As good a place as any to start . . .
Since season one, January 1990, each Simpsons episode begins with a joke that is missed by tens of millions of fans in hundreds of millions of viewings. When the Simpsons title card emerges from the clouds, you see the first half of the family’s name, “The Simps,” before the rest of the word. So what? Well, “Simps,” is short for simpletons—stupid people—like the ones you’re about to see in the show. If you never caught this, don’t feel bad; most of our current staff didn’t know it, either.
(Other jokes you may have missed in life: Toy Story is a pun on “toy store;” the comedy Legally Blonde is a play on that hilarious term “legally blind”; and there’s a 31 hidden in the BR logo of Baskin-Robbins, referring to their “31 flavors” slogan. You’ve already learned four things, and this is just page 1!)
At The Simpsons, we put as many jokes in our opening credits as some sitcoms put into an entire episode (or all eight seasons of Home Improvement). Our credits always open with a new “chalkboard gag,” where Bart writes a phrase repeatedly on the school blackboard, such as “NERVE GAS IS NOT A TOY.” And they always close with our “couch gag,” where the Simpsons pile onto the sofa and something surprising happens (e.g., the couch eats them). When the show went to hi-def in 2009, we added more gags: a “fly-by” (some Simpsons character zooms past the title in a weird contraption) and a video billboard. Lisa’s sax solo in the theme also changes from week to week; lately, it hasn’t always been a sax—we’ve also had her play the harp and theremin.
This whole idea for ever-changing credits came from an unlikely source: the 1950s’ Mickey Mouse Club. Its opening credits always ended with Donald Duck hitting a gong, and something catastrophic happening: the gong would explode, or Donald would vibrate uncontrollably . . . there were many variations, but they all ended with a duck getting maimed.
Our first chalkboard gag was simple and self-referential: “I WILL NOT WASTE CHALK.” Great joke. But it went downhill fast from there: two episodes later the phrase became “I WILL NOT BURP IN CLASS.” While there have been plenty of good ones (“BEANS ARE NEITHER FRUIT NOR MUSICAL”), these gags are very hard to write because anything longer than ten words goes by too fast to read. Furthermore, when we drop them from the opening credits, which we do more and more, nobody complains. In fact, sixteen years ago we already had Bart writing on the chalkboard “NOBODY READS THESE ANYMORE.”
The couch gags are a lot more fun . . . but a lot more work. We used to repeat every joke once a year, doing eleven couch gags for our twenty-two-episode season. But we quickly learned that if people saw an old couch gag, they thought the whole show was a repeat and tuned out. Now, virtually every episode gets its own couch gag.
Generally, our credit jokes are written at the end of the day. If it looks like work might wrap early, say five thirty P.M., and there’s a chance the writers might get home to a hot dinner and nonsleeping children, the boss will tell us to come up with couch gags and chalkboards.
Our couch gags have parodied other shows’ opening credits: The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones, and Breaking Bad. One time the Simpsons were crushed by the giant foot from the opening credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Showrunner David Mirkin made sure we used the exact foot Python used: it’s from The Allegory of Venus and Cupid by Agnolo Bronzino.
A few couch jokes are mini epics. In just seventy seconds, we recapped all of human history, starting with an amoeba that evolves into an ape, then a caveman, then devolves slightly to Homer Simpson. We condensed the Lord of the Rings trilogy to a minute thirty-nine.
Sometimes we don’t even have to do the work, because guest artists do it for us! This has given us a chance to work with animators we admire, like Bill Plympton, Don Hertzfeldt, and the teams from Robot Chicken and Rick and Morty. Guillermo del Toro did a three-minute spectacular that referenced every horror movie ever made, and it’s simply amazing.
And then there was notoriously reclusive artist Banksy. Al Jean approached him (her? it? them?) through the producer of the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. Banksy did a hilariously Orwellian depiction of the Korean animation house where our show is made: in the sequence, Simpsons DVDs are pierced on the horn of a starving unicorn to make the center hole, then packed in boxes sealed with a dead dolphin’s tongue; live white squirrels are fed into a shredder to make stuffing for Bart dolls, then loaded into a cart pulled by a sickly panda. We loved it; our Korean animators did not. (I was the first Simpsons writer to visit our animation house in Seoul; the workers, mostly women, have nicer, sunnier offices than our writers do; and most of them were watching Korean soap operas on their cell phones as they did their jobs.)
My all-time favorite couch gag was the one that aired the night our show beat The Flintstones as the longest-running prime-time animated show in history. The Simpsons run into the living room, where they find the Flintstones already sitting on the couch. That show’s producers, Hanna-Barbera, asked that the Flintstones be paid as guest cast—and they were! Fred, Wilma, and Pebbles split four hundred bucks.