute spectacular that referenced every horror movie ever made, and it’s simply amazing.

  And then there was notoriously reclusive artist Banksy. Al Jean approached him (her? it? them?) through the producer of the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. Banksy did a hilariously Orwellian depiction of the Korean animation house where our show is made: in the sequence, Simpsons DVDs are pierced on the horn of a starving unicorn to make the center hole, then packed in boxes sealed with a dead dolphin’s tongue; live white squirrels are fed into a shredder to make stuffing for Bart dolls, then loaded into a cart pulled by a sickly panda. We loved it; our Korean animators did not. (I was the first Simpsons writer to visit our animation house in Seoul; the workers, mostly women, have nicer, sunnier offices than our writers do; and most of them were watching Korean soap operas on their cell phones as they did their jobs.)

  My all-time favorite couch gag was the one that aired the night our show beat The Flintstones as the longest-running prime-time animated show in history. The Simpsons run into the living room, where they find the Flintstones already sitting on the couch. That show’s producers, Hanna-Barbera, asked that the Flintstones be paid as guest cast—and they were! Fred, Wilma, and Pebbles split four hundred bucks.

  Burning Question

  Throughout the book, I’ll be answering the questions most often asked by Simpsons fans.

  Let’s start with the big one:

  Where Is Springfield?

  The name Springfield was chosen by creator Matt Groening for its generic blandness. It was the name of the hometown in the generically bland 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best and is one of the most common place names in America—only Riverside and Five Points beat it. There are forty-eight Springfields in forty-three U.S. states, which means there are five states that have two Springfields. Great imagination, folks.

  But Matt Groening’s version of Springfield wasn’t intended to be a guessing game; like most things on The Simpsons, we didn’t plan it. And by this point, we’ve put in enough clues as to where it might be that it can’t possibly be anywhere. Let’s recap what we know: Springfield has an ocean on its east side and its west side. We once said that East Springfield is three times the size of Texas. And in one episode we see Homer shoveling snow in the morning and lying in a hammock sipping lemonade that afternoon. This raises the question: what planet is Springfield on?

  The Emmy-winning episode “Behind the Laughter” ends by calling the Simpsons a family from northern Kentucky. There’s your answer. Except that in the closed-captioning, we said they’re from Missouri. In the rerun, we changed it to Illinois. And it’s referred to as “a small island” on the DVD.

  In The Simpsons Movie, Ned Flanders says that Springfield’s state is bordered by Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky. There was even a contest to coincide with the release of the movie that invited different Springfields in the United States to make a video explaining why they’re the one the Simpsons live in. Thirteen cities entered, competing for the honor of being America’s fattest, dumbest, most polluted town. Springfield, Massachusetts’s film featured a guest appearance by Senator Ted Kennedy; he invited his soundalike character Mayor Quimby to come visit. This was a big concession by Kennedy, since I’ve heard that he hated that character. And yet despite all this effort, Massachusetts lost. The winner was Springfield, Vermont. (Comedian Henriette Mantel is from Springfield, Vermont, and she told me it’s nothing like the town on the show.)

  I like the answer given by John Swartzwelder, the quirky writer of fifty-nine quirky Simpsons episodes; he says, “Springfield is in Hawaii.” But a few years ago, Matt Groening said the show is set in a city near where he grew up: Springfield, Oregon. What does he know?

  Act One

  I hope this book feels like a Simpsons episode: fast-paced, full of quick scenes, and stuffed with hundreds of jokes, some of them funny. I’ve even structured it like a Simpsons script, which has four acts: setup, complication, resolution, and coda. Now, Aristotle said all drama has three acts, and classic films usually employ a three-act structure. We have four, which means we’re one act better than Aristotle. Also, with four acts, you can sell more commercials.

  The Simpsons has a structure like no other show that preceded it. The first act of every episode kicks off with a string of scenes that have nothing to do with the plot of the show: it may be a visit to a water park, a trip to the stamp museum, a visit to an indoor water park . . . we’re kinda running out of ideas. It isn’t till the end of act 1 that the story really presents itself, though it’s barely connected to what came before: Homer fights with Marge in a movie theater and winds up managing a country-western singer; making funeral arrangements for Grampa becomes a story about the Simpsons getting a tennis court; Lisa becomes a veterinarian after . . . a visit to a water park.

  The first act of this book will be like that: there’s a point to it all, but you’ll never see it coming.

  Chapter One

  It Begins . . .

  I got the Simpsons job the same way I got a wife: I was not the first choice, but I was available.

  I was working at It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, the second-lowest-rated show on TV. (The lowest-rated was The Tracey Ullman Show, which featured short cartoons about these ugly little yellow people.) The Shandling show was going on summer break and showrunner Alan Zweibel was launching a new show, The Boys, a sitcom set at the Friars Club. Man, I wanted that job, where I would have been writing jokes for Norm Crosby and Norman Fell, two of my favorite Normans!

  But Zweibel opted to hire my old
friends Max Pross and Tom Gammill, so my writing partner, Al Jean, and I had to settle for the job they turned down: The Simpsons.

  Nobody wanted to work on The Simpsons. There hadn’t been a cartoon in prime time since The Flintstones, a generation before. Worse yet, the show would be on the Fox network, a new enterprise that no one was even sure would last.

  I took the job . . . but didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. After eight years writing for films, sitcoms, and even Johnny Carson, I was now working on a cartoon. I was twenty-eight years old and I thought I’d hit rock bottom.

  Still, I’d been a fan of Matt Groening and executive producer Sam Simon for years. They were having fun creating the show, and it was infectious. It was a summer job and it felt like the summer jobs I’d had in the past (selling housewares, filing death certificates): we knew we wouldn’t be doing this forever, so no one took it too seriously. We didn’t even have a real office at the time. The studio had so little faith in us, they housed us in a trailer. I assumed that if the show failed, they’d slowly back the trailer up to the Pacific and drown the writers like rats.

  Al Jean and I quickly churned out three of the first eight episodes of the show: “There’s No Disgrace Like Home,” which ends with the Simpsons electrocuting each other during family therapy; “Moaning Lisa,” in which a depressed Lisa meets jazz great Bleeding Gums Murphy; and “The Telltale Head,” where Bart saws the head off the Jebediah Springfield statue. This is also the episode in which Sideshow Bob, Reverend Lovejoy, Krusty the Clown, and bullies Jimbo, Dolph, and Kearney first appear.

  But the whole time I was writing, I groused, “I’d rather be doing jokes for Norman Fell.” Since so few writers wanted to work on the series, we wound up with a very eclectic writing staff: except for Al and me, none of them had ever written a sitcom script before. They’d come from the world of sketches, late-night TV, even advertising. One day before the series premiered, I was sitting in the trailer with the other writers. After Matt Groening left the room, I asked the question that was on all our minds: “How long do you actually think this show will last?”