The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  In addition, because of Brooks’s unparalleled clout, The Simpsons was the only show on television where network executives were forbidden from giving notes. For comedy writers, it was the land of Milk and Honey. Originally, those writers worked under the guidance of Sam Simon, a TV sitcom veteran and producing partner of Brooks’s, who assembled what became one of the most hallowed staffs in television’s history. Simon would eventually depart from the show, after one too many confrontations with his fellow producers, especially Matt Groening. Still, many of the original, great writers of The Simpsons credit Simon as the show’s true architect.

  And as Bartmania cooled off, and the show moved toward becoming a full-fledged institution, with its fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, the show’s quality miraculously refused to drop. Fox’s merchandising explosion had ultimately been deceiving; The Simpsons had struck a chord that reverberated deeper than a mass-market logo on a T-shirt. It got funnier, smarter, richer in allusion and parody. They changed animation studios from Klasky-Csupo to Film Roman in the fourth season, updating the rudimentary look with slicker designs and a more varied palette. The writers increasingly filled the show with sly popular culture references and filmic parodies (Hitchcock and Kubrick were recurring favorites). Chat rooms, websites, and newsgroups overflowed with Simpsons conversations. Even the conservatives eventually came around. “It’s possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever,” wrote the National Review in 2000. “The Simpsons celebrates many … of the best conservative principles: the primacy of family, skepticism about political authority … Springfield residents pray and attend church every Sunday.”

  The Simpsons spawned imitators and opened doors for new avenues of animated comedy. Directly or indirectly, they sired Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, Adult Swim, and South Park, which, nearly a decade after Bart’s boastful underachieving, managed to regenerate a familiar cacophony of ratings, merchandise, and controversy (the latter perhaps deservedly: so far Bart’s greatest sin was sawing the head off the statue of the town’s founder; in season 9 on South Park, Cartman tried to exterminate the Jews). While there have been few successes—for every King of the Hill, there is a Fish Police and a Critic—the show inspired a new genre of television, the prime-time animated comedy.

  The Simpsons became both a celebration of buffoonery and a polished incisor, descending into America’s overweight midsection. And yet it was impossible for the show to keep producing comedy at the level it had for the first five or six seasons. Around Season 9, it hit a point where the characters and situations became so exaggerated, the comedy so dispensable, and the show so unmoored from its origins that even the most die-hard fans had trouble finding positive things to say. As seasons accelerated past the double digits, fans who’d come of age with the series found fewer reasons to tune in and fewer areas of interest for this history,a yet the show plowed forward. And while today it tends to go more topical, and the jokes come off a little “easy,” millions of viewers still look to The Simpsons for profound misunderstandings of our often incomprehensible postmodern world. The Simpsons provides answers. Or as Homer might say, “It’s funny because it’s true.”

  After twenty years, the residents of Springfield no longer merely hold mirrors to our way of life; they have ingrained themselves into it. The Simpsons has been so influential that it is difficult to find a strain of television comedy that does not contain its bloodline. And yet its footprint is so much larger than this. Homer’s signature “Doh!” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The characters have graced every magazine cover from Spy to Rolling Stone. Psychology Today published an article in 2003 using Marge and Homer to investigate sexual behavior between married couples. And in 2009 the Simpsons joined Frank Sinatra, Rachel Carson, and Mickey Mouse when the United States Postal Service issued stamps featuring the family. There’s a Simpsons course at Berkeley (for credit), not to mention the hundreds of academic articles with The Simpsons as their subject. Next to pornography, no single subject may have as many websites and blogs dedicated to its veneration. It has permeated our vernacular, the way we tell jokes, understand humor, and tell our stories, particularly those of us who came of age with the show.

  It is rare to find someone young enough to have tuned in for Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210 and old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall whose sense of storytelling and understanding of comedy are not somewhat structured by The Simpsons and peppered with its content. And while I believe that generation was most deeply touched, the show’s influence is much broader. The Simpsons was immediately popular with young children, teenagers, college students, and many adults as well.

  Although the marketing and merchandise onslaught that accompanied the first seasons would provide physical evidence of the show’s beloved status, its true acceptance came with the level of interest and commitment of its fans. People went nuts for it: kids never missed it; those who never watched TV were watching it. After the initial thirteen episodes ran, Fox reran them and reran them again. Yet people kept watching. The show had impact. And while the wave of Bartmania soon rolled back, the force of the show’s influence never broke, and, in fact, aided by syndication and the Internet, grew exponentially.

  The viewers it attracted with Bart’s sass in the first years matured and grew along with the show’s humor, developing their voice, comedic timing, and interpretative and critical faculties with The Simpsons (among other influences). The comedy that originated in The Simpsons’ writers room had a prime role in shaping and developing a massive and international audience. The size and depth of that influence cannot be measured quantitatively, but listen to the way any of your friends, or your kids’ friends, tell jokes. As unpleasant as it sounds, examine the things that make you laugh in current television shows, in films, or on the Web. The connection won’t be far away.

  The Simpsons’ writers went on to run other shows, like Frasier; King of the Hill; 3rd Rock from the Sun; Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; and The Office (“Every writer’s assistant I’ve ever worked with has gotten a big TV writing job,” Mike Reiss, one of the show’s veteran producers, once boasted3). And those of us within that age range ideal to absorb its lessons in humor are now writing for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Hannah Montana, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and Saturday Night Live. And that’s just the influence within television comedies. We of The Simpsons generation are becoming lawyers and lawmakers, executives and enemies of the state. So what? What could it possibly matter if the guy interviewing you, or presenting a talk to your ethics seminar, watched The Simpsons when he was twelve?

  It probably doesn’t, superficially, but chances are that part of his narrative, the way he tells his own story, whether in a barroom or a boardroom, is influenced by The Simpsons.

  It may seem like a leap to place such weight on a silly TV series, but The Simpsons is one of the longest-laasting and most pervasive forces in our popular culture, which has a profound effect on how we live. What our society says, collectively, is absorbed, reflected, and influenced by our popular culture. The terrorist attacks of 2001, interest rates, and architecture certainly affect all of our lives today, but that doesn’t mean that Fox News, blogs, Paris Hilton’s sex tape, and Marc Jacobs’s designs don’t as well. The point is that elements of our popular culture, like television and You Tube, do affect how we think, act, and speak, just as Shakespeare’s plays did during his time.

  Many television series have survived, and many more have been funny, but The Simpsons remains the most powerful, lasting, and resonant entertainment force television has ever seen. Not many people reference Home Improvement in casual conversation, or write scholarly essays on Cheers. Roseanne and Frasier were both hilarious, intelligent shows, and for the most part, their ratings drowned The Simpsons—yet they have very little cultural influence. The Simpsons, by contrast, has entrenched itself so far into our culture that its content has s
eeped right into the popular vernacular and ingrained itself into our imaginations.

  We, as a culture, speak Simpsons.

  ONE

  The Matt Groening Show

  In which evil grade-school teachers destroy masterworks … punk rock brings together Life in Hell’s bunnies and Maus’s mice … Matt Groening becomes the Casanova of the LA Reader … and Deborah Kaplan becomes the Bennett Cerf of alternative comics.

  The Simpsons did not spring out of one man’s brain, fully formed, like a hilarious Athena. Its inception was a process, and it has more than one parent (as well as stepparents, grandparents, creepy uncles, and ungrateful children—I’m looking at you, Family Guy), but its most direct progenitor is Matt Groening’s comic strip Life in Hell, which, by the late 1980s, was being syndicated in alternative weeklies all over the country, earning him success and cult celebrity status.

  But before The Simpsons, before Life in Hell, before any of the fame or money or angst-ridden bunnies, there was a little boy with an imaginary TV show, hosted by its creator, Matt Groening. He even recorded a theme song.

  MATT GROENING, creator, The Simpsons (on NPR’s Fresh Air, 2003): [Singing] First you hear a mighty cheer, then you know that Groening’s here. Then a streak of color flashes on the ground. You know it’s not a train or a comet or a plane. You know it must be Matt Groening, cool guy … Matt Groening. Matt Groening. Matt Groening. Not a coward, superpowered Matt Groening, coolest guy there is in town, coolest guy around.

  Considering that The Simpsons paterfamilias would name the animated family after his own (father Homer, mother Marge, sisters Lisa and Maggie), it would indeed be a nice touch to this story if he had grown up in a town named Springfield, but he didn’t. Born February 15, 1954, he grew up in Portland, the middle child of five children in a house so close to the Portland Zoo that, as a little boy, Matt would go to sleep at night to the sound of roaring lions.1 Playing in the grizzly bear ghetto and the abandoned zoo’s caves and swimming pools,2 Groening does seem to have had an idyllic childhood, especially for someone with creative ambitions. As Groening told Playboy in 1990, his father was a cartoonist, filmmaker, and writer who showed by example that one could put food on the table and succeed using one’s creative faculties.

  Writing stories, drawing cartoons, playing in worlds of his own imagination in the family basement, Groening was a fine student but constantly in trouble at Ainsworth Elementary School because his attentions were elsewhere. “I have to write ‘I must remember to be quiet in class’ 500 times and hand it in tomorrow” is an exemplary entry in Groening’s diary, which he kept from an early age. “The Boy Scouts are alright if you don’t have much to do, or you like to pretend to be in the army, and you enjoy saluting the flag a lot,” reads another one.3

  MATT GROENING (to The New York Times, October 7, 1990): When I was in fourth grade, I read a World War II prisoner-of-war book, I said, “Yeah, this is like my grade school. There’s guards, and you can’t do anything.”

  MARGARET GROENING, Matt’s mother (to The Seattle Times, August 19, 1990): Actually, he did well in school—he was popular and got good grades … although he doesn’t particularly want anyone to know that.

  MATT GROENING (to the Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1990): You are what you are basically despite school. I think there’s a lot of unnecessary misery in education. I certainly felt it. Just the idea of punishing a kid for drawing stacks of cartoons, or ripping them up and throwing them away. Some of the stuff was senseless and immature, but other stuff was really creative, and I was amazed that there was no differentiation between the good stuff and the bad stuff, or very little.

  Lincoln High School (class of ’73) was less rigid, but Groening still felt the constraints of conservative suburban culture, especially when contrasted with the radical and antiestablishment sentiments of the sixties burgeoning all around him. Groening was a mix of the straitlaced and rebellious. He was elected student body president, but under the banner of a tongue-in-cheek group called Teens for Decency (a parody of a local Christian group). His campaign slogan: “If you’re against decency, then what are you for?”4

  In high school, Groening would also discover his lifelong passion for alternative music and would continue drawing his cartoons. One story from Matt’s teenage years involved Matt telling a girl with whom he was infatuated that it was his plan to have a career as a cartoonist. The girl rejected him because she believed she was going to have a very big life, saying something along the lines of, “Maybe if you were like Garry Trudeau or somebody.” Never short on ego, even then, apparently Matt told her, “I’m going to be bigger than Garry Trudeau.”

  For college, Groening applied to only two schools: Harvard (which said no) and Evergreen College. The latter was a newly formed progressive state-funded college in Washington, where there are no grades or exams.

  MATT GROENING (to The Seattle Times, September 28, 2003): [Evergreen] was condemned in the Legislature by conservative Republicans as being a haven for hippies, poets and revolutionaries … The main square was made out of red bricks, and there was some suspicion as to why we had a red square.

  While the school remains a progressive, liberal feel-goodery, it is also regularly ranked among the West’s best liberal arts colleges.5 Its funding as a state school has been a topic of debate in Washington’s state legislature, especially among Republicans. “We went into one dormitory and the smell of marijuana was everywhere. And there were a bunch of people watching The Simpsons, whatever that means,” said Representative Gene Goldsmith, a youth and media expert, after visiting the school in 1995. “And there were two girls sitting in there necking, kissing—two lesbians.”6 While it’s unknown how rampant lesbianism was at Evergreen during Groening’s time there, he did indeed attend a hippie college at the height of hippiedom.

  Studying literature and philosophy, Groening decided he wanted to be a writer. That, combined with his studies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the gloom of rainy Olympia, Washington, was a recipe for moodiness.7

  LYNDA BARRY, cartoonist and friend (to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, April 29, 1990): Matt was like this guy who was a kind of straight guy at a hippie college, but so militantly straight that he was hipper than the hippies. He was the opposite of that song “The Poetry Man”; his sensibility was that life is not a haiku. Even though he’s not “The Poetry Man,” he’s a guy with real strong feelings.

  At one point, one of Matt Groening’s writing teachers, Mark Levensky, drew a simple formula on the blackboard to show Groening what the basic plot structure was for all his short stories and asked him if he felt his writing was worthwhile. Groening has said that that question has “haunted” him ever since.8 The ghosts of his writing failures would return in The Simpsons writing room—where Matt’s writing was ridiculed—and linger like Banquo.

  A place like Evergreen, with all its liberal pretensions, was hardly safe from Groening’s scorn—he delighted in sending up the school once he took the reins of Evergreen’s student newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal. He sensationalized the paper, getting political with his attacks on the state legislature, as well as lampooning the school’s countercultural piety.9 Groening added a cartoon page to the Journal, where he and his friend Lynda Barry (of Ernie Pook’s Comeek fame) showed their work. Professors would post his cartoons, yet the school’s most ardently liberal students were indignant. When Groening made fun of communes, a petition was circulated: “Dear Mr. Groening: Communal struggles are not funny!”10 While Groening enjoyed annoying people with his antics, he could also be affected by their reactions. Of his days at the paper, Groening’s friend Steve Willis remembered how he would find Groening, his head cradled in his hands, repeating to himself, “I didn’t mean for it to come out this way.”11

  In 1977, a freshly graduated twenty-three-year-old Groening headed to Los Angeles. He lived with his girlfriend, Lynda Weinman, worked on his writing, and paid the rent with a series of dead-end jobs. Matt’s initiation to LA was, in a wo
rd, hellish. As he later told Playboy, “Life in Hell was inspired by my move to Los Angeles in 1977. I got here on a Friday night in August; it was about a hundred and two degrees; my car broke down in the fast lane of the Hollywood Freeway while I was listening to a drunken deejay who was giving his last program on a local rock station and bitterly denouncing the station’s management. And then I had a series of lousy jobs.”12

  These included being a writer/chauffeur to an ancient director, writing slogans for horror movies at an ad agency, landscaping at a sewage treatment plant, and working at a copy shop.13 His interest in music drew him to the punk scene, and he got jobs at the Whisky a Go Go, where he got to wait on Elvis Costello, as well as at Licorice Pizza, the record shop across the street. In addition to selling records, Licorice Pizza also sold drug paraphernalia, including coke vials. Because the store sold the caps separately from the vials, Matt would have to count them out one by one. It was great fun for him to take his time counting out hundreds of coke vials while the customer, ramped up on cocaine, waited impatiently.14

  At this point, Groening was already drawing Life in Hell, which he photocopied and sent to his friends, or sold for $2 a pop at Licorice Pizza.15 Groening attacked the institutions the angsty twentysomethings found most repellent and conformist: school, work, and love.

  A typical strip asked, “Is there a Life in Hell philosophy?” The answers were as follows: “Your days are numbered.” “It’s later than you think.” “We’re all doomed.” “Have a nice day.”