There is literally nothing you can’t do with Mr. He can have a cavernous basement under his mansion. A scene can open with him coming out of a hyperbaric chamber where he sleeps at night. Those three qualities are great, because they allow you to create anything. Burns was my favorite, because he had two qualities that are perfect if you’re a comedy writer and want to have fun: he’s infinitely old, and he has unlimited wealth. Much has been made of the acrimony between Matt Groening and Sam Simon during those early years. Imagine a Ford Taurus creeping around a completely empty Fox lot and John Vitti and I looking for scenes where they had shot episodes of Batman. Once we took my Ford Taurus for a spin around the Fox lot. I think I still have that pool cue somewhere, in a closet or a basement. I remember moments where Jeff and I were doing it, and there was a circle of people around us watching, and it got very intense. And other people in the room would watch sometimes. It got to the point where Jeff had the record for 45 flips in one minute, but then there was the time I broke it and got to 46 we were elated. We developed all these complicated rules involving how far your wrists had to be apart, and so forth, and we took it really seriously. Jeff Martin and I developed a whole game around unscrewing it, flipping both handles in opposite hands, and screwing it back together, and how many times could we do that in a one-minute period. There were two pieces that screwed together with a brass fitting, and then unscrewed. I look back at a few periods and realize, “Gee, I think I lost my mind a little bit during certain stretches.” I used to walk around the Fox lot, and I found two pieces of a broken pool cue in an alley. It can happen.”ĭo any stories from those early days at The Simpsons stick out? It was a bit of an “Aha!” moment when I got to The Simpsons: “Oh, right! If you think of it and it makes everybody laugh, someone can make it. Burns’s basement, or a monorail system snaking through the town of Springfield, it could happen. If you had a strange idea for something in Mr. When I came to The Simpsons, I found myself in an animated world, and people could create whatever you could think up. cartoons and silly physical humor-the Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies and things like that. Words are important, but I always thought there was an element of things you do on the show that might be funny even if you had the sound off. I realized later that it was always important to me on Late Night that things look funny. Even my written pieces, there’s a cartoonish element to them. When I was on the Lampoon, I drew a lot of cartoons. I’ve always had a very visual sense of humor. What from your experiences at The Harvard Lampoon and S.N.L.
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