Episode 1684 - Matt Groening

All right, let's do this.

How are you, what the fuckers?

What the fuck, buddies?

What the fuck, Nicks?

I'm Mark Marin.

This is my podcast.

Welcome to it.

We're coming down to the wire here.

Only a few more shows.

I hope you're all right.

Are you all right?

Today on the show, Matt Groening is here.

He's the creator of The Simpsons, which means he's responsible for a global phenomenon and an American cultural institution.

I was on episode 653 of The Simpsons.

That's season 30.

He's also known for Futurama, Disenchantment, and he got him right under the wire here.

He will be the last guest recorded here in the garage.

I'm going to do one more.

And that'll be me talking to you directly.

Just me.

Just us.

It's going to be just us.

And then we have one more after that.

This is the longest goodbye ever, but it's important.

It's important.

I have to go in the house now.

I think, what is it with being sick and you want toast?

You just want peanut butter and toast.

Is that a childhood thing?

I don't know.

I hope it doesn't upset you that I don't talk for a really long time today.

I will on Thursday, but I am under the weather and I have to go run around the fucking city of Los Angeles now and do QA's at two screenings of my dock.

Let's talk about that.

A couple of things.

The special screenings of the documentary, Are We Good?

Around the country, they happen Wednesday, October 8th.

It's currently playing in New York and LA.

I'll be at a screening at the Arrow here in LA next Friday, October 10th.

You can go to arewegoodmarin.com to see where else it's playing and get tickets.

I'll be back at Dynasty Typewriter in LA for two shows, Saturday, October 11th and Friday, October 17th.

I'll be back at Largo on Tuesday, October 14th and Tuesday, October 28th with the band.

You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour for tickets.

Also, you guys, if I'm going to talk, certainly in the near future, I will do it on Instagram.

So you can go

follow me on Instagram.

If you haven't done that.

Also, our friend Brian Jones, who makes all the cat mugs I give to my guests, will be part of the Hudson Valley Pottery Tour this month.

That's October 18th and 19th.

Admission is free to all the studios on the tour.

Go to HudsonvalleyPotteryTour.com to learn more.

I've been doing a lot of work around the house, trying to

make it funner for Charlie.

Make it more fun for Charlie when I have him locked upstairs.

It's so dumb, waffling about what I'm going to do with this cat.

Eventually, we'll move him into his own house out here.

But until then, I put together, I was sick yesterday, and I put together a cat tree, and I opened the window.

I took a shade off with the screwdriver from

screwing screws out of wood and took that down.

I want to take it down anyways.

Then I screwed the window shut to make sure he couldn't fuck with it.

And now he can perch on his new cat tree and look out the window.

Yeah, that's that's it's so ridiculous.

It's so ridiculous how much I tweak out about these cats.

Scrambled to the vet today, that was a whole other thing, man.

You know,

Buster's been acting weird, and you kind of feel like you know when they're sick, or and he was marking everywhere.

And

I don't know, I thought it was Charlie, and,

you know, but it comes and goes.

And then I found like, you know, when you're looking for pee, and all of a sudden you're like, oh my God,

there's way more pee than I ever imagined possible.

Jackson Galaxy told me to get a black light.

I'm afraid to even use it.

He just fucking peed all along the inside of the curtains, all around the rooms.

I was like, what the fuck?

And he's on Busporin.

I'm on that.

I'm on the Busporin.

I no longer pee on the wall around the house.

I mean, why isn't it working for him?

Yeah, I was like, I was a big peer in corners.

No more.

It should be working for him.

But then I thought maybe he's got a UTI, so I took him to the vet.

I'm scrambling because I got some things to do out of town.

And, you know, I'm scrambling to get everything.

I brought Charlie to the vet to see if he might be fucked up with a pee thing because he's peeing in the sink, but he's always peed in the sink.

Then I took Buster in.

They did tests.

And,

you know, she didn't think it was a UTI because he's marking, but Buster always pees vertically.

He always marks.

I've never seen him pee normal.

The Busporan should be working for that, right?

Anyway, so

yesterday I get a, or the day before yesterday, I get an email from the vet.

He's got bacteria in his pee, and I'm like, well, I got to go.

So I drag poor Buster in there and get him, get him the shot.

And then I had all these errands to run yesterday and wasn't working out.

This is not, none of it's important.

We should be here kind of easing out.

But

it's so weird.

I know I've talked about this before, but when I get sick

and my body just slows down, I can really tap into stuff.

I can tap into vibes I felt a long time ago about places.

I guess it's sort of like a deja vu of sickness, maybe.

Like I think that when your body's sort of shut down a little bit and you're a little sick, it remembers other times you were sick.

I keep thinking about college and about, you know, kind of walking through, always feeling exhausted and just feeling the fall in Boston and just sort of like, kind of like totally tripping out on it.

I guess the word now is vibing on it.

And it's just almost like time travel when I get a little ill.

I hope it doesn't get worse.

Kid's got a bronchial thing.

You don't want that, man.

Keep it out of my chest.

Please.

Please keep it out of my chest.

I know this is not the kind of thing you want to be talking about, you know, as we head into the last few shows, but this is who I am right now.

And, you know, I'll say it again and again.

I'm so happy you guys hung out, man.

I'm so happy you guys all hung out.

A lot more people hung out than I even thought of.

Every time I have a guest on,

it's like

they're like so many people told me that they heard me.

I'm like, oh my God.

But I'm glad you hung out.

I hope I didn't get anyone sick.

Oh my God.

Do Do I have to keep talking through the sickness?

You guys going to be okay until Thursday?

That's a big talk.

I just, oh, so much work to make one cat comfortable.

It's so fucking crazy.

It'll all level off.

Everything is so important to me in the moment.

I do not have ADHD.

What I have is when I realize something is up, I have to deal with it immediately or else I'll forget it.

But, you know,

I got to give this cat thing a rest, goddammit.

All right, look,

this is

the way I'm going out.

Wow.

Today, with only a few shows left, sick and worked up about cats.

That makes sense.

All right, look, Matt Groening is here.

Season 13 of Futurama is now on Hulu.

The Simpsons just began its 37th season, and the 800th episode will air in February.

And this is me talking to the great Matt Groening.

What have you never mentioned?

I've never mentioned the original inspiration for Homer Simpson, and it was from a 1982 documentary on PBS.

It was part of the Middletown series about Muncie, Indiana.

And one of the episodes was called Family Business, and it was about about a guy who had a Shaky's pizza franchise and he was going nuts.

He couldn't make his monthly due.

Nuts.

And it was just about him trying to make pizza and have the straw hat on and playing the piano and running around and stuff.

And he had his kids working there.

And his kids loved him, but he didn't have enough money to pay his kids.

And one moment in the documentary, the kids just can't take it and they go to a movie instead of coming to work.

And he's there by himself, and of course the camera crew is there documenting this guy going crazy.

And I thought,

this is a man,

a sweet man who's getting kicked in the ass by life.

I want to write about that.

And that's where Homer came from.

From that guy, from the Shaky's guy.

That's good information.

Thank you.

And it's never been out there.

Nope.

That's the big news on this episode.

Do you have an outline?

I just have some little things if I want to mention something that I get the

thing right.

Really?

Yeah.

You did some work beforehand?

Well there's a you know there's a few

there's a documentary that I love that I want to mention.

It's called Which Way Home.

It's an HBO documentary from, God, I don't remember where.

Which Way Home?

Which Way Home.

It's about immigrant children coming up from Central America and Mexico to the United States.

And it is the most heartbreaking documentary I've ever seen.

Okay.

And I think it would change people's minds who have no empathy for immigrants if they could see this documentary.

It just blew my mind.

The empathy deficit, I don't completely understand, but I've grown to believe that through massive pummeling by propaganda, that I think it creates a manic state.

And I don't think they can see past it until they see people face to face.

Well, it doesn't even get acknowledged that things to be empathetic about

on the news.

I mean, you know, everything is so narrow and everything is replaced by the next thing, the next thing, and the next thing.

Whatever the news is.

Yeah, whatever it is.

It's all about.

I had that conversation with someone the other night about their parents getting brain fucked

into Trumpism.

And it's really because that generation,

your age, a little older, when they watch Fox News, they think it's the news.

Right.

And these are people that watched Cronkite

for half their life.

And they just don't make the adjustment.

They're like, well, that guy's sitting there behind the desk.

It's the news.

Well, one way in which I'm not surprised by Trump is that growing up watching television evangelists

blatantly being crooks and con artists.

Oral Roberts.

Yeah, Oral Roberts and Billy Graham.

Billy Graham.

Billy Robertson.

When I was in the Boy Scouts in the late 1960s,

our scout master volunteered us to be ushers at a Billy Graham revival

in Portland, Oregon.

And we got on a bus and we drove over there.

And on the way, I drove past something called the Psychedelic Shop, which is a brand new

Emporium.

How old were you?

I was 12.

Okay, so you're driving home from the

way to the revival.

To the Billy Graham revival.

And I see the psychedelic shop, and I go, I got to go there.

1960.

67.

Oh, so early.

Early.

Early.

First psychedelic shop.

Yes.

And

I snuck out

of the revival after handing out

tracts.

And I walked across the bridge,

across the river, Limert River, to the psychedelic shop.

And there's where I saw.

The thing I remember most is that Grateful Dead poster with the skeleton and the roses.

That's the best record.

The best.

That's like late 60s, right?

So that's 67 live.

Yeah, the very first

Grateful Dead.

The very first record I ever bought was the Grateful Dead record.

Which one?

The first one, the first album.

What else did you see in there?

Well, the only thing I could afford at the time was the first Country Joe and the Fish

seven-inch EP.

So it was a record shop.

Records and posters.

Right.

Yeah.

So you got Country Joe and the Fish.

Which one?

The Rag Baby EP.

It's a seven-inch EP.

Okay.

But see, I had very hip parents, and my father was in advertising, and we subscribed to, we got free subscriptions to every general interest magazine in the country.

And I had just read an issue of Ramparts magazine, which was this political.

Back when

Horowitz was the other way.

So, yes, exactly.

Anyway, they talked about psychedelic music in this magazine, which I'd never heard, I just heard about, and so I wanted to hear what it sounded like.

And it turned out it was rock and roll.

Sure.

It was like, it's all kind of country-driven rock.

Right.

Right?

Right.

It's interesting, Ramparts magazine, that Horowitz, what's his first name, David?

Yeah.

That he went so dramatically the other way that he was part of the Ramparts magazine.

And then something broke in his brain, and he is cited as the mentor of Stephen Miller.

It's crazy.

That story, like, I try, I know his son, and I'm like, that's got to be a movie

the arc of that.

Because Ramparts was an important, you know, lefty rag, right?

Yes, it was.

Yeah.

And then this guy becomes the architect of the mindset that creates a Stephen Miller.

Isn't that a fascinating movie?

Yes.

Yes.

But you know what?

Other thing about Stephen Miller that I don't get?

How could you go to Santa Monica High School and turn out like him?

Because he was clearly annoying and hated.

And it seems to me that the only way he could push back on it was leaning into it.

And then he began to enjoy it.

He liked being a fucking iconoclastic cunt.

And it gave him his own space, and they didn't like him, anyways.

Right.

And then he locked in.

Right.

And this is what we get: a Jewish Nazi.

Yes, you were.

I remember you said that on your special, which I just watched.

That was great.

Oh, thank you so much.

I, uh,

you know, I we met right at the Zappa house.

Yes.

I remember that.

Do you remember what year that was?

Holy shit.

Well,

it must have been maybe

a year before she got cancer.

So you were, so it was a party.

It's a yearly Christmas party at the Zappas.

I'd been dating Moon for about 10 minutes.

And I'd gotten invited to this very dug-in tradition.

of the Zappa Christmas party.

And I, you know, going over there was just mind-blowing to me.

That was the first time I'd been at the house.

Oh, wow.

And we only dated for like six months, but it was long enough to be able to go to that thing and her giving the tour of the Frank Studio and then the new studio.

And for some reason, Moby was there because him and Moon are friends.

And he was dragging along on the tour.

It ruined it.

He kept stopping and playing every fucking instrument in the place.

I'm like, dude, just have some reverence, dude.

That was amazing.

So you asked me to do your podcast.

Then.

Then.

Yeah.

And what happened?

And I said, I'll think about it.

And now you're doing the last one.

This is the last one?

Well, no, it's the last one is also going to be an interview.

And then the one before the last one is going to be me just talking about the podcast.

And then the third to the last one is going to be you.

Wow.

Yeah.

I'm honored.

So if you recall, at the time, I promised you that I would do your podcast and you would be the first podcast that I would do.

Yeah.

And I kept that in my mind all those years.

Yeah.

But I did, I have to confess, i did do two other podcasts i did a simpons podcast because it was the last episode of the simpsons podcast called round springfield okay by allie gertz and julia prescott and then i did a jay kogan who was a simpsons writer he had a he had a podcast so listen only to what i did and speak myself for you because you know as long as long as you covered all that simpsons stuff elsewhere then maybe we can have a good conversation yeah who yeah i don't want to talk about anything simpson related yeah well i mean it's interesting because like generationally like my producer, who's, you know,

a good deal younger than me, is in his mid-40s.

I mean, The Simpsons informed his entire existence.

There's a whole generation of

people who The Simpsons, you know, it just gave them all the intellectual and comedic and cultural education that enabled them to move through the world with a sense of humor and intelligence.

I believe that.

Wow.

Do you believe that?

Well, I have to be a little bit more modest.

No, you don't.

No, but what I will push back and I'll push it away from me is say that one of the great things about The Simpsons, I always wanted it to be funny.

And I always thought it was going to be a success, but I didn't know that it would be that crazily successful.

And I didn't understand what the possibilities are.

I thought there were boundaries and rules in animation that I knew in my head.

And I was wrong.

In animation, not in

comedy,

whatever.

Yeah.

And there were so many things I liked and so many things that influenced me from the time I was a little kid.

My father, Homer, was a cartoonist in the 1950s.

Is that true?

Yes.

Oh, I don't know why I just said it like that.

Like, he'd be lying to me about that.

Let's go back to that then.

So, you grew up where?

I grew up in Portland, Oregon.

So, Portland, Oregon, you know, war-torn Portland, Oregon.

Sure, yeah, where it's impossible for people to live there right now.

The war is ongoing.

Exactly.

I just talked to, I have friends up there.

I just talked to somebody the other day.

It's just, all that's ridiculous.

But Portland for me,

when I've gone there, I've always felt a seeping darkness

that I mean because it rains so much.

Well, there's that, but it also felt ancient, not ancient quite, but maybe 1800s kind of darkness.

Like I felt that there was a there was something about that town and whoever discovered it that and whatever rules were put into place that that

made it darkness.

Is that possible?

Possible.

Yeah.

Well, you know,

it was always rainy.

Yeah.

It was this the town was named by a coin toss.

It was

Lovejoy, and I can't remember the other guy, and they tossed a coin.

And if one had won, it would have been Boston, Oregon, and the other one was Portland.

Oh, we got Portland.

That's when we got Portland.

But the racial laws were kind of rough for a long time.

The racial laws were very bad in Oregon.

Like literally, there were no black people allowed.

Right.

Yeah.

Up until like a couple years ago, right?

You know, things loosened up.

I did go to an all-white grade school.

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Was it called that?

All-white?

It was called Ainsworth after Captain Ainsworth.

Oh.

In fact, you know, there's all these streets in Portland that I named characters after.

Oh, really?

So that's, yes.

So Lovejoy, Reverend Lovejoy,

Kearney is named after the Kearney Care Center where I used to work in high school,

washing dishes.

Okay.

Yeah.

What was it, the Kearney Care Center?

It was for old people.

Oh, so you you were a nice kid.

Well, when I wasn't washing dishes, I had it.

They tasked me with wheeling old people around the neighborhood.

And

I remember it was a couple of my dishwashing buddies and me, and we were wheeling these guys, and they pointed up at this theater marquee of the movie theater on the corner that was the stewardesses in 3D, which was a softcore porn movie.

And we did, we coughed up our own money to take the old people to the streets.

Oh, you brought them?

Yes.

And did they enjoy it?

Yes, they did.

Was there any commentary afterwards?

No.

All right, so you're growing up in Portland.

So your dad was a published cartoonist?

Yes, in little magazines, you know, pageant and argosy.

Single panel stuff?

Single panel, you know, the prospector crawling across the desert looking for something to drink,

those kind of things.

Guys on deserts' islands.

Yeah.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And he was also an advertising person?

He got into advertising.

But before that, he's got a really interesting story because he grew up in Kansas.

First, he was born in Canada because his parents were Mennonites and they were pacifists and they didn't want him to be an American citizen.

So they drove up to Canada so he would not be born in the U.S.

and he would not have to serve in the military.

Right.

And so he was born in Saskatchewan and then they came back and lived in western Kansas where he did not speak English.

He spoke German until the age of five.

The family did not have a car.

They had a wagon, horse and wagon.

Mennonites.

Mennonites.

And they made it to Portland.

They made it to McMinnville, which is south of Portland, where I don't know this part of the story.

But was it part of that wave of

Germans and

I think like some parts of Russia where they wanted people to come to farm the land in the Midwest because it was so hard?

I guess so.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

my dad's mother was from Russia, and her family escaped from Russia.

And then they somehow hooked up, met and got married in Kansas, and then moved to Oregon, where I don't know how this happened, but both of them became college-educated.

And my grandfather was a physics teacher at

Linfield College, and then Lewis and Clark College for the rest of their lives.

And my grandmother taught Russian.

And these were ex-Mennonites.

These are your mother's parents or your parents?

My father's parents.

He was a physicist?

He was a physics teacher.

A physics teacher.

Yeah.

But I didn't understand how, where do you get the connection from being a Mennonite to

Einstein?

Well, I think that not unlike you walking into the psychedelic shop, somewhere along the line, his mind got blown.

Yes.

And he's like, I've got to figure this out.

Yeah, so my dad was a stalwart, obedient kid who was obsessed by basketball, and he wanted to be a basketball player when he grew up.

And he just played basketball all the time.

And he realized when he got to college that he was never going to make it in the basketball behavior.

That's an important short.

Important realization.

So he decided to perfect a basketball shot that only he could do.

And so starting in college, he turned around, faced away from the basket to the other, looking at the other basket, and over his head he would shoot.

And he moved out an inch a month for 30 years.

Well, this explains how he got interested in physics.

The answer is right there.

That was the seed of of it.

The FBI came to the house at the beginning of World War II and said,

because my father had joined Red Cross, in fact,

he taught life-saving at a Japanese internment camp in

Southern California.

I said, how could you cooperate with such a racist thing?

And he said, yeah, it was racist, but I wanted to be good to the people that were locked up.

So I taught life-saving.

Anyway, so the FBI came and they said that if my dad didn't join up,

he would go to prison.

Join up in the forces?

Yeah, join the forces.

And my dad joined the Air Force, ended up being a B-17 bomber pilot.

Come on.

Yes.

And then he gave me the book, Cats 22 by Joseph Fowler.

Oh, that's enough.

And I went, oh, my God, that's what it was like?

He said, no.

But it's a really good book.

How old were you when you read that book?

12.

This 12-year-old thing, this is where it all started.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

Yes.

Grateful Dead.

Grateful Dead, Frankfurt Zappa.

Zappa

Fish.

Yes.

Where'd you find Zappa at 12?

That I found Freak Out at the grocery store.

At the grocery store, the record bin.

Yeah, a little record bin at the grocery store.

Yeah, I bought Jethro Tell's Aqualung at Skaggs Pharmacy.

They only had like one little bin of records, and Freak Out made it in there.

Yes.

Isn't that wild when the record companies, they try?

Yeah.

And that's a great record to have.

Yes.

And that was the beginning of your relationship with Zappa?

I followed every album since that first one.

All 900?

Yes.

And they still, the amazing thing, like he's been gone since 1993, and they're still putting out new, fresh stuff

a few times a year.

Ahmed is doing such an amazing job.

At keeping the archive alive?

Yes.

I guess they, like, once they unloaded that house and went through all those tapes downstairs, they were like, oh, my God.

Well, when Frank was alive, he invited me over once and he said,

do you want to

see the basement where all the tapes were?

And I said, yeah, he goes, well, you got to put on the spelunking spelunking helmet.

And I had to wear a helmet with a headlamp on it and go down into the sub-basement, and there were just racks and racks and shelves and shelves.

Did you spend a lot of time with him?

Yes, I did.

Well,

yes, on a regular basis, a small amount of time every day,

every week.

Really?

Every Friday.

Yeah.

And like, what did you guys talk about?

Music and politics.

And he was, you know,

I think he liked me because I, first of all, he was a big Simpsons fan.

So that was good.

In fact, he said, you know, if you want, I'll come down and mumble into the microphone for you.

And it never got around to it.

And he got too sick.

Really?

You didn't get him on?

No.

Did you have to approve me being on?

No.

Oh, by the way, thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

What's that?

2018 you were on with Krusty the Clown?

Krusty the Clown.

I interviewed Krusty the Clown.

I think it's the episode 653.

of The Simpsons.

Wow.

That's my episode.

Wow.

I'll never forget Krusty saying to you, that's off-limits, Soul patch

well i think in the tradition like in terms of you're gravitating towards zappa outside of the music i think that you know what's at the heart of of what the simpsons has become is there's a healthy amount of fuck you in it yeah i would agree with that and that you know that art with a healthy amount of fuck you is is necessary uh more so than ever but it's kind of it's hard to get to a broader audience with it i think now

well I learned so when I moved to Los Angeles after college in 1970 so wait now let me just ask you before we get there because I watched I've had this I don't know if it's a catharsis but a sort of a re-realization I watched the documentary Crumb for for like the second time recently I saw it when it came out and I watched it again

and not unlike you although I'm probably 10 years younger than you, you know, I went into, I had an experience with underground comics that changed my life,

completely reconfigured my brain.

I was at a B.

Dalton bookseller in Wenrock Shopping Mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the humor section.

And they had the history of underground comics.

And in that, it was broken into categories like sex, violence, and a few other categories.

And I saw, there's that one panel by Spain Rodriguez, I think, with the two constellation of two people fucking in space.

And then there's all the crumb stuff, all the fucking, all the fucking.

Just like, and I'm sitting there, you know, in this bookstore with a fucking boner, you know, wondering, like, what the fuck is this?

They didn't even know what they had.

Changed my life.

So, because it reconfigured the possibilities of comics and of what you could get away with.

But I watched the

Crumb documentary again, and I realized that if you look at everything through a Crumb lens,

you will feel better about life.

Yeah, if you look at, if you look at people and then just crumb them,

it humanizes everybody because it's just this, like that slightly strange kind of caricature that shows their flaws.

And even if they're grotesque, they're more human than they would be.

And it's really helping me right now.

Now, did you have experience before you left, you know, when you were a kid with comics in general?

Well, again, my dad was a cartoonist.

So the house was full of cartooning books.

Of how-to.

Well, how-to, but also collections of punt from Punch Magazine and Saturday Evening Post.

And again, we got every magazine in the country delivered to the house.

So I read every ⁇ my job was to stack them up in piles in the basement.

Where's Gahan Wilson factor in?

Gayen Wilson was in Playboy.

Yeah, so where does he factor into your mentality?

He's definitely up there.

Right?

Yeah, yeah.

How do you pronounce his first name?

Gahan.

Gahan, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Did you watch that talk?

No, I I haven't.

There's a talk about him.

That's great.

Those ones killed me.

And the crumb killed me.

Oh, my God.

So I was at

you remember Meltdown Comics

on Sunset Boulevard?

I was in Meltdown Comics,

Hawaiian shirt and shorts.

Yeah.

And this guy came in and he said, Are you Matt?

And I go, yeah.

He goes, do you know anything about Playboy?

I go, yes.

And he said, come with me.

And across the street, there was an auction of all Playboy,

old Playboy memorabilia from the magazine.

And I came over there and it was all people much, much younger than me.

Yeah.

And they had no idea what they were looking at, nor did the people who ran the auction house.

And so I said, that's Gayn Wilson, and that's, you know, so-and-so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was amazing.

Do you know S.

Kway Wilson?

His stuff?

I met him a couple times.

I interviewed him.

He's great.

Can I do an interview?

Ask me a question

to S.K.

Play Wilson.

So, where did you come up with the checkered demon?

He was sick already?

Yeah.

That's too bad.

I met met him.

I interviewed all of the Zap Comics cartoonists.

A bunch of them?

Yeah.

They did a new issue, and they came to L.A.

and Spain, Robert, S.

Clay?

S.

Clay, Rick Griffin.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When was that?

I can't remember.

Were you already doing The Simpsons?

Yeah.

No, no, that was before The Simpsons.

Oh.

I think, yeah.

But so when, like, when do you start?

Do you start doing cartoons before you come down here?

Oh, yeah.

I was doing cartoons.

I was drawing from the first day of first grade.

I was so bored in school that I just remember constantly.

I did that too, but I didn't stick with it.

Well, I stuck with it, but I didn't think I was going to do anything with it.

I just thought this is, I'm doomed to wiggle the pencil.

What were your early styles?

I would imitate Dr.

Seuss and Charles Schultz peanuts.

Oh, so that makes sense.

Yeah.

So that's why my line is all curvy.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's definitely the peanuts that are in there, huh?

Right.

Dr.

Seuss.

And then later,

when I moved to LA, I hated it so much that I got a job working at

a Xerox place,

and I made my own little magazine, my own little zine called Life in Hell, and it was all about Los Angeles and living here and how much I hated it.

And that's one thing that

I learned, that hostility only goes a little ways.

Most humor has hostility in it,

but you can't be so blatant with it.

You got to lure people in.

So you had to temper your life from hell?

Well, what I did was at first I would make the little bunny rabbit that was the star of

the comic.

You just rant.

You just rant and rant and rant, and people didn't like it.

Single panels?

No, it was like a little comic book.

Well, then I got a job

at the Los Angeles Reader.

newspaper was a weekly paper yeah and they let me have a comic strip in the back of the paper in the classifieds.

Yeah.

And I called it Life in Hell, and I made it square because that was the same shape as a record album.

Yeah.

And for the first six months, I just had it, was very angry, and nobody liked it.

And then I just made Binky, the rabbit, a victim.

Okay.

And bad things happened to him, and people seemed to really like that.

So you switched to a lovable loser.

Existential rants to a

existential self-hating rant

to an underdog.

Yes.

Oh, and that changed everything.

That did change everything.

But so

what did you

study in college?

I went to a college called the Evergreen State College, Philippia, Washington.

I know that place.

No grades, no required courses.

So out of patchouli, oils.

Yeah, a lot of white kids with that.

A lot of hippies, yes.

So what year was that?

That was

73 to 77.

So still pretty full hippie, 73.

It was all hippies.

Oh, really?

It was all hippies, yeah.

Were you political?

Were you part of it?

Were you, like, what were you doing?

Were you afraid of the people?

Well, I consider myself pretty progressive, but back then I was

to them.

Right of center.

But what was the scene there?

Did you do poster art or anything?

I worked at the school newspaper and I ended up editing the paper, and that's all I did.

I just would work on the school newspaper.

Did you have friends?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

That's when you have friends.

I mean, this is what I tell kids who are miserable in high school.

Grow up, graduate from high school, go to a college, and you're going to meet like-minded people.

Right.

You know,

it's when you're in crummy town, in your crummy school that you're in now, get away, get away and meet and meet creative, funny people.

Yeah, you better do it soon before all the colleges turned into just exactly what your high school was.

Yeah.

When I was in high school, it was in downtown Portland, and it was during the

anti-war protests and stuff.

And the high point of being

at Lincoln High School in Portland was that when

the protesters came up and surrounded the school

and the principal freaked out and he dismissed school immediately.

And that meant everybody in the school was out on the street with all the protesters.

It was fantastic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was exciting.

Yes.

And

it probably helped.

It might have worked a little bit.

Yeah, I don't know about that, but

you got to do it, yes.

Of course.

But it's interesting to me now that what is happening with

the right in general it's just it's pushback that you know started just post the 60s you know that you know and the new deal they're still trying to dismantle the new deal and dismantle any sort of cultural progress that was made in the late 60s and they're doing it very quickly they're feeling their oats yeah but they were i mean there was always there was always this sort of right wing you know trying to trying to worm their way in and and and for the longest time it didn't work you know and then it would work here and there.

And, you know, I mean, in 68, you know, George Wallace ran for president, you know, totally blatant right-wing racist, Democrat.

Were you doing any art relative to that?

I would attempt to do bad psychedelic art.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

What form?

You know, the psychedelic lettering that you can't really read.

Sure.

You know, you know, and then

I was working with my friend Joe,

who was my lifelong friend.

I met him in the first grade.

He was a kid that came up to me and said, smell my finger.

Not first grade, kindergarten.

First day of kindergarten, Joe came up to me and said, smell my finger.

And I smelled it.

It was a bad smell.

Yeah.

Right.

And then he stuck his hand down the back of his pants and go up to everybody else.

And he's like, oh, that was his thing.

Really funny kid.

Yeah, yeah.

So then a month later, the kindergarten teacher marched us all down to the boys' restroom and pointed, said, who did that?

And there was

somebody had dumped in the urinal.

Yeah, sure right and you know right and we were shocked and we were kindergartners except for Joe who laughed his ass off

and they grabbed him and took him away and that was the last you saw of him no the rest of my high school I spent with Joe we had you talk asked about psychedelic posters I did psychedelic posters for our band that never played oh we had a little band and I wrote the lyrics yeah a funny undulating circling kaleidoscope yellow omnipresent universe yeah which is our version of Lucy in the sky with diamonds but that spells out fuck you.

Oh, see, the fuck you.

Yeah, there you go.

You're right about it.

The fuck you is there.

And the art wasn't cartoons, per se?

It was, yeah,

it was cartoony.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Joe, did he let go of the shit angle eventually?

Yes, he did.

Yes, he did.

And he became a fantastic guitarist, and he was a brilliant kid.

And then in the...

In the height of hippie dom in the late 60s, he shaved his head.

And I said, why?

And he said, I want to be goonworthy.

And I I don't know exactly what that meant, but he would march around and he put up posters of cartoon robots saying obey and so on.

And

my senior year in high school,

every month they would give the Boy of the Month award and the Girl of the Month Award.

And for the month

that humor was the thing, Joe won.

Joe won for humor.

And he got up on stage and

he said his joke.

And you have to understand, Lincoln High School is made out of brick.

Yeah.

Okay.

So

he got up

on stage and said, why is Lincoln High School so red?

Yeah.

Well, if you had eight periods a day, you'd be red too.

Wow.

And that got him kicked out of school.

That was it.

And by the way, so my 50th high school reunion,

I told that joke

via video because I couldn't make it.

And the kids I went to high school, oh, no, don't say it.

They knew what was coming.

And did they, they all knew Joe?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And did you play music then or no?

I wanted to, but I have no skill.

But you were a big music fan?

I was a big music fan.

I was in a band.

I've been in a band with Stephen King and Dave Berry and Amy Tan and all these other writers.

Yeah.

The Rock Bottom Remainders.

Sure.

We were called The Remainders, but it turns out there was another book band called The Remainders.

Yeah.

So we were the Rock Bottom Remainders.

So how far out did you, do you have a huge record collection?

Yes, of course.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Did you ever,

where'd you start collecting?

Well, I mean, I don't know if the collecting, they piled up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, from the time I was, you know, in high school, yeah.

Just kept coming.

I think I had incredibly

good luck at guessing by album covers what was good.

And you just kept up.

I kept up, you know.

Do you like your jazz guy?

Yeah.

Are you a weirdo music guy?

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Who are your favorite weirdos?

Well,

how weird do you want to get?

Like Residence Weird?

Oh, yes.

I know the Residence, and I wrote a little bit about them back in the day.

Yeah, The Residence.

Let's see who else.

That universe.

That universe of weirdos.

Obviously, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart,

the Bonzo Dog Band from England.

And then

classical music and avant-garde classical music like

Mr Vinsky, not so much avant-garde, but pretty amazing.

John Cage?

John Cage, George Crum, Toru Takamitsu,

Olivier Messian.

No, I don't know them.

Terry Riley.

Terry Riley, yes, of course.

Great.

Yeah.

All right, so you graduate with a degree in hippie?

Yes.

And you moved to L.A.

for what?

It was either L.A.

or New York.

For cartoons?

Well, to be a writer, basically.

Okay, so to be a writer.

Because I never thought, you know, nobody was saying, hey, your cartoons are great.

Okay, so you you moved down here to be a writer?

Well, I went to New York

to see what it was like.

Yeah.

And

there were hypodermics on the stairwell of the apartment I was staying at.

And I said, I'm going to L.A.

What's your mom do?

She was a school teacher, and then she raised five kids.

Five of you?

Yeah.

Are y'all weirdos?

No, I'm the weirdest, but yeah, they're all weird.

Yeah.

And by the way, they're, you know, so I have a sister, Lisa, and a sister, Maggie.

The characters in the show are named after them.

And

my father is Homer, obviously, and my mother is Margaret.

But I shortened that to Marge.

I thought it was slightly funnier.

And I do have an older brother named Mark.

Yeah.

But I was afraid he'd hit me if I named Mark.

Right.

But so your parents were okay with your choice of life?

No, no, no.

When I went to Evergreen, they said I was throwing my life away.

They were very unsupportive.

They don't remember it that way.

But

from my recollection,

they thought I was wasting my time.

In fact, I sent them the newspaper that I was editing, the campus newspaper.

They showed it to journalists at the Oregonian in Portland.

And they said he will never get a job in journalism in the Pacific Northwest.

And my parents said, you know,

we've never considered disowning you, but this is the...

Because they were progressive people, issues?

They were, but it was like the weirdest thing.

Because, again,

my father made movies, surfing movies in the 60s.

He was very hip and very adventurous, but he had this military backbone that was kind of harsh.

Oh, yeah.

But he was an artist.

Yeah, he was.

And he was a cartoonist.

But I didn't understand.

Well, one thing he said, he said, you can't draw.

And then

later, The Simpsons takes off, and my mother says, look, look, you did exactly what we told you to do, and look how it turned out.

Yeah, of course.

And I said, you didn't tell me, you didn't tell me to do this.

You told me that I should drop out of school and enroll in a community college and learn a trade.

Yeah.

She goes, no, we didn't.

I said, you told me to learn how to run a lathe.

Yeah.

And my mother said, no, we would never do that.

You know you're clumsy.

You'd slice your hands off.

They want to take credit.

Yes.

So when you got here, you were miserable.

You worked at the Xerox place?

Yes.

Where else did you work?

Shortly after that I got a job at Licorice Pizza, a record store right across the street from the Whiskey Ago Go.

So that must have been a life changer.

What year was that?

77.

So that was the beginning of punk.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So I wait when there were 500 people at Tower Records down the street, there would be five people at Licorice Pizza.

And you guys are selling mostly punk records?

No, it was, yeah, there was a punk corner, and that's where I put Life in Hell, my little magazine, and the punks used to rip it up, which I felt was like

a badge of honor.

Yeah.

So that's where you were doing the magazine at the Xerarch store, and then you kept going?

We also sold drug paraphernalia.

Sure.

You know, bongs.

Bongs and

little coke vials

and toy footballs that they made into bongs and all this stuff.

Yeah.

And like a jerk, I always, when people would come in and buy 500 vials, I'd say,

what do you do with these?

What do you do?

Yeah.

So that was the place.

Yeah.

So the dealers used to.

And I just thought it was so obvious that that's what it was in any whatever.

But you never did the drugs.

No.

You know why?

Two reasons.

One, I was afraid of losing control, but the other reason was Frank Zappa said not to.

Yeah.

You know, and I said, okay, that's good enough for me.

And I liked his stuff, so.

He didn't mind eating cigarettes, basically.

Well, yes.

He was totally into nicotine and coffee.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In fact,

one time he had to go back east and he was flying private and they asked, would you be willing to go with him?

Because nobody in the family wanted to be on a plane with Frank across the country while he smoked incessantly.

In the back.

I remember that.

And I said, yeah, I'll do it.

But then he got too sick and he didn't.

Oh, it's so sad.

Yeah.

And did you hang out with Beefheart?

Very little.

Very little.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And bet you knew all the kids and everything, Gail and everything.

Yeah, I love all the kids.

I love all the kids.

Yeah.

So

when do you make the break?

I mean, when does it start taking off?

It was Life in Hell, right?

Well, Life in Hell,

I published, self-published

the book Love is Hell in 1984.

And it was a little, it was the size of a record album because, again, that's where I thought, oh, they could stock it at record stores.

Yeah.

And it was called Love is Hell.

And then I did a book called Work is Hell shortly thereafter.

And they sold so well that I got the attention of of Art Spiegelman of Mouse fame.

I know him.

And he introduced me to Pantheon Books, and Pantheon Books published Mouse and My Life in Hell books.

Yeah, Spiegelman's

like a comic savant.

Yes.

Yeah, he's like he's a history of comics.

Yes, he knows a person.

And he's got a lot of opinions.

He referenced it in everything.

Yes, he's brilliant.

Yeah, he smokes a lot too.

Yes, he does.

But now it's whatever.

Vape?

Vape, I think.

Oh, my God.

I think he was smoking those camel camels straight speaking of crumb yeah crumb was supposed to come to LA and I was supposed to interview him on stage me too really here yeah oh they asked me ask for no not on stage no okay anyway I was supposed to interview him on stage to promote the book the biography by

Dan Nadel and Crumb backed out bailed bailed and then

Art Spiegelman said I'll go and Art Spiegelman came out.

How was that?

That was amazing.

Did you know that?

Because you said

he was the he got comedy history.

Yeah, amazing, right?

Yes.

What do you make of Ralph Bakshi?

When I met Ralph Bakshe, he said, you've got to get out of this animation thing.

It's a complete rut.

You're wasting your time.

Yeah.

And then I went, oh, okay, okay.

And then like the next day, he was announcing a new movie.

Oh, yeah.

Who's the other guy I liked?

What was that guy's name?

Von.

Von Bode?

Von Bode or something?

Yeah, that guy, Cheech Wizard.

Yeah.

His greatest.

That's wild.

Right?

Yeah.

He was great.

Yeah.

So when you come down here, when you start to take off as a cartoonist, do you meet other cartoonists outside of Spiegelman?

Did you have contemporaries?

Well,

I started, I was on the fringes of the punk scene scene, and

there was a newspaper called Slash, Slash magazine.

And there was a comic strip in there called Jimbo

by Gary Panter.

Gary Panter is great.

Yeah, Pee-Wee's guy.

Yes.

And so

Gary wrote me a letter in this

scrawled handwriting, and I thought, because of the style of his work and everything, I thought he was a Japanese punk.

Yeah.

Also a great painter.

Yeah, a brilliant painter.

And then it turned out he was a very sweet Texan.

Yeah.

And

we became really good friends.

And we used to hang out together and we used to scheme, like, how are we going to break into pop culture?

Yeah.

And we'd sit at Astro Burger

Melrose and split a burger because we had so little money.

Yeah.

And

scheme.

And then he, he got Pee-Wee's Playhouse, you know?

Yes.

Yes.

And it was like, oh my God.

That was unbelievable.

Did you go see those things early on?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Like before they were the show.

Yeah, when it was at the Ground League.

And yeah, that was great.

Did you see those?

No.

Oh, that was before your time.

Yeah.

It's great.

Yeah, it's great.

What about Linda Berry?

Linda Berry I met in college.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

In Portland?

No, well, in Olympia.

Yeah, Evergreen.

And I met her because I found out there was another girl in the dorms who had written to Joseph Heller

and gotten a reply from Joseph Heller.

So

I had to track down the girl who had corresponded with the writer of Cat 22.

And I tracked her down, and it was Linda Berry.

Wow.

And she was unbelievable.

And what she had done is she had written a fan letter to Heller and written on the return address, Ingrid Bergman, because she thought that way he would actually open it up and read it.

She proposed marriage to him.

Did he read it?

Yeah, he replied to her and he said, I don't think there's room for the both of us in your dorm.

So we became friends.

And she surfaced as a very good comic artist.

Oh, she's the best.

Yeah.

She and I have gone around

the country and into India and to Australia talking together.

And I'm the straight man.

She is so funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She's great.

Yeah.

All right.

So the books come out, all the in-held books.

Yes.

And you're starting to make a living?

Yes.

And you like L.A.

better?

Right.

And how does...

When did the Simpson panel start happening?

Well, what happened was Polly Platt, the movie producer who used to be married to Brock Donovan.

Brilliant, underrated, understood.

Yeah, apparently wrote most of his stuff.

Yeah, so

bought James L.

Brooks an original piece of art by me called the Los Angeles Way of Life or something like that in it.

And it was very dark.

And he had me come over to Paramount where he was located at the time to see if there was something we could do together.

And at the time, I lived in a little apartment house.

across the street from Paramount.

Yeah.

And my car had been towed away.

Yeah.

So I had no car.

So I walked over to Paramount.

Yeah.

And they wouldn't let me on the lot because I didn't have a car.

Right.

Right.

They said, go get your car and we'll let you on.

I go, I don't.

Oh, that's it.

They tore it away.

They tore it away.

This is the meeting that's going to change your life.

And you're at the gate.

You can't get in.

That was in 85.

In 87,

the Fox Network started, and they hired me to work on the Tracy Allman Show.

But in 85, did you have the meeting?

Yeah, I had the meeting, but it didn't go anywhere.

Okay.

You know.

Who was it with?

James L.

Brooks.

So it was the first meeting with Brooks.

It was the first meeting with Brooks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it didn't go anywhere.

Well, I mean, you know, it took two more years, and then he had a new show, The Tracy Ellman Show.

And he remembered you?

Yes.

Well, that's something.

So it did go somewhere.

Yeah, exactly.

No, I remember

Jim Brooks.

And you did the interstitials.

Yes.

And first they went into this meeting and they said,

can you do two-minute cartoons every week?

And I said, oh, no, two minutes.

That's too short.

What can you do in two minutes?

And then I said, well, I'll try.

Oh, I've left out a part of the story.

They wanted the life and hell characters, but I found out that if I signed a deal, that I would lose control of the house.

They don't own the hook.

They don't know.

And so I made up The Simpsons in the waiting room to meet Jim Brooks.

At Paramount.

No, at Fox.

Oh, so the second meeting.

Yeah, the second meeting.

And yeah, The Simpsons was, and what did I do?

I drew humans.

I usually only draw animals.

Yeah.

And

my dad, my mom, you know, my dad.

Where did the inspiration for Bart come from?

It's a combination of my older brother, Mark, and me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Joe Vermilia, the guy Joe, the kid with the finger up his butt.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the way he looks,

you just came.

Well, that was based on

this idea that I had

that the most identifiable, the most memorable cartoon characters are cartoon characters you can identify in silhouette.

Yeah.

So if you look at the Simpsons, they're all identifiable in silhouette.

And in fact, that's all what I try to do.

Yeah.

I heard somewhere that, you know, you pulled from that picture by Diane Arvis.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

So there's a picture of Diane Arvis

of a kid.

I was just looking at that last week.

I sent it, I literally, I had no idea.

And I sent that picture to a photographer friend of mine to make sure she had seen it because I was going through that book, that first Diane Arvis book.

And that kid is so memorable.

It's a very skinny kid in Central Park wearing shorts and with one strap kind of down.

And he's holding a toy hand grenade.

Yeah.

And his hands are kind of...

And he's got that face.

He looks very agitated.

Okay, so I said in an interview that it was based on that, as kind of a goof,

and I got a letter from that kid.

Come on.

Yes.

Obviously, he was a grown-up.

And he wrote, he said, thank you.

That was me in that photo.

I grew up.

I became normal.

I'm a fine person.

And he goes, the reason why I was making that face, and I was so unhappy, is because I had just lost my G.I.

Joe doll.

And so that's why.

So

there's the rest of the story.

Isn't that something?

Yes.

But was it true that you had seen that and it was

a Diane Arbis person?

Of course.

The best, right?

Same as Crumb.

If you look at everybody with a Diane Arbis lens, it's a little sadder than Crumb, but there's a humanizing element there.

Do you know the photographer Vivian Meyer?

Of course.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

A nanny who took photos

in her spare time.

My late partner loved her, Lynn did.

And she had bought all the, I have the books.

She introduced me to her.

I studied a lot of photography.

It did have a profound impact on me.

Taking pictures became too complicated.

You don't take pictures?

Well, at the time when I was into it, it was before digital.

So if you wanted to take pictures and process them, there's a lot of math to it in a way.

Apertures and chemicals and papers and film speeds.

And it was too much for me.

Now I've been told I should just get a little

Laika and shoot.

You shoot?

My iPhone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, but learning about photography had a profound effect on me.

Photography is great.

That Richard Avedon book, The American West,

that's a killer.

Right.

But all those, Arbis is great.

Nan Golden, too.

Uh-huh.

I love her.

Right.

All right.

So you've got your Bart, you've got your family, you've doodled it, waiting to see Jim.

They say, I come in, they say, can you do two-minute cartoons for the Tracy Olden show?

And I'm thinking that's impossible.

But of course, I say yes.

And then they call me up and they say, by the way, it's not two minutes, it's one minute.

I go, oh, no.

And then they say, oh, by the way, it's not one minute, it's two 30-second cartoons.

So it's basically an animated single panel.

And then, yeah, and then they cut it even more.

They said it's four 15-second cartoons.

So the beginning of The Simpsons was all based on 15-second second little interceptions.

And they're like one exchange.

Yeah, well, yeah.

And I realized the only way to make people remember what they were seeing is if it had very, very heavy mayhem, slapstick, physical, you know, so that's why Homer Strangles Bart.

And what was the experience in working with moving pictures?

That was a blast.

Did they just set you up with an animator?

How did it work?

Well,

we went through the motions of contacting various animation studios, and it turns out that they chose the cheapest one.

Right.

And that was Klasky Chupo in Hollywood.

Yeah.

And they had,

they were struggling and they hooked me up with three animators.

David Silverman, he ended up creating the rules for how to draw the characters.

Okay.

You know, so I didn't know.

Like I would draw a bunch of spikes and David Silverman said, no, there are 10 spikes.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Was it always 10, even though you didn't know?

I didn't know.

Well, it is, I think it is now.

Yeah.

I don't count.

So that's interesting.

So he was the he created.

He made the rules.

So from that, you know, what's the next turn?

Auditioning.

So I was assigned Dan Castlaneta.

You said you have to work with Dan Castlaneta and you have to use Julie Kavner, who are who are

members of the cast of the Tracy Hillman Show.

And then so that only left two people to cast, and that was for Bart and for Lisa.

And I think we saw maybe 10 people total.

And Nancy Cartwright came in to audition for the part of Lisa, but she was Bart.

She became Bart.

And Yardley came in to audition for Bart, and she was Lisa.

Okay.

So that's it.

Yes.

And they've been fantastic ever since.

Forever.

Yes.

When did they say, like, we want to do a full show?

They would show, as the Tracy Ellman Show went on, they would show these little short cartoons to the audience at the Tracy Ellman Show while they were filming it on Friday nights, and they were a hit with all the people sitting in the bleachers.

And the Fox executives were there going, hmm, this is actually getting laughs.

And so they said, would you like to do a special?

And Jim Brooks and I said,

no, we want to do 13.

Yeah.

And they said, well, how about four?

Yeah.

And the reason we were opposed to doing just one is because if it was successful, it would be another year before we'd have another.

Oh, exactly.

But if we had 13, and they green lit the show without a pilot, yeah.

So there you go.

That was really.

And what was on Fox at the time?

That was before it was just starting to do programming, right?

Really?

Yeah, they were not in the entire country.

Yeah.

There was a lot of forgetful Beans Baxter, I think, was one that's okay.

Yeah.

They think of.

And then Married Chip with Children.

That was a huge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so

in the early

kind of developmental meetings about 13, did Brooks bring the sitcom sensibility to it?

Jim was brilliant from the very beginning.

And he basically said, okay, our mission is to make people forget they're watching a cartoon, to go for moments of real emotion.

We know it's going to be cartoony, but let's go for

moments of real, real emotion.

And I agreed with that.

I think that was a great idea.

So that's what our mission was.

So

the assignment was emotion.

You brought the fuck you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The underground snarly.

Right, right.

I mean, like, but like, were you a malcontent your whole life?

No.

No, I was like, I was, you know.

When you were a kid, did you get into trouble?

I did get into trouble.

But if there was another class clown in the room, I was fine.

Yeah.

But if there wasn't, then I had to take that.

You got to feel that I had to take that thing.

Did you do any other performing?

You know, yeah, you know, little things.

Oh, yeah.

Nothing that.

When I was in at the end of high school, my friends and I created a political party.

We ran for office.

What was the platform?

We were called the Teens for Decency.

Oh.

And our slogan was, if you're against decency, what are you for?

And because at the time, there was

a Christian group called Young Life who had just started at our high school, and they were going around telling all the Jewish kids they were going to hell.

So we created this parody group to make fun of them, and we all won.

Okay, that's good.

So, okay, so where did Simon come in?

Sam Simon was Sam

was

one of the writers and producers of the Tracy Ullman show, and he was the only one who had experience in animation.

He had worked on the Fat Albert animated show.

Yeah, I interviewed him, but he was sick.

Oh, you did?

Yeah.

Oh, I haven't heard that one.

Yeah, it was good.

I interviewed him when he was, you know,

he was incredible.

One of the funniest, smartest guys

I've ever met.

He and I butted heads eventually, but at the time.

About what?

partly because of the amount of attention that I was getting.

I think that really bugged him.

Because he was functioning as head writer?

He was the showrunner.

Yeah.

And he was great and he knew everybody

and brilliant.

And

I, but he and I used to be really good buddies.

We'd go to the Lakers together.

Yeah.

You know, and then.

It's an ego thing.

Yeah.

But he was also very cynical about the show.

So while we were doing the first 13 episodes, every day he'd say, 13 and out, 13 and out.

He was absolutely sure the show was going to fail.

And by the way,

his judgment was probably astute and correct.

The idea of it working was

unlikely.

Why?

Well, because there had never been an animated show in 25 years on in primetime.

Right.

And that everybody said this can't, you know, you can't have animation in prime time.

Yeah.

Except for Garfield specialist.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

But there, But I think one of the reasons why The Simpsons got on the air is because there were finally

TV executives who were young enough to have remembered the Flintstones and the Jetsons and Johnny Quest.

And so they said, oh, there can be animation at night.

Sure.

Yeah.

And were you aware that you wanted to cross lines

in pushy envelope?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Of course.

A little bit.

You know, I wanted to be friendly enough

that people would watch.

But I figured that kids would watch i knew that we called it an adult show because if you call it

kids to watch well we knew kids would watch yeah yeah no matter what it was yeah but if we called it a show for adults then we could get away with more with more wild jokes yeah but back at the very beginning um it was amazing how uptight even a network is as loose as fox was we had an ep a line i think it was in the first episode one of the early episodes in which homer says to marge hey marge uh tonight will you wear your blue thing with the things?

Yeah.

And they said, You can't say that.

We said, Well, what does it mean?

They couldn't say why.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so did it have to be cut?

No, it didn't.

Okay.

So we look, yeah.

So we got, there are hilarious sensor notes that we

did you keep them?

I have them, a file of them, and they make great jokes reading on stage.

Yeah.

Have you done that?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Bart cannot say, Bart cannot hold a shotgun shotgun up to the Easter bunny and say, in five minutes, either your eggs or

your brains are going to be in this basket.

Yeah.

He can't say that.

You can't say that.

Yeah.

He did.

How much did the lampoon have an effect on you?

Huge.

Huge.

Yeah.

When I was in high school,

National Lampoon started.

Yeah, that just reminded me of the dog cover.

Oh, yeah.

Buy this magazine,

yeah.

National Lampoon and Monty Python, I was only aware of in the form of record albums.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

But the lampoon, because I kind of got hip to that in high school too, and I was like, what is happening?

This is where it's at.

The lampoon was amazing.

And before the lampoon, though, of course, there was Mad.

Mad Magazine.

Sure.

Mad Magazine.

But even before that, Mad Comics by Harvey Kurtzman.

Sure.

Unbelievable.

Yeah, they were great.

Yeah.

Yep.

But like Mad Magazine, Al Jaffe.

Yep.

And Don Martin.

Right.

The best.

The best.

Eric.

His were really good.

Yeah, he was great.

Like, you know, he was dark.

He was good.

He was the best.

He's the best drawer in the business.

What was the name of the strip?

In Mad, he did these little these little things in the margins.

Yeah.

And then he did other stuff.

He actually did Simpsons comics at one point.

He did.

Yes.

Yeah.

Oh, you think he's the best, huh?

I think he's the top.

Yes.

Oh, wow.

As far as drawer.

Yeah.

Were you Al Jaffe guy?

Yep.

He visited The Simpsons.

Yes.

Yeah.

That was huge.

It was huge.

Yeah.

It was huge.

How did The Simpsons

become sort of a training ground for all these amazing comedy writers?

Again, was that Sam?

Yes,

Sam hired so many of them, you know, and he recognized talent, and Jim Brooks was encouraging of new talent.

And, you know, I don't know.

How did we get Conan O'Brien?

How do we get Greg Daniels?

How do we get all these guys?

Dana Gould.

Dana Gould.

John Schwartzwelder.

Yeah.

Just unbelievable.

Rob Cohen.

Yes.

Yes.

And David X.

Cohen, who went on to do Futurama with me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So many.

I actually thought, you know, I'm going to try to mention as many writers as I can.

It's going to be boring, but I'll mention their names.

And then I looked it up.

There's 142 Simpsons writers.

I think one of the reasons

is not unlike what's going on, I think, in horror films today,

is that it provided a space for them to

really take it out there.

Like, you know, when you have to have humans talking and you're confined to what's possible with humans on a sitcom, you're fundamentally limited.

No matter what you can do, even if it's an elaborate sitcom like Seinfeld, where you can change sets and you have all this money.

But with a cartoon, I mean, you can literally do anything with jokes.

So why wouldn't they want to do that?

I mean, it's like the best thing in the world for a writer.

Right.

No, it's amazing because, you know, if you actually filmed a Simpsons episode in live action and just depicted what we depict in animation form, you couldn't do it.

It would be impossible.

Hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So all these guys must have been living their best lives.

No, it's the greatest thing.

And also, very early on,

we realized that this was a forum for different comedy styles.

So there's all sorts of, there's puns and parodies and

do whatever.

We can break our own rules all the time.

Yeah.

All you got to add is a little self-consciousness to it.

Right.

Yeah.

That's interesting, right?

And it keeps going.

So in Futurama came when?

Around 2000.

And they're doing more of those now?

Yeah.

We're on our, in the middle of our next season, whatever.

And you're still actively engaged with all of it?

Well, you know, you can't be in more than one place at one time.

So I get to tell the people at The Simpsons I'm going to work at Futurama.

And then vice versa, and then I just go home.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

But Jesus, it's like

South Park is getting there as well.

But it just.

Hundreds of episodes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With South Park?

I think with South Park, certainly with Futurama and Simpsons is almost 800.

We're coming over 800.

800

episodes.

That's too many.

But you don't.

But it's not, what I like about it is it's not a ghost ship.

It's not, it's not, it's not.

I love The Office.

I love Seinfeld, but

there are no new ones.

There's no new ones.

There's no new ones.

Yeah, but sometimes they become zombie ships before they're over.

That's true.

That's true.

And sometimes you recover or the zombies come back.

That's what I'm going to stick to.

But how much do, I mean,

it becomes difficult for a group of writers to make sure that something hasn't been done before when there's 800.

Oh, my God.

It is impossible.

Yeah, yes, we do inadvertently.

repeat ourselves.

Yeah.

Yeah,

it's really hard.

And what do you do?

Are you

kind of tapped into what the audience is now?

Or is it just...

No.

As a parent, I am because I have all these little kids.

How many little kids you got?

Well,

I have a couple of adult children.

Yeah.

And then I have a 12-year-old.

I have two nine-year-olds and two seven-year-olds.

So I have two sets of twins.

That really kicks the number up.

And then I have a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a one-and-a-half-year-old.

How many total?

Ten.

Really?

Yeah.

With how many different women?

Two.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

So, and everybody gets along?

Do your cats get along?

Not right now.

No.

No, by the way.

Just one bad one.

One bad one.

I have my friend Colette who follows

the story of your cats

and is very proud that you're making a special home for Charlie.

Out here.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was going to give him to somebody else, but then I realized, like, well, I guess he could live out here.

My friend Colette wanted me to tell you that she has pigs.

She rescues pigs, and that's what she did with her pigs.

And so she thinks that you should treat your cats the way she treats her pigs.

Separate them.

Yeah.

All right.

Well,

I also have three cats.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

This one just went bad on me.

I don't know what the hell happened.

He was okay.

Right.

And then he just started beating up on the old guy.

And it's just like, there's no stopping it.

He's just beating up on this old cat.

He's not even that old.

He's nine, and Charlie's three.

And fucking the old guy's got nine.

He's got one kidney.

He's a sweet guy.

And Charlie just can't not think about beating the shit out of him.

it's really hard to herd cats it really no they're fucking monsters you know if you i got two two good ones one the one i thought was a moron turns out to be the best cat i have

i had these three cats yeah uh that were all rescues and one was a gray tabby named frosty and he uh and he

uh spent a lot of the time outdoors yeah and it turns out he was going over next door

and eating and eating other people's food and he grew enormous

Just really fat.

And then I got a call from the Purina Cat Chow Company and they said, do you have any cats?

We're doing a Purina Kat Chow celebrity calendar.

And I said, yes, I do.

And they came over with a photographer and I hid the other two normal-looking cats.

And

they didn't want to do it.

They had to have a consultation.

And so they did it.

And they posed them on the kitchen counter in front of a frame portrait of Bart, trying to hide his body.

Right.

It did not work.

And if you look at the calendar,

you see all these beautiful cats, and then you see mine, and everybody bursts out laughing.

And then the other thing was they asked me to write a little bit about my cat, and everybody else wrote, Mittens is more than a cat.

Mittens is my best friend.

Sure.

And I wrote, we try to keep Frosty on a diet, but it's really hard when he sleeps inside the cat food bag.

They wouldn't print that.

It's so funny that there's a beauty standard with cats, too.

Well, and then, okay, so, right, your cats are beautiful and wonderful, and they should be famous, right?

Well, I got a call a few months later saying, we saw your cat in the Purina Cat

calendar.

We'd like to use him as a model for an ad.

And I said, fantastic.

You know, it's about time, but yes.

And they said, well, before you say yes, we just want you to know it's an ad for diet cat food, and he's the before picture.

Did you let him use him?

Yep.

Of course.

You got to get the cats their star time.

Well, what's the big plan now?

What are you doing with your life?

I

spend most of my time trying to make sure that my kids know I'm there and take them to school every morning.

I line them up in front of the garage every morning and take their photo.

So I've got their entire lives

eight that are still.

I'm only taking six to school.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

How'd you get two pairs of twins?

The magic of

fertility drugs?

Yes.

Yes.

And they're a blast.

They're so much fun.

And they, you know, like, who wants to hear about other people's kids?

Well, you know, they're great.

I don't have any.

They're great.

Yeah.

They're great.

My three-year-old

went through a phase where he just was saying, why?

Why?

Why?

To everything,

any answer, he'd say, why?

Yeah.

And so finally, I learned to say, why not?

Oh, good.

And that stopped him.

Throw the wrench in.

Right.

Why not?

And he just like pondered that for a while.

And then later I said, why'd you throw your milk on the floor?

And he said, why not?

Well, it's great talking to you, Matt.

Thanks, man.

You feel good about it?

I do.

Thank you.

So, you're quitting.

Yeah.

So I did my life and health strip for 32 years.

Yeah.

And it was such a relief

to stop.

Yeah.

To not have that one extra deadline.

Yeah.

And you think, oh, I'm going to lose everything.

No, you give you, yeah.

And I just got to not be afraid of it.

No, don't be afraid.

It's going to be great.

You honestly, do it again.

Sure.

I'll take your word for it.

Yeah, I mean, I do not feel regret about it.

Right.

Thanks, man.

Thank you.

Wow, there you go.

Futurama season 13 is now on Hulu.

The Simpsons airs Sundays on Fox and streams on Hulu.

We're back on Thursday.

No guest.

I'll make up for what I didn't talk about today.

I think I'll feel a little better.

And now just, the guitar is just sort of like it's all

falling apart now.

Good timing.

Boomer lives, monkey and the fonda, cat angels everywhere.