The Guys Who Go With the 'D'oh!'
Humor Has Long Been Family Value No. 1 for Creators of 'The Simpsons'

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

LOS ANGELES -- On the campaign trail in 1992, George H.W. Bush promised voters that if he were reelected president, "we're going to strengthen the American family to make it more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons."

The Simpsons won. Good night, John Boy.

"When Bush said he wanted us to be the Waltons, we thought, what? He wants us to be poor and sleep in the same bed?" This is Al Jean, one of the founding writers for "The Simpsons," which has been a pop culture trademark for 18 years and 400 episodes on the Fox network.

"We also wondered, why the Waltons? Weren't they, you know, set in the Depression?" This is David Silverman, one of the original animators for the show and now director of "The Simpsons Movie," opening nationwide on Friday.

Though younger fans may not recall the distant past of the 1990s, there was a time when the antics of Bart ("Eat my shorts") were considered controversial -- the 10-year-old as social outlaw. Today's parents might beg for children as relatively restrained as Bart.

"We've gone from counterculture to mainstream culture in this 20 years," says James L. Brooks, who developed the show, which is successful beyond his wildest dreams, now the longest running sitcom in television history (the runner-up, interestingly, is "Ozzie and Harriet," 1952 to 1966).

"In American culture there's been a historical pattern where people pretend to be offended by something of the moment and then they lose interest and find something new to be offended by," says Simpsons creator Matt Groening, which rhymes with raining, as in money raining down upon Groening's head from show sales, worldwide syndication, commercial endorsements and an orgy of merchandising -- and coming soon: the box office receipts from a potential blockbuster.

"There's always a menace," Groening continues. "There was the menace that children would steal quarters from their mothers' purses to play video games at arcades. There was the menace that rock-and-roll lyrics were too filthy. There was the menace of comic books."

"Yeah," says Jean, archly, innocently, "it's always something, isn't it?"

The four Simpson founders all laugh conspiratorially (insert a Montgomery Burns eeeexcellent here), because they know that nothing is better for comedy than the pixie dust of mild subversion. In fact, you get the feeling they miss being merry pranksters in the culture wars (that prize has gone to shows like "South Park" and "The Daily Show").

The Simpsons team gathered Monday in a hotel room, naturally, to promote the movie. Together, they've outlasted most marriages. The youngest, Silverman, who is 50, has spent two-fifths of his life living in Springfield. They say kind things about each other, quote each other, bestow bouquets of credit. They tell jokes, but as Brooks explains it, "the Simpsons culture is very protective of the family," and one has to ask what family he is talking about: the people-people? Or the bubble-bellied, goggle-eyed, yellow-headed cartoon-people?

"The Simpsons" almost never happened. In 1986, Groening was (and still is) drawing a comic strip called "Life in Hell" for the alternative press. The title for the panel was taken from Walter Kaufmann's "Critique of Religion and Philosophy," and the cartoon characters are angst-ridden rabbits and two gay men in fezzes. The recurring themes: love and doom.

Brooks, who produced "Mary Tyler Moore" and "Taxi," was then working with "The Tracey Ullman Show" and wanted Groening to do animated shorts for Ullman's comedy and variety program.

Brooks (helpfully, and obviously for the reporter's benefit): "Didn't you draw them in my office waiting area?"

Groening (going along with it): "Yeah, yeah . . . originally I was going to pitch the 'Life in Hell' characters I draw, my bunny rabbits, but because Fox network was brand new, and it seemed the history of animation was full of disasters, I thought, I'm not going to ruin my bread and butter, my weekly characters, so I'll come up with something new, and that was the Simpsons."

The characters are named after Groening's own mother and father (Marge and Homer) and his sisters Lisa and Maggie. Bart is, interestingly, an anagram of "brat."

"My secret ambition for all this is that it would be a TV series," Groening says. "And so I laid into those early cartoons, even though they were very short, characters like Krusty the Clown, Itchy and Scratchy, the idea of the cartoon within a cartoon, which was inspired by '101 Dalmatians,' where the puppies are watching TV commercials."

Silverman, who animated the original Simpsons for the Ullman show, says: "And things kept changing. At first, Homer was more of a belligerent father and Bart was almost at his mercy. And in the second season, we start seeing Bart being the Peck's Bad Boy. It was the first time Bart said, 'Yeah, Homer.' "

Groening: "That was very much inspired by my younger sisters Lisa and Maggie, who actually did call my dad Homer. Which I considered outrageous."

Even in the 15-second shorts, the struggle between father and son -- which is a meta-narrative of the Simpsons today, in the television show and the film -- was there.

"Very early on, the original idea for Krusty the Clown was a clown worshiped by Bart, who has no respect for his father," Groening says. "If you look at the design of Krusty and Homer, they're equivalent to each other."

Getting. Heavy.

"Krusty," Groening continues, "is just a clown version of Homer. Homer with Bozo hair. The secret that was supposed to be laid in at that time was that Homer was really Krusty in disguise."

Like Clark Kent and Superman?

"And then I abandoned that idea," Groening says.

"Some secrets are best kept secret," Jean says.

"But we came up with a better identity for Krusty," Brooks says.

Silverman: "Yeah, that he is Jewish and his father was Jackie Mason."

Jean: "With substance abuse issues."

Silverman: "Write what you know."

Question: So you're just making it up as you go along?

"We're not only making it up from week to week," Groening says, "we were making it up scene to scene. I was drawing on animation paper as quickly as I could and my expectation was that professional animators would clean it up and make it slick and good. And that didn't happen." And so the classic simplicity of the Simpsons animation style was born.

When they went from the Ullman shorts to the Fox half-hour show, again the Simpsons faced looming disaster. The creative team worked on the series for eight months. "Everything was going great," Brooks says. "But we'd never seen any of the animation." The episode originally scheduled to be the first of the series in 1989 came back from the animation shop and they screened it at Brooks's office.

"It was terrible," Groening says.

"They were ugly," Brooks says. Homer, Marge, the kids. "They were repellent."

They sat there, stunned. "It was like a bomb went off," says Brooks. "We didn't think we had a show."

"And you said?" This is Jean.

Brooks said the product was an expletive.

"And one of animators said, what do you mean?" says Jean.

"And I said it is a foul substance which causes disease," says Brooks.

But the next episode -- different director -- came back from the animators a week later just fine and because they never showed the first to Fox ("We hid it from them," says Brooks), "The Simpsons" premiered in 1989 as the highest-rated show in the then-history of Fox.

To what do the creators credit the long and successful run of "The Simpsons" -- and its persistence in American culture?

Every television show has what the writers call "the bible," a set of principles and rules. "Matt said, this is a television family that watches television," says Brooks. "There were seasons we had absolute rules and then we'd break them," Silverman says. Like? "We had a rule of never going to space."

"We obeyed the laws of conventional physics," Silverman says. "For a while."

"Then physics changed," Groening says.

But seriously. "The two biggest rules were to follow Jim's great shows, where emotion is at the center," says Jean. "And we never said, it's a kid's show. It was the first cartoon where it was written for adults. 'The Flintstones' was a really terrific show, but it was for kids, and this wasn't."

There is a lot of sly humor in the Simpsons. In the movie, for example, Homer and his pig (it's a long story) create a toxic nightmare, which allows the evil Harvard-educated head of the Environmental Protection Agency to place a giant bubble over Springfield and then plot its destruction. So, for example, huddled in church, Flanders tells Bart, "Doomsday is family time." Or, "Why does everything I whip leave me?" Does a kid get it?

"No," says Groening. "But the 8-year-old is going to get it later when he's 16 years old. And when he's 23 years old, he or she will come write for the Simpsons."

Brooks: "It's written for an adult audience and children are invited."

Jean: "I also think no matter what age you are, you enjoy seeing someone get hit on the head."

In olden times, the Simpsons writers were viewed as liberals, which they admittedly are, mostly. They've inserted politics and social commentary into many episodes. Evolution. Gay marriage. American exceptionalism. Etc. "But when we discuss an idea, you see two points of view," says Jean. Kinda. "You have to throw a pie in the face of evenhandedness because there's a trap there, too," says Brooks.

"I think the best comedy has a strong sense of humor," Groening says. "You don't have to agree with it." Brooks says, "That's why it's good for us to make the face of ultimate evil the head of the EPA. We're poking fun at our own progressive attitudes."

Where the Simpsons were once more daring, they are now quite quaint -- if still hilarious. In fact, the Simpsons have been embraced by some religious leaders. The series has been praised by England's archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as "generally on the side of the angels and on the side of sense." A Church of England book compares Bart's impatience to meet Krusty the Clown with the Christians' wait for the Second Coming.

Ahem. Okay. In the movie, family and loyalty are challenged. A marriage does hang in the balance. A son's love is up for grabs. "The stakes have never been higher," says Brooks.

"Great family entertainment," the veteran producer explains, "is nobody gets talked down to. You don't look for a common denominator that brings everybody in, you just have something entertaining for every segment. And if you want a really funny pig, we're going to give you one."