The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  MICHAEL CARRINGTON: George is just a joke machine. We would be sitting there and he would be firing off jokes, boom, boom, boom, one after another. And no one would be writing them down. And I would be like, Wow, that was brilliant. Well, that was brilliant too. How come no one’s writing? And then I realized he was just getting warmed up. By the time he got to the seventh or eighth joke—that was the twisted one. That’s the one that went in. I said, “Oh, I get it now.”

  And ever since then I’ve been trying to do that as well. You just toss out those first five or six ones. And you have to remember, if you’re writing by yourself, not to think of that first joke and put it in. Just keep going and keep going until you get to one that no one else would think of. And that’s what I learned from George.

  You can put your finger on some concrete Meyerisms. They include the term “yoink” (it denotes an unexpected snatching), and the Leftorium, Ned Flanders’s store for southpaws. Apparently Meyer was once moved, nearly to tears, when he spotted a fledgling store dedicated solely to providing objects to left-handed people. And yet his total contribution to the show could never be quantified.

  BOB KUSHELL: I often wondered whether or not George Meyer would go on to do other things or whether he would just be one of The Simpsons’ writers for the rest of his life. There really is no place better suited to George Meyer than The Simpsons, where you can literally do anything, and say anything, and have any point of view.

  Meyer left the show in 1996. He had had a development deal since 1994, but his efforts to produce his own material were apparently frustrated by incursions from execs who weren’t willing to give him the creative freedom he required. He had expected carte blanche and they were “all over him,” says one source. As it turned out, Meyer was not quite done with The Simpsons after all. He returned in 1999, first part-time as a consultant and then full-time in the room. But by 2002, Meyer was restless again. “I’ve accomplished all my goals in the mass media,” he told Los Angeles magazine. He wrote, directed, and starred in a play, Up Your Giggy, produced by Maria Semple. Up Your Giggy played for only a few nights at West Hollywood’s Court Theatre. Featuring Meyer, Semple, comedian Dana Gould, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson in its unpaid cast, Meyer attacked his favorite topics—including advertising and marriage—with absurd skits and monologues.

  BRENT FORRESTER: George would retire several times from The Simpsons. The first time he retired, we really took it seriously. We had a big retirement party for him. And then, as a going-away present, we got him a brick of gold. What Greg Daniels found hilarious was that, you know, after a little while, George came back to the show. Didn’t give back the gold brick. I mean, how are you gonna give back a gold brick? But Greg found that hilarious—that he got a gold brick out of his fake retirement.

  Meyer left for good in 2004, but he did return to work with the “dream team” of Simpsons writers Jim Brooks assembled for The Simpsons Movie.

  While Meyer was always an authoritative voice and often headed up a room when the staff was divided into writing groups, he never took on the official job of showrunner. Meyer excels at writing, not managing, and he didn’t deal with the squabbling among staffers and the nitpicking responsibilities that come with running a room.

  DONICK CARY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1996–99); creator, Lil’ Bush: George was always best when he was not running the room. Because when you run the room, you have all this extra pressure of tracking the story and making sure everyone breaks at the right time for lunch—practical concerns—rather than just making sure the show is smart and funny. It always seemed best when somebody else was running the room, and George was right next to him, just thinking about how to make this thing smart and funny.

  When asked by The Believer what his favorite line is that he’s written, Meyer said, “Pray for Mojo.” (In Season 9’s “Girly Edition,” Homer pretends to be handicapped so that he can receive a helper monkey to do menial chores for him. The monkey, named Mojo, takes on Homer’s personality, becoming drunk and slothful, to the point where he is completely useless. Upon being returned to his trainers—on a wagon—they ask him what went wrong. The monkey’s reply is three perfect words typed into a computer: “Pray for Mojo.”) “It’s almost like an epitaph for Western civilization,” Meyer said. “It’s this bloated, fucked-out corpse that washes up on a beach, burping up its final breath.”

  BOB KUSHELL: He thinks so far out of the box that he’s in a different box store. The turns of phrase and the ability to connect different things together and form jokes and comedic situations out of it is something I’d never seen before.

  RICHARD APPEL: You know how Variety always has those punning headlines? When Disney’s Michael Eisner fired Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the writers in the room was just doodling what some headlines for this story could be, all sorts of puns based on “Mouse House” and Katzenberg. And this writer kept on going throughout the morning, pitching these at random moments. At one point, George, who I think was losing some patience with this process, just blurted out, “Katz flees mouse.” The other writer loved it. Everyone was laughing, and then we moved on and could focus on the script.

  About twenty minutes later, the writer who had been coming up with headlines was on the phone in the kitchen. He popped his head back into the writers room and he said he was on hold with Army Archerd [editor of Variety], having just pitched that headline. And the next day in Army Archerd’s column, he had something like, “The Katzenberg firing had scribes all over town pitching headlines for Variety. George Meyer called in with this one.” And George was both mortified and recognized the humor in it. He did say he had a number of phone messages from people saying, “Um, you really called Army Archerd to take credit? This doesn’t seem like you.”

  Not only is George prolific with his jokes, they are regarded as some of the most original that his fellow comedy writers have ever heard. One writer who spent many years with George gave him the most fitting compliment, telling him that he honestly never once knew what Meyer was going to say. Meyer was so touched he replied with a long hug.

  Second only to Meyer as the most influential writer in the show’s history is John Swartzwelder. Swartzwelder, the author of fifty-nine Simpsons scripts, who also left The Simpsons in 2004 (he now writes novels), worked in the room only for the show’s first few years, appearing on the Fox lot rarely after that to hand in and rework his first drafts. His main role was as the show’s premiere first draftsman.

  John Swartzwelder is an enigma. No one I interviewed knows much about the man, and unlike Meyer, he has never given an interview or spoken publicly about himself or his work. There is not a single Swartzwelder commentary on The Simpsons DVDs (as of this moment, they are up to Season 12). There is even a myth among Simpsons fans that Swartzwelder does not exist. A former ad man and writer for Saturday Night Live (with Meyer), he has written far more Simpsons scripts than anyone else, including such classics as “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” “Rosebud,” and “Bart Gets an Elephant.” According to Matt Groening, Swartzwelder used to write his first drafts while sitting in a booth drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes at a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley. When California outlawed smoking in restaurants, Swartzwelder bought a coffee shop booth, moved it into his house, and began writing from home.5 In a nod to Swartzwelder’s elusiveness, the writers often place his image or his name in episodes. In the early days, the one-armed military surplus store owner, Herman, was modeled on Swartzwelder. Later on, he appeared more randomly (and had larger hair, a longer mustache, and bigger belly).

  BRIAN ROBERTS: Swartzwelder, one of the oddest guys ever to walk the planet. Nice, but odd. Even after he was making a pretty decent salary, he still drove a crappy car to work every day. He chain-smoked too. You could always tell Swartzwelder’s car because his dashboard was always full of empty cigarette packets and fast-food shit and whatever.

  BRENT FORRESTER: Swartzwelder was incredibly intelligent and just a pur
e eccentric. I could never have meetings with him in the office because he reeked of smoke so powerfully that, even though he wasn’t smoking in the office, his just being in there meant you couldn’t be in there for six hours afterward. You would smell like smoke from the secondhand reek of John Swartzwelder.

  DARIA PARIS: There was a rule that you couldn’t smoke in Jim’s office. When we would have meetings in there John Swartzwelder, who is a very talented writer, wouldn’t say a word. He couldn’t talk without a cigarette.

  BRIAN ROBERTS: He looks a little bit like Mark Twain. Everything that’s Civil War on The Simpsons—if you notice, there’s a very big Civil War theme—that’s all from John Swartzwelder.

  BILL OAKLEY: Swartzwelder—is Mr. Simpsons. He’s the guy who gave The Simpsons its sense of, like, lunacy. But that’s more from his first drafts.

  HANK AZARIA: Back in the day we all used to look forward to John Swartzwelder’s scripts, like seriously look forward to them.

  ROB COHEN: Swartzwelder’s an enigma. I really like him. He was always incredibly kind to me. He’s almost solely responsible for all the Itchy and Scratchy stuff. I remember he had a really old, weird Datsun B210, with one of the windows made out of plywood. His car was even crappier than my crappy car, which was a ’76 Datsun 280Z that had multiple different-colored panels on it, so that made me feel good.

  Swartzwelder was this big sort of quiet guy—I think he was from Seattle—with a mustache and a mysterious brother nobody’d ever met.

  JAY KOGEN: I got to know all those guys over the course of five years pretty well and while I never have been invited over to John Swartzwelder’s house, I always used to imagine what it would be like. Stacks of old newspapers, historic newspapers, portraits of people from 1812. One time I remember he bought a picture that Hitler had painted. I was incredulous. “Really, you want to buy a Hitler painting?” But he loved historical artifacts. And so [I imagined] he lived with his brother in the valley and they had old newspapers and historical artifacts. I just pictured it being like … I don’t know if you know who the Collyer brothers were, they actually died under stacks of old newspapers. That’s how I pictured their life in Van Nuys.

  BRENT FORRESTER: He told us that when he was in advertising it was his goal to spend as much of his money as he could on whatever the newest technology was. So he was one of the first people with a home computer, for example. It was probably enormous and very slow and incredibly expensive, but it was fun for him to have. And, you know, I think he kind of frittered away a lot of his money that way early on.

  We would have story meetings with him outside. And I remember distinctly one time being a young comedy writer, and Swarzwelder just happened to be sitting there, smoking a cigarette on the lawn. And I thought, Man, I’m just gonna ask John Swartzwelder a random question and see what he says in return. And I said, “John, what would you do if you had all the money that you could spend?” And without a moment’s hesitation he said, “I would buy a battleship and the Empire State Building. With the Empire State Building, I would just let it run down and get decrepit. Because people would say, ‘You can’t do that! That’s the Empire State Building!’ I would say, ‘No, I can! I own the Empire State Building.’ The battleship,” he said, “I just think it would change people’s conversations with me if they knew that I had a battleship.”

  BILL OAKLEY: The best thing is a Swartzwelder first draft rewritten by people who can sort of bring it down to earth and put in some more emotion. His strength does not lie with emotion, it lies with the jokes that just come out of left field and that no one in history ever could have made up, other than him. If you look at the Swartzwelder scripts, it’s like he comes from another dimension. He is a genius. His material is so strange you almost wonder how his brain works. The ultimate Swartzwelder joke that I still remember appears in the episode “Whacking Day.” Homer is letting people park on his lawn, and he has a sign that says, “Parking: $10 per axle.” And this foreign guy in this crazy foreign car, with like eight axles, drives up, and Homer goes, “Woo-hoo!” and the foreign man goes, “Hooray!” God, it just makes me laugh.

  WALLACE WOLODARSKY: Swartzwelder seemed to go directly from being a homeless person to a writer on The Simpsons. He was a little bit older than us and had, I think, seen a little bit more of the world, in terms of being up and down. He did have interesting preoccupations. I know for a while he was collecting Wanted posters. Real Patty Hearst Wanted posters.

  BRENT FORRESTER: Swartzwelder, George Meyer, and [writer/producer] John Collier were smart about collecting things like R. Crumb stuff before people figured out who R. Crumb was going to be. Or Daniel Clowes and Robert Williams. You know, George Meyer has an incredible Robert Williams collection. The Swartzwelder Museum would be one of the most fascinating places to hang out.

  WALLACE WOLODARSKY: He gave me this sage advice once: if you’re somewhere, and you see something you really want, no matter how much it costs, just buy it. Which I follow to this day … to great success.

  Swartzwelder has not written for the show since 2004. Since then he’s devoted his time to skewering the crime, western, and scientific genres with novellas such as The Time Machine Did It, The Exploding Detective, Dead Men Scare Me Stupid, and How I Conquered Your Planet.

  BRENT FORRESTER: He was once a great athlete and tried out for a professional baseball team, was what we’d heard. But by the time I met him, he was certainly a former athlete—a very tall guy, florid red skin in a way that just bespoke some kind of unhealthiness of diet and exercise regimen.

  JENNIFER CRITTENDEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons: He’s truly the most eccentric writer I’ve ever worked with. He wasn’t on staff. We’d only see him when we broke his stories. He always wore the same thing: white short-sleeve button-down shirt and beige corduroy pants. Whenever he came, we’d get lunch from the Apple Pan and he was the only writer allowed to smoke in the room. He told me he got his exercise by running from wherever he was to wherever he needed to go. I guess just sort of integrate random bursts of sweaty cardio into his day. Anyway, when I was on Seinfeld, I pitched that as a Kramer story, a few times, actually, and no one ever liked it. They always thought it was too crazy, no one would ever do that.

  Also, the day of O.J.’s Bronco chase, John didn’t show up for work. He told us that he had been walking around Encino with a baseball bat—looking for him.

  FOURTEEN

  Who’s the Boss?

  In which The Journal of Applied Mathematics is America’s most hilarious publication … no one can really get on side with the Rappin Rabbis … the Internet blames Mike Scully for everything … and Jon Lovitz proves much funnier than Kiefer Sutherland.

  While it takes a village to raise a child like The Simpsons, the humor, atmosphere, and themes of a particular episode are largely attributed to the sensibilities of the showrunner at the time, which is why people will refer to a “Mirkin show” or the “Scully years.” With a new showrunner came new staff, different kinds of jokes, and new directions for a series whose writers, cast, critics, and fans were resistant to change.

  Al Jean and Mike Reiss, the showrunners for Seasons 3 and 4, very much followed the lead of Sam Simon, who was still supervising from Gracie. The shows stayed sweet and cohesive, and while some writers, like George Meyer, reportedly grated under Jean and Reiss’s leadership (his material was more popular with Sam), the group produced two seasons of The Simpsons’ best episodes.

  JAY KOGEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): Those years with Al Jean and Mike Reiss running it were pretty darn good. And then the ones after that maybe not so much. Some people ran it better than others.

  COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS, postproduction supervisor, The Simpsons (1989–97): When Al and Mike came, they recorded so many takes that the days became really long. The actors started saying, “They’re recording too much. They’re recording out our voices. They’re burning us out. It’s too much.”

  Al Jean, for one, is like a machine. When re
cording actors, he could hold all the takes in his head. Normally, with executive producers, you can say, “This was a good take,” and lead them toward stuff you thought was good and move on. But Al would record like twenty takes for a “d’oh,” just waiting, because he didn’t want to tell the actors how to do it. But he had it in his head, how the line he wrote was supposed to be read. And he would have the actors say the lines over and over and over again until they got it. And then he would say, “Okay, take number seventeen.” And he’s not writing anything down! Normally when you start building takes, people will say, “Take this line,” or “Take the first half of this line,” or whatever. Al Jean would be like, “Take the ‘T’ from take one, take the rest of the word from take five.” It was incredible. It was like working with a computer.