A few years ago at the airport, Matt Groening was steered into the T.S.A. secondary screening line and told to remove the contents of his luggage. Then he heard a child’s laugh ring out, in the unmistakable taunting tones of the “Simpsons” bully Nelson Muntz: “Ha-ha.”
“I don’t know if it was just the kid acting like the character, or if the kid knew who I was and was really rubbing it in,” Groening said in a recent phone interview. Either way, the incident says something about Groening’s legacy and the ubiquity of his creation.
Thirty-nine years after a certain scraggily drawn cartoon family first appeared on television, as part of Fox’s “The Tracey Ullman Show,” “The Simpsons” is about to air its 800th episode on the network. (There have been some additional Disney+ exclusive episodes.) “Irrational Treasure” will premiere on Sunday, which also happens to be Groening’s 72nd birthday. In a recent conversation, Groening spoke about how the show has evolved, the Homers in his own life and why there is no end in sight for the series.
“I’m not going to be the guy that says it’s over,” he said.
This interview took place before recent reports noted similarities between a plot detail in a “Simpsons” episode from 2000 and Jeffrey Epstein’s island. On Friday a representative for Groening declined to comment about the episode and about Groening’s past contact with Epstein, revealed in court documents that were unsealed in 2019.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Why do you think “The Simpsons” has lasted so long?
I think of “The Simpsons” as a forum for different comedy styles. There are so many different kinds of jokes in the show. If the show had stayed consistent with my earliest vision, which was generally much more mild and not as crazy, I don’t know that it would still be on the air. We reinvent the show over and over again, and the writers and animators are trying to surprise themselves over and over again. That keeps it fresh.
What is your role these days?
Way too much of my time is spent doing custodial cleanup work. I look at the designs of backgrounds and characters and props and things like that to make sure they’re consistent. You would think that by this time, we must get it right every time. It’s amazing we still need to tweak things.
I take my credit seriously, but I can’t say enough how much “The Simpsons” is a collaborative effort. It really is the amazing output of a lot of people working as hard as they can to be as funny as they can.
What do you say to people who say “The Simpsons” peaked 30 years ago?
The thing about humor is anybody can say, “That’s not funny.” Everything isn’t for everybody. It’s been on an awfully long time. People who say, “The show hasn’t been good since Year X” — you’re not watching the show! In recent years, and I don’t know how the animators do it, we’ve been incredibly ambitious with our efforts not to repeat ourselves and surprise both us and the audience.
The show has been part of the culture for so long, it is easy to forget how bizarre the original character designs are.
I agree. Somebody wrote that the most memorable cartoon characters are the ones that you can identify in silhouette. No matter which way Mickey Mouse turns his head, his ears are distinct. That’s what I tried to do with Bart, Homer, Lisa, Maggie and Marge.
Bart probably has a place on the Mount Rushmore of cartoon characters next to Mickey. With Bugs Bunny and SpongeBob, perhaps.
That’s good company. I would shout out David Silverman, one of the original three animators on “The Simpsons,” who came up with the rules. When I would draw Bart, I would say, Oh, there are a lot of spikes on his head. But David actually counted them and made the rules of how many there should be. I think it’s 11. Or nine. [It’s nine.]
And Gyorgi Peluce’s colors.
Oh, yes. The amazing pioneer who looked at my black-and-white drawings and picked yellow. Which worked perfectly.
Were you ever taken aback by the phenomenal success of the show?
I was startled by how popular the show was all over the world. It is extremely popular in basically every English-speaking country, but it’s got probably even more intense devotion in Central and South America. I was in Buenos Aires several years back. There’s Simpsons graffiti all over the place, and I was recognized on the street. That was amazing.
We had a guest bedroom that I outfitted from top to bottom with “Simpsons” pillowcases and bedsheets and curtains and a million toys. The great thing about it was that guests would only stay one night and then find a reason to leave.
You rarely wrote for the show. Was there tension between you and the writers in the early years?
TV comedy writers in general, you’re staying up all hours and you’re forced to be funny. That’s a recipe for insanity. The long hours that are integral to animation, everyone just goes nuts. And then the sudden overwhelming success of the show also made some people a little crazy. Looking back on it, we were all a little nuts.
You wanted to do a live-action Krusty the Clown spinoff at one point. What happened there?
I thought it’d be conceptually hilarious to do a live-action spinoff of an animated show, with Dan Castellaneta in clown makeup. Fox said, “Does it have to be live action?” I said, “OK, let’s do it animated.” But we couldn’t make the deal. There haven’t been any spinoffs of “The Simpsons” in part because the original show has been so lucrative that no deal can be made. Too many people have dollar signs in their eyes.
You named your son Homer — after your father rather than the character. That must have resulted in some interesting conversations.
When my son was really small and I was wheeling him around in a stroller, people would say: “Oh, what a cute baby. What’s his name?” I’d say Homer. And then they would laugh.
I wanted to make it up to my father that I had named this idiot after him. My father was nothing like Homer. He was really smart and athletic, and he was a war hero. He was a B-17 pilot in World War II. He made surfing movies in the ’60s and cartoons and was a huge inspiration to me.
The only thing that bothered him about Homer Simpson was if he was ever mean to Marge. There was an episode in which their car broke down in the desert, and Homer made Marge carry the flat tire back to the town. He said, “Homer should not have done that.” And he was really serious.
That would be “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet,” from Season 5.
Oh, wow. I used to have every episode memorized, but now we’ve reached the stage where I can actually watch most of the episodes and be completely surprised. Every time we do a new episode, it squeezes an older episode out of my brain.
You do these drawings, they come alive, they move around, they say things. And not only do they move around and say things, but they do things that you didn’t write, that other people wrote. I feel like, Oh, this is what it’s like to be God and give people free will.
The show has now been on for more than half your life. Will it run forever?
About 15 years ago I was asked this question, and I said, “We’re probably closer to the end than the beginning.” And then headlines around the world were saying that “The Simpsons” was canceled. So I have learned to say there is no end in sight. We’re still having a good time.
One of the fun things about my projects is that they don’t seem to end. “The Simpsons” keeps going. “Futurama” has come and gone and come again. And who knows what’s coming? It’s always surprising.
What’s the next meaningful milestone for you?
I’m trying to figure out what my epitaph is going to be on my gravestone. There’s still that to come.
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