The way to become famous fast is to throw a brick at someone who is famous.
—WALTER WINCHELL
I believe that famous people have a debt to everyone. If celebrities didn’t want people pawing through their garbage and saying they’re gay, they shouldn’t have tried to express themselves creatively.
—HOMER SIMPSON, EPISODE 5F19
(“When You Dish upon a Star”)
IMAGINE THE SCENE AT 10 DOWNING STREET, LONDON. It was April 11, 2003, two days after the fall of Baghdad. The media was filled with stories of the ongoing war, of gun battles in Kirkuk and Tikrit, of an anxious Britain torn in two over the presence of its soldiers on Iraqi soil. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s own government was no less divided. Blair had lost a cabinet minister over his decision to go to war. Even as statues of Saddam Hussein were toppling into the Baghdad streets, there was talk in Britain of pyrrhic victories and encroaching quagmires. Rumours and allegations and angry words were raining in on Downing Street from all sides. Yet in the midst of this maelstrom, Blair made time to welcome a VIP from Britain’s closest ally, the United States. In April 2003, in the middle of a war, Tony Blair spoke with Homer Simpson and his family.
In another, more accurate way, Tony Blair took the time on that tense April day to record a guest appearance for a Season 15 episode of The Simpsons. In the episode, the Simpson family travels to England to find Grampa’s wartime girlfriend, and Blair is there at Heathrow Airport to greet them as they come out of the gate:
BLAIR: Hello. Welcome to the United Kingdom.
LISA: Prime Minister Tony Blair!
BART: Why are you greeting lowlifes like us at the airport?
BLAIR: Because I want to encourage all the world to come see the beauty of twenty-first-century Britain.
HOMER: [decked out in tropical shirt and shorts] Would an American dollar encourage you to leave us alone?
BLAIR: [snatches dollar and pockets it] No. But thank you.
MARGE: Tony—I mean, Mr. Prime Minister—what should we see first?
BLAIR: There’s so much to see here. Parliament, Stratford-on-Avon, the White Cliffs of Dover. Oh, and you Americans love castles—there’s a huge one in Edinburgh, the city where I was born.
HOMER: The place I was born is now a gator farm.
BLAIR: Smashing.
LISA: Maybe you could give us a personal tour of your country.
BLAIR: I’d love to, but I’m late for an appointment. I’m greeting a lovely Dutch couple at Gate 23. [straps on jet pack and flies off, calling:] Cheerio!
HOMER: Wow! I can’t believe we met Mr. Bean!
With this short meeting, Tony Blair became the first head of state to appear as himself on The Simpsons, beating out an illustrious list of world leaders—Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy among them—who have visited Springfield only in caricature, their voices provided by Simpsons cast members. Many had been asked to do their own voices, including George W. Bush (who flatly declined the offer) and his 2000 election opponent, former vice-president Al Gore. Gore turned down a guest spot on The Simpsons when he was merely Clinton’s VP, but he reconsidered during the 2000 election campaign. His aides approached the show’s producers of their own volition to plead for a guest spot—presumably to inject their candidate with a much-needed jolt of self-deprecating cool. “As far as I was concerned,” Simpsons producer Mike Scully later told London’s Times, “he’d had his chance.” Gore was turned down.
Tony Blair, though, knew better than to pass up such a golden opportunity. A self-professed “Simpsons addict” who watched the show regularly with his kids, Blair was well aware that his guest spot on The Simpsons meant, as The Economist noted, that he was being inducted into “the grandest of American halls of fame.” Blair offered a similar (if more personal) explanation to Simpsons producer Al Jean on the question of why he agreed to become a cartoon character. “I just want to do one thing that will impress my kids,” said Blair. This, for a real-world celebrity, is the promise contained in a visit to Springfield: The Simpsons confers status and authenticity upon its guests, and sends a clear message to the show’s predominantly youthful fans that these guests are their kinda guys. Even for a leader of the free world, it’s an unparalleled opportunity to impress the kids.
Homer Simpson—perhaps more resigned than Blair to the notion that he’ll never really impress his kids—has deigned only once to submit to the equivalent torture of a visit to our world, in “Homer,” the third chapter of the show’s Season 7 Halloween special (Episode 3F04, “Treehouse of Horror VI”). Trying to find a hiding place to ride out a visit from his hated sisters-in-law, Homer stumbles upon a dimensional portal behind the living-room bookcase. He steps through it to find himself in an inter-zone of green grids, bouncing geometric shapes and flying equations in which he’s been transformed into lumpy 3-D.
For the show, if not for Homer, this step into 3-D animation was an event as unique and significant as Tony Blair’s appearance. The animation of the segment, which the pioneering computer graphics (CG) animation firm Pacific Data Images took three and a half months to produce, was the first-ever use of CG in prime time. It also marked the only segment in the show’s history produced by CG and the only time Simpsons characters ever appeared as fully rounded three-dimensional beings. In short, a lot went into bringing Homer to our earth.
As far as Homer’s concerned, though, those CG eggheads can cram it with walnuts. The shock of his protruding stomach and ass as he gets his first look at his 3-D self is bad enough, but then a bouncing cone goes and lodges itself in his newly bulgy butt. Homer extracts it and tosses it away, and when it hits the gridded surface of the dimension, it begins to carve out a fast-deepening chasm. Bart is sent into the dimension to save Homer, but the grid collapses too quickly. (Bart, back in the Simpsons living room, explains: “We hit a little snag when the universe sort of collapsed on itself. But Dad seemed cautiously optimistic”) Cut to a back alley—a real, live American back alley—into which 3-D Homer, screaming, plummets from the sky, landing with a crash in a dumpster. He climbs out, takes his first glimpse of our planet and passes judgement: “Ewww … this is the worst place yet.” He walks out onto a dingy city street—Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles. As startled Angelenos scoot out of his path and shoot him odd looks, Homer walks on down the street, taking tiny, uneasy steps and whimpering with each one. He recoils with each new horror he encounters, his arms curling up against his chest protectively. He’s terrified. He wants out. He spots an inviting store, reads the sign: “Ooh, erotic cakes!” In he goes, escaping from the unspeakable horror of an L.A. street. And so ends his adventure in real-life America.
He never makes it to Hollywood.
The symbolism here is almost certainly unintentional. Still, even though Homer’s in the L.A. area, he makes no effort to reach the celebrity factory. From then on—as before—the rich and famous can come to The Simpsons, or they too can cram it with walnuts. As with Homer, so with the show: The Simpsons does not court celebrity. If celebrities want to, they can make their way onto The Simpsons. And when they get there, they will abide by the show’s physics, its rules, its logic. The show is bigger than any single one of them, whether they be British prime ministers or A-list movie stars or world-renowned scientists. This is the bedrock of The Simpsons’ relationship with celebrity and of its critique of same. And this is the lesson of this little two-part fable about Tony Blair’s wartime summit with Homer and Homer’s brief foray into the universe Blair inhabits: Tony can take a break from the war to entertain the Simpson family, but The Simpsons as a show will not abandon its own agenda to honour Tony’s real-world status. Or anyone else’s.
It’s not that The Simpsons dismisses celebrity out of hand. Quite the contrary: celebrities have been a part of The Simpsons universe from the earliest episodes. They appear sometimes as themselves, sometimes as characters unique to Springfield. And there are also a handful of celebrities born and bred in the show’s world, homegrown entertainers with massive followings and even bigger egos. Celebrities are often central to the plots of the episodes in which they appear, and it’s quite possible that the other characters on the show will treat them with the quasi-religious hero worship typical of the cult of celebrity in contemporary Western society. What’s more—as Blair’s appearance attests—becoming a guest star on The Simpsons has in recent years supplanted the guest-hosting gig on Saturday Night Live as the hippest TV appearance available to the modern celebrity.
The difference, however, is in how the show treats these celebrities. The people of Springfield may or may not bow in reverent deference to a given celebrity, but said celebrity will at any rate be used as the show, not the celebrity’s publicist, sees fit. Celebrities have been required, for as long as the show has existed, to surrender control of their appearance—what they say, how they’re animated, how they’re portrayed—to the show’s producers. If they appear as themselves, they’ll almost certainly be mocked mercilessly, and if they appear as someone else, it’ll be a supporting role—the Simpsons themselves are always the stars. A Beatle-sized legend like Paul McCartney might have only a few lines in the third act, while a character actor like James Woods becomes central to the plot of the episode he appears in. Fringe-dwelling art-rock band Sonic Youth spend considerable time on tour with Homer in their Simpsons appearance, while intergalactic pop stars U2 serve primarily as background detail in a couple of scenes. Second-tier Saturday Night Live alumnae (Phil Hartman and Jon Lovitz) and B-list movie actors (particularly Albert Brooks and Joe Mantegna) have created beloved characters; meanwhile, the characters contributed by some of the most celebrated Hollywood stars of our time (including Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, Kirk Douglas and Elizabeth Taylor, to name only a handful of the most prominent) have been comparatively forgettable. On The Simpsons, in other words, the usually immutable laws of celebrity—that the biggest stars get the biggest and best parts, that leading men and ladies are infallible and heroic in any and all endeavours, that the world in general treats top-tier celebrities like a separate and superior species—do not apply.
I’m guessing I don’t need to elaborate too much on the pervasiveness of the cult of celebrity in the West, nor the fact that it was, as the U.K.’s New Statesman put it, “the growth industry of the ’90s.” But quickly: Entertainment Tonight, a daily news program about celebrity culture, has been on the air for more than twenty years, and it is merely the highest-rated of the half-dozen daily celebrity-news broadcasts on North American TV. There is an entire magazine—In Style—dedicated to showing us what kinds of things celebrities own. Britain’s three most prominent glossy weekly celebrity-news magazines—Hello!, OK! and Now—together sell more than 1.3 million copies each week. You, me—practically all of us—carry with us storehouses of knowledge about the lives of celebrities, stuff we maybe can’t remember the source of and likely as not didn’t seek out, but there it is anyway. For example, off the top of my head: Brad Pitt has a deep passion for architecture and design. Demi Moore and Bruce Willis had three children together, and those children were given the unique names Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle.1 (Before he became an actor, incidentally, Willis was a bartender at a New York tavern frequented by showbiz heavyweights.) Nicolas Cage owns a Lamborghini that used to belong to the shah of Iran. Sandra Bullock is allergic to horses. And I need only to turn on my TV or surf over to the internet Movie Database or pick up today’s newspaper to add a fresh load of trivia to the pile.
Even when the celebrity in question is actually talented and truly accomplished, and even when the worship of this celebrity is intelligent and artful—even then, there is something perversely exaggerated about the modern relationship with celebrity. Here, for example, is an excerpt from Mike Sager’s erudite profile of the gifted actor Robert De Niro in the August 1997 issue of Esquire magazine:
Celebrities give us faith that there’s something more to life than mere existence, something more than work, family, grind. They give us faith that a kind of heaven exists right here on earth and that some of us might actually attain it. They may not be holy, but neither are they ghosts. Push a button and there they are—playing celebrity softball, attending a star-studded opening, pulling a gun on a perp, taking a gratuitous bubble bath with a costar, dropping the soap. Because we can’t know God, in other words, we need Robert De Niro.
Sager’s not exaggerating, as far as I can tell. He’s reporting. After all, which holy scripture is more instantly familiar to you, and more resonant: Psalm 23 or Travis Bickle in front of the mirror asking, “You talkin’ to me?” And how many of us would cite Ezekiel 25:17 as the only passage of the Bible we know by heart, by virtue of the fact that it’s the one that Samuel L. Jackson so bad-assedly intones in Pulp Fiction?
This, then, is the landscape against which The Simpsons treatment of its guest stars distinguishes itself. Ours is a world in which celebrity has come to refer to a separate Olympian peak upon which the deities from all walks of life—sports, politics, business and crime as well as entertainment—meet and interact and give meaning to the lives of the rest of us, the great uncelebrated masses. Celebrity is no longer a state attained through unique achievement but a kind of person, a tribe to whose ranks we all presumably dream of being elected. If not quite everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes, everyone at least wants to be, because to be famous—to become a celebrity—is now the presumed goal of any human endeavour. Against this backdrop, The Simpsons performs a tricky, paradoxical feat: it mocks and deflates individual celebrities and relentlessly attacks the cult of celebrity itself, even while it serves as a significant participant in that cult, a central vehicle for bestowing special honour upon chosen celebrities.
This is a conflicted and contradictory relationship. And you can see its paradoxes at work in the unique celebrity enjoyed by the members of the show’s own creative team.
Episode BABF19 of The Simpsons (“Behind the Laughter”) is an extended parody of the overwrought VH1 documentary series Behind the Music, complete with candid interviews with the show’s “stars” (Homer, Bart, et al.), melodramatic recountings of drug abuse and backstage squabbling and a chronicle of the Simpsons’ fast-lane off-screen lives. “I want to set the record straight,” Homer says in one interview clip, in the deliberate cadence of a repentant Hollywood star. “I thought … the cop … was a prostitute.” We’re left to imagine the scandal that occasioned this mea culpa, the headlines splattered across the covers of tabloids, the daily coverage of the trial on Court TV, the redemptive tell-all interviews with Larry King and/or Barbara Walters.2 The entirety of BABF19 is an exercise in sustained irony: although the show’s characters may be among the most recognized icons of our time, no one’s ever caught a glimpse of them knocking back martinis at the Viper Room or chatting up their new projects with Jay Leno. Successful as the show is, its stars—not just the cartoon characters themselves but its flesh-and-blood creators—are not part of the cult of celebrity. Not one of the actors who produce some of the world’s most recognized and beloved voices is a household name, and none of the show’s principal producers and writers have ever been mobbed at a movie premiere.
The incongruity is startling: in a recent British poll, 74 percent of respondents properly identified a picture of Homer Simpson; I’m sure (though there was no comparable poll) that fewer than 1 percent could identify a picture of Dan Castellaneta. Same goes for the middle-aged women, Nancy Cartwright and Yeardley Smith, who provide the voices of the Simpson children.3 The show’s two most prolific voice actors, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer, might be recognized on the street for their live-action work—Azaria, for example, was the Latino house boy in The Bird Cage, and Shearer played mutton-chopped bassist Derek Smalls in This Is Spinal Tap—but few celebrity worshippers would connect them to the busloads of minor characters they’ve breathed life into on The Simpsons.
This state of affairs is partially deliberate. Until fairly recently, the show’s actors have avoided public appearances in which they use their famous voices. “I think it destroys the illusion,” Julie Kavner once said. “People feel these are real people.” In other words, the audience has come to think of the Simpsons characters themselves as the actors in the show, an effect that would be ruined if Kavner and her co-stars were famous figures in their own right. When we watch Marge, our vision isn’t clouded by a competing image of Julie Kavner. We just see Marge. It’s a powerful effect, akin to the way soap opera fans think of actors on those series as indistinguishable from their characters (and have been known to chastise the actors in public for their characters’ behaviour). In the case of The Simpsons, this phenomenon enhances the immersive aspect of the show. Your average mega-hit sitcom’s viewer brings to the tube a wealth of information about the cast that can get in the way of suspended disbelief—we see Cheers’ Sam Malone, for example, and maybe are reminded of Ted Danson’s scandalous blackface routine at his former flame Whoopi Goldberg’s Friar’s Club roast, rather than just seeing a retired baseball player named Sam who owns a Boston bar. When we watch The Simpsons, though, there’s no gossip-column white noise. That man there on the screen is Homer Simpson. He is only Homer Simpson. He casts no real-world shadow.
The show’s fans, however, are not above hero worship: rare live read-throughs of Simpsons scripts by the show’s cast were the undisputed highlights of both the 2000 Edinburgh International Festival and the 2002 Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. And the cast’s appearance on the popular PBS series Inside the Actors Studio in 2003 generated far more interest than any of the series’ regular guests (a who’s who of Hollywood) ever has. But the excitement around these events is the inverse of the hysteria around a movie star’s public appearance. The thrill for us is not in finally seeing in the flesh someone we’ve seen so often on-screen, but in seeing real flesh-and-blood people—and strangers at that—speak in such instantly recognizable voices. If you have occasion to meet a Hollywood star, what you’ll probably notice is a giddy sense of surreality, a feeling that you can’t possibly be in the physical presence of someone so famous.4 But when you see The Simpsons’ voice actors speaking in character—in person or onscreen—what amazes you is that they are these characters. How can this real, live person be Mr. Burns? How can this one guy—Harry Shearer, that is—be both Burns and Smithers (and Principal Skinner and Kent Brockman and Ned Flanders)? It’s like a magic trick.
The Simpsons’ celebrated writing staff has been similarly wary of the spotlight. They’ve given interviews only occasionally, and profiles are rarer still. Indeed the show’s most prolific writer, John Swartzwelder, is reputed to be a recluse. Near as I can tell, there are no existing profiles or photos of Swartzwelder—nor even a single quote—in the public domain. And even the most visible of the show’s creators, Matt Groening, is far from a famous face, despite the dozens of in-depth interviews and profiles he’s submitted to—many more than any other Simpsons creator. Groening’s not even a famous name: in almost every one of these articles, the author feels obliged to clarify the pronunciation of his last name. (It rhymes with “raining” and “complaining.”)
The anonymity of the show’s creators has had a single powerful effect: the focus of the media and (most of) the fans has remained on the show itself. Admittedly, there have been occasional eruptions of low-intensity media attention on backstage tiffs (co-creators Groening and Sam Simon once quarrelled in the press about the show’s evolution) and on contractual tangles (Maggie Roswell, the voice of Maude Flanders, once held out for a higher salary and found herself out of a job; this may or may not have been the motivation for killing off her character in Season 11). For the most part, though, The Simpsons creative team has managed to achieve the goal of many a reluctantly famous artist: it has kept the attention of its fans and critics almost solely on the work.
And in that work lies a second device—this one built-in—that distances the show from the celebrity world. Which is this: cartoon characters cannot become off-screen celebrities. It’s an impossibility. (Among other things, it would be a terrible strain on the animators’ wrists to try to conduct live public appearances.) This fact is, of course, the wellspring of the deep irony of Episode BABF19. There is no “-behind-the-laughter” drama to be documented.5
Even better, the (reasonably) good judgement of the show’s producers and the labour-intensive exigencies of animation have meant that even though the Simpsons have endorsed the odd product—Butterfinger chocolate bars, most notably—they haven’t been media-blitzed into serious overexposure. We will not get sick of seeing them hawking crap on every other TV channel, nor of reading about their on-again, off-again romances with J.Lo or their painful struggles with alcoholism. We’ll never know anything about their lavish estates in the Hollywood Hills. When we see The Simpsons, it’s where we want to see them: on TV, on their show, amusing the hell out of us.
And it is only there, on the show, that we’ll see them cavorting with Hollywood’s A-list.
The first celebrity sighting on The Simpsons sets the tone for the dozens to follow. It’s a single line of dialogue. Blink and you miss it. Season 2, Episode 7F05 (“Dancin’ Homer”): Homer, who has found a new vocation as “Dancin’ Homer,” a baby-elephant-walking baseball-team mascot, lands a job as the understudy to the king of mascots, the Capital City Goofball. As the Simpsons drive into the metropolis, pointing out Capital City’s many sights—the Cross-Town Bridge, the Penny Loafer restaurant, street crime—their slack-jawed touristing is set to a Sinatra-esque soundtrack. “It’s the kind of place that makes a bum feel like a king,” an unseen singer croons. “And it makes a king feel like some nutty, cuckoo super-king.” Suddenly, there he is out the window—the singer himself. “Look!” Marge exclaims, “It’s Tony Bennett!” A tuxedoed Bennett, complete with requisite Simpsonian yellow skin and overbite, replies, “Hey, good to see you.” And then he returns to his ode to his home sweet swingin’ home. And just like that, the first appearance of a real-world celebrity as himself on The Simpsons is over.
Many of the celebrity guest spots on The Simpsons would continue in this vein over the next few seasons: brief appearances, often without fanfare, to add just a little colour. Talk-show host Larry King narrates a books-on-tape version of the Bible—only his voice is used. Deep-voiced soul singer Barry White appears on the podium at the launch of Whacking Day—introduced by Mayor “Diamond Joe” Quimby as “Larry” White—and later sings one of his tunes (“Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe”) to lure Springfield’s snakes to safety. James Brown is an honoured guest at the town’s inaugural “Do What You Feel” Festival, energizing the crowd with a rendition of his signature song, “I Got You (I Feel Good),” until the sloppily constructed bandstand behind him collapses. (This occasions the Godfather of Soul’s only lines of dialogue, delivered in an over-the-top version of his patented soul-brother staccato: “Hey, wait a minute! Hold on here! This bandstand wasn’t double-bolted!”) There’s a pointedly mundane quality to these Simpsons guest spots, a kind of implicit “So what?” directed at the celebrities. Certainly it’s well worth mining James Brown’s singular voice and long-standing reputation for reckless living for a line of ironic dialogue, but neither characters nor plot point giddily at the Godfather, or anyone else, to indicate the enormity of their fame.
There are two particularly celebrity-packed episodes—one each from Seasons 3 and 4—that illustrate the show’s deft use of the rich and famous for its own purposes, and its adroitness in avoiding enslavement at the hands of same. The first of these is Episode 8F13 (“Homer at the Bat”), in which Mr. Burns stacks his company softball team with nine of professional baseball’s biggest superstars: Wade Boggs, Darryl Strawberry, Jose Canseco, Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, Ozzie Smith, Mike Scioscia, Steve Sax and Ken Griffey Jr. (All of the players supplied their own voices for the episode.)6 Homer and his co-workers are duly impressed, though Homer, who had until then been the softball team’s star, is disappointed that Darryl Strawberry will be taking his position in the starting lineup. But the episode never becomes a vehicle for celebrating this impressive gathering of baseball talent. Quite the contrary: the famous ballplayers are slaves to the show’s various needs. Some serve as straight men for a non-stop string of gags that lampoon the players themselves: Strawberry, as well known for his bad behaviour and lengthy criminal record as for his bat, is portrayed as an ass-kissing coach’s dream, and the notorious glory-hog Jose Canseco is an overeager good Samaritan. Others are props in absurdist gags: Ken Griffey Jr. falls victim to gigantism, his head swelling up to the size of a beach ball after he drinks Mr. Burns’s nerve tonic; Ozzie Smith tumbles into another dimension at Springfield’s “Mystery Spot” tourist trap; Steve Sax finds the honest work at the power plant a welcome relief from the pressures of big-time baseball. And only Strawberry actually plays in the climactic softball game, in an explicit defiance of expectations that has become a recurring device in Simpsons celebrity appearances.
Episode 9F19 (“Krusty Gets Kancelled”) marks an even more impressive balancing act between star power and the show’s integrity. When Gabbo the wise-cracking ventriloquist’s dummy pushes Krusty the Clown off the air,7 Springfield’s favourite clown is reduced to begging on the street until Bart and Lisa come along to plan his comeback special. The TV special’s guest list—and thus the episode’s roster of guest voices—would turn a talk show’s booker enviously green: Hugh Hefner, Bette Midler, Elizabeth Taylor, Luke Perry, all four members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Johnny Carson (the only guest spot he’s made on a TV series and one of his few public appearances anywhere since he retired from The Tonight Show). When it first aired in 1992, this episode was easily the most star-studded in the show’s history, a sort of coming-out party for this new celebrity institution.
And yet despite Hef and Johnny and the rest, 9F19 keeps its focus on the show’s cast. Krusty’s Komeback Special is first and foremost about Krusty. Midler comes out to serenade Krusty with “Wind Beneath My Wings” (a reference to her performance of “One for My Baby” on Johnny Carson’s gala finale), but Krusty soon joins in and upstages her with his gravelly, tuneless harmonizing. Luke Perry, as previously noted, is employed as a prop in an elaborate sight gag. Carson—the King of Late Night himself—is reduced to vaudevillian sideshow antics, coming onstage to juggle a 1987 Buick Skylark while singing opera and telling nary a joke. In the end, it seems only natural that superstar Krusty would have such superstar friends, only fitting that the post-broadcast party at Moe’s Tavern would culminate with Bart’s toast to the evening’s biggest star: Krusty. “To Krusty,” Bart announces, “The greatest entertainer in the world.” Beat. “Except for that guy.” Cut to Johnny Carson, balancing a bench on his head upon which sit Grampa Simpson and his pal Jasper, who play chess as Carson tap dances and plays “Good Night, Ladies” on the accordion. And then Carson segues into The Simpsons theme.
This relentless schticking is merely a mild jab at Carson’s unwavering professionalism, but it hints at the savage satire of celebrity employed in other episodes. In many cases, The Simpsons goes much further, standing as prime-time TV’s foremost practitioner of an art that’s best summarized by the excellent British phrase “taking the piss.”
Look no further than another Season 4 episode—9F10 (“Marge vs. the Monorail”)—for a prime example of Simpsonian celebrity piss-taking. The grand marshal for the monorail’s inaugural run is the target of the piss-take: Leonard Nimoy, better known as Spock on the original Star Trek. “I’d say this vessel could do at least warp five,” says Nimoy, all Spock-like, to appreciative laughter from the gathered crowd. Mayor Quimby, confused as usual about the identity of his guest of honour, replies, “And let me say, ‘May the force be with you!’”
“Do you even know who I am?” an irritated Nimoy responds.
“I think I do,” says Quimby. “Aren’t you one of the Little Rascals?”
When Nimoy climbs aboard the monorail, the abuse (which, given that he does his own voice in the episode, is actually a kind of self-abuse) gets nastier. In the train’s luxurious lounge, Nimoy tries to regale a passenger with a drawn-out anecdote about how the special effect of the automatic doors on the starship Enterprise was created. But Nimoy’s neighbour is utterly unregaled, and replies with annoyed, sarcastic half-interest. Later, Nimoy sits contentedly in a passenger seat, gazing out the window at an impending solar eclipse. In the sombre, mythopoetic tones he used as host of the 1970s documentary series In Search Of, Nimoy announces, “A solar eclipse. The cosmic ballet continues.” The man sitting next to him looks desperately around the train. “Does anybody want to switch seats?” he pleads. In Springfield, at least on this day, it’s the celebrities who intrude annoyingly, while the average Joes fight desperately to escape the conversation. And they’re right: Nimoy’s banter is banal, his anecdotes boring, his overwrought observations irritating as hell. No one, frankly, should be paying much attention to this guy.
This point is made more emphatically in Episode 8F11 (“Radio Bart”), as Krusty the Clown works to organize a charity recording for Timmy, a little boy stuck in a well in Springfield whose plight has become a cause célèbre. (In actuality, “Timmy” is Bart, who has dropped a radio down the well and is using a toy microphone to play the part of the trapped boy.) Krusty’s musical tribute—“We’re Sending Our Love Down the Well,” a ridiculously schmaltzy hymn in the “We Are the World” vein—attracts a star-studded roster of contributors, including Sting (voicing himself). And of course Channel 6’s Kent Brockman is on the scene, pressing Krusty to tell the tale of how he got Sting involved. “I called my good friend Sting,” Krusty explains. “He said, ‘Krusty, when do you need me?’ I said, ‘Thursday.’ He said, ‘I’m busy Thursday.’ I said, ‘What about Friday?’ He said, ‘Friday’s worse than Thursday.’ Then he said, ‘How about Saturday?’ I said, ‘Fine.’ True story!”
Skull-boringly dull as Krusty’s “anecdote” is, it’s really only a slight exaggeration of the kind of prosaic patter that fills the screen on entertainment-news shows and fills out the celebrity profiles in glossy magazines. Think, for example, of how many times you’ve read in some detail about what stars are eating, how they hold their forks, how they interact with waiters—because of course the average “profile” has been written by a journalist whose sole first-hand knowledge of the profile’s subject is a single shared lunch. Or try to imagine the monument to sustained emptiness that is a given star’s full round of publicity for a new blockbuster. Imagine it packaged together—the morning talk-show interviews, the newspaper Q & As, the late-night talk-show interviews, the bantering behind-the-scenes features for Access Hollywood, the “in-depth” chats with writers from Vanity Fair and Maxim—imagine all of this in a single reel, a unified, relentless assault of banalities, cute anecdotes and well-crafted sound bites. It’d play like an anthropomorphic version of Andy Warhol’s Empire (an experimental film consisting of a single eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building). And it’d make Krusty’s scheduling conversation seem like a non-stop thrill ride.
The self-important, self-absorbed banality of the rich and famous is of course hardly breaking news, but The Simpsons often uses its celebrity guests to satirize the entire celebrity apparatus—and, more broadly, the entire culture for that provides celebrities with the foundation for their self-importance in the first place. Consider one of the show’s oddest guest spots: the appearance of Ernest Borgnine in Episode 1F06 (“Boy-Scoutz ’n the Hood”). In 1F06, Bart joins the Scout-like Junior Campers, and Borgnine is brought in as a fatherless boy’s “special celebrity dad” for the troop’s father-son camping trip. The gag is sort of conceptual, playing off the conceit that a celebrity—any celebrity—would make a fatherless kid happy, and thus suggesting that seemingly any problem the world faces can be solved by the mere magical presence of a celebrity or two. Jane Fonda goes to Hanoi, Sean Penn to Baghdad, John and Yoko lie in bed in a Montreal bedroom and Sheryl Crow shows up at the American Music Awards in a T-shirt that reads WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER—and with these simple acts, world peace becomes a reality. Right? The Simpsons’ selection of Borgnine for the job added an extra layer of ironic detail to the episode’s critique, because it turned out that he agreed to the guest spot despite his total ignorance of the show. “He’s a good actor, and he read his lines just fine,” said Hank Azaria, “but he had no idea what the show was, no idea what we were doing.” The symmetry’s stunning: the celebrity machine, churning on under its own power, delivers The Simpsons a random celebrity to play the part of a randomly chosen celebrity.
It’s a safe bet, though, that most Simpsons guest stars know exactly what they’re doing. And the fact that they play along indicates either that they don’t take themselves too seriously or else that they know the publicity value of appearing not to take themselves too seriously in this deeply ironic age. “I thought they used me very cleverly,” Leonard Nimoy said of his lambasting on The Simpsons. “I think they’re very hip, very bright people.” And the show’s celebrity guests seem to understand that the sharpest satirical barbs are not aimed at them specifically but rather at the whole celebrity circus. Hence (I’ve got to assume) the willingness of Kim Basinger, Alec Baldwin and Ron Howard to stand in for all of Hollywood in the series’ most intensive attack on celebrity: Episode 5F19 (“When You Dish upon a Star”).
In the episode’s opening sequence, Homer accidentally falls through the skylight of a palatial estate while paragliding, landing in the bed of Baldwin and Basinger. In fact, Homer lands right on top of Baldwin, and thinks at first that he’s squished Alec’s brother, Billy; he’d have been happy with either of them. Star struck, he insists on becoming the famous couple’s personal assistant. Soon, their pal Ron Howard comes by for a visit, and Homer refers to him variously as Potsie (a supporting character on the sitcom Happy Days, which starred Howard) and Horshack (a character on another 1970s sitcom, Welcome Back, Kotter, which Howard wasn’t in). Basinger is shown obsessively polishing her Oscar; Baldwin the bad-script magnet suggests (to the weighted silence of his fellow celebrities) that they’d forgive each other if any of them ever made a bad movie; Howard pitches hokily melodramatic film ideas to a producer.
The episode is a veritable catalogue of the consumer fads, linguistic quirks and lifestyle pretensions of the modern celebrity. Homer is dispatched to the Kwik-E-Mart with a grocery list overflowing with “weird and fruity items” four kinds of mushrooms (portobello, porcini, chanterelle and shiitake), tofu, wheatgrass juice, jellied zinc, six-hundred-dollar sunglasses, extra-wide bumper stickers for a Humvee. (It’s grim testimony to the marketing power of celebrity culture that the majority of these are now available at your average suburban shopping mall.) In short order, Homer himself goes Hollywood, his pants pockets overflowing with cellphones, PETA brochures and back issues of Variety as he talks up his own movie script, a “project” that Ron Howard might well be “attached to” (he’s at least “expressed an interest”).
Homer’s standing in, as usual, for the citizens of the celebrity-obsessed West in general, any and all of whom would surely leap just as quickly as Homer does at the chance to hobnob with the stars. After all, you no longer need to know Jack Warner personally to be a Hollywood “insider”: the mainstream media speaks of opening-weekend grosses and star vehicles and green-lighted projects, as if all the world’s accountants and computer programmers and Wal-Mart greeters were a phone call away from a three-picture deal with Miramax. (You getting points on the merchandising? asks the kid who delivers your pizza. No, you answer, but I’m getting fifty percent of the foreign-market gross.) Just flip through the pages of Entertainment Weekly—which shares grocery-checkout-line space with ultra-mainstream titles like People and Better Homes and Gardens—for a taste of faux-insider Hollywood. You’ll find detailed handicappings of the box-office potential of the season’s new releases and overviews of the career arcs of stars discussed with a casting director’s critical eye, offering us the opportunity not just to revel in the lavish lives of the stars but to pretend to be part of the fray.
When Homer is cast out of Eden—booted from the Baldwin-Basinger summer home for revealing their presence to the denizens of Moe’s Tavern, which precipitates a stampede of stargazers to the estate—he’s devastated. “I’m sorry I blew your secret,” Homer tells his celebrity pals before being tossed. “But you don’t know what it’s like to be a nobody! I just wanted to bask in your reflected glory. Reflected glory!” As he leaves, the mob at the gate perks up for a minute, but soon realizes Homer isn’t “somebody,” he’s just “nobody.” Back at home, Homer can’t help but notice that his dinnertime Manwich isn’t on focaccia and it’s lacking in fennel, his wife couldn’t open a movie if her life depended on it, and his kids will never be John and Joan Cusack.
Homer’s fall from grace is a kind of exaggerated high-relief version of the dissatisfaction bred by the rise of celebrity culture and its faux-insider adjuncts. Why would anyone want to live a quiet, anonymous, glamour-less life when the riches and fame and excitement of Hollywood are so tantalizingly close? Who wouldn’t want to be inside? And indeed it’s a common enough desire—simply to be famous—that it has given birth to an entire genre of TV entertainment: reality TV, which simply couldn’t exist if it didn’t have deep reserves of nobodies who desperately want to be somebody to draw its “stars” from. If the genre’s pioneers—Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire—were ostensibly contests predicated on the notion of winning money, subsequent reality TV shows have offered nothing more than a shot at celebrity. Destroy your relationship on Temptation Island or reveal your venal soul on Big Brother or sing your heart out on American or Canadian or (Britain’s) Pop Idol, and you too could be famous.
And with fame comes an even greater promise: that your life will no longer be ordinary. That you will live, finally, in the transcendent world of Hollywood. There’s an old-time diner I used to pass by at least once a week on the streetcar, a place down in the industrial wastes of Toronto’s east-end rail lands called the Canary Restaurant that was my own local monument to this promise. The Canary, you see, is a favourite of film crews, and with good cause: it’s a magnificent place to behold from the street, its funky neon sign—a bright-yellow canary on a perch—jutting out into the intersection, the restaurant’s name rendered in lovely art-deco, another sign (hand-painted) reading STEAKS & CHOPS. The building’s all red-brick nostalgic goodness, the second storey wrapped in wrought-iron railings. It’s the place to shoot a vintage-diner scene—as long as you zoom in tight on it, use it only for an “EXT. Vintage Diner” shot, because the Canary stands alone in a decaying wasteland of railway overpasses, vacant lots and chain-link. I once made the mistake of going there for lunch, and found the inside sadly devoid of the chrome and vinyl-seated booths and tabletop jukeboxes usually associated with vintage diners. (You can find those across town at the Lakeview Lunch—a frequent location for “INT. Vintage Diner” shoots, the necessary companion to the Canary’s “EXT. Vintage Diner.”) Instead, the Canary’s all cheap Formica and ratty stacking chairs, and the food’s merely bland.
The disappointment I felt having lunch at the Canary is—as I come around to the point of this reminiscence—the same kind felt by Homer after being exiled from the celebrity estate, by avid readers of Entertainment Weekly who’ll never actually have a financial stake in the box-office grosses the magazine so obsessively records. When the mob gathers at the Baldwin-Basinger home’s gates, one of Springfield’s citizens holds aloft a sign reading YOU COMPLETE US. Sadly, it’s only slight hyperbole. Even those of us who don’t spend tremendous amounts of time studying the lifestyles of the rich and famous can still feel strangely dissatisfied with some part of our lives—our waistline or our bank balance or our local diner—because of the all-pervasive ideal versions relentlessly blasted out at us from the celebrity world.
The ultimate target of Episode 5F19’s piss-take, and of a significant portion of The Simpsons’ critique of celebrity, is this culture of illusions. It’s a culture that emerges as much from the audience’s desire to immerse itself in Hollywood’s fantasias as from a given celebrity’s fondness for focaccia. As much fun as it is to take the piss out of unctuous Spock, if you will, it’d be dishonest not to lay some blame at the costumed feet of the Trekkies as well. The relationship is a codependent one.
It’s a relationship, too, that’s somewhat unique to film and television. To be sure, the culture of celebrity extends, for example, to the world of pop music, and there’s as much hero worship at a rock concert as there is at a film opening. But the audience’s relationship to music is ultimately less yearning, more personal—the music is often a vehicle for the listener’s own hopes and dreams, not a factory for constructing impossibly ideal ones. This might begin to explain why there’s so much less fanfare—and less ridicule—when the household names appearing on The Simpsons are not movie stars but musicians. The previously cited examples of James Brown and Barry White are typical: musicians are often used simply as grandiose background detail.8 In Episode 5F09 (“Trash of the Titans”), for example, the Irish band U2—one of the most prominent pop bands of the last twenty years—doesn’t appear until the second act, and its Springfield concert is there mostly as a platform for Homer to campaign for garbage commissioner. (Later, the band serves as famous window dressing at Moe’s.) When Phish pops up in a Season 13 episode, it’s a similar story. Homer, suffering from an eye injury, has been given a prescription for medical marijuana, so the appearance of the famously pot-friendly Phish at a local benefit concert serves as an obvious punchline. This sets up an obligatory ironic gag about the band’s stoner audience: Phish stops their Springfield concert to demand to see a prescription from a pot-smoking fan, who turns out to be withered old Hans Mole-man in a psychedelic T-shirt. But this is merely a brief prelude to the real purpose of Phish’s appearance: to provide a colourful stage-set for Homer to stonedly stumble across, as he urges the crowd to vote against a proposed ban on his medicine.
This backgrounding effect persists even in episodes where rock & roll takes centre stage. Consider one of the most music-saturated Golden Age episodes: 3F21 (“Homerpalooza”), in which Homer becomes a sideshow freak in the Hullabalooza rock festival. Even there, the music is a backdrop for the jokes: a snippet of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Zero” is used as the soundtrack for a gag about the bummed-out teenagers swaying along to it, Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do” plays to introduce a joke about his cheesy props, and the London Symphony Orchestra arrives backstage as a set-up for a gag about the conditions under which Cypress Hill may have ordered them to come to the concert (possibly while high, that is).9
The music is similarly downplayed in Episode DABF22 (“How I Spent My Strummer Vacation”), whose guest-voice list reads like an induction-ceremony program for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, Lenny Kravitz and Brian Setzer. The episode’s premise is that Homer goes to Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp, where this roster of greats teaches him and the rest of the class of Simpsons regulars how to look, dress and act like rock stars in a series of gags about rock’s most shopworn clichés. There’s very little playing like a rock star, though—conspicuously little music at all—which feels intentional. The trappings of the rock lifestyle are good for a gag or two, but perhaps rock itself did attain perfection in 1975 (as Homer once argued), and so what’d be the point of an elaborate parody of something that’s been coasting for so long? One of the other rockin’-est Simpsons episodes—8F21 (“The Otto Show”)—stars Spinal Tap, which is itself an elaborate (not to mention brilliant) satire of rock & roll. The Simpsons’ rock fantasy camp, with its light parodies of Elvis Costello’s elaborately crafted persona and Jagger’s stable of clichéd rock star poses, simply makes a wee bit more hay from whatever wasn’t burned to ash and dust in This Is Spinal Tap—which isn’t much.
It’s worth noting that Simpsons creator Matt Groening is a huge music fan and an avid record collector. Might it be reverence that keeps the show from savaging the rock gods who make guest appearances? Actually, more likely the opposite: it’s already been done. By Matt Groening, who wrote piss-taking music reviews for an L.A. alternative newspaper right up until the debut of The Simpsons. Here he is on his career as a rock critic, from a 2002 interview in Rolling Stone: “I had a weekly column making fun of rock & roll. I used to review bands based on their publicity photo. Oh, God, I was such an asshole. I learned that nobody was buying the records that I was reviewing, so I started making up bands and records. I knew that I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life, so I just did it until I got fired.” Elsewhere in the interview, Groening professes a love for “oddball music,” stuff that’s “more challenging rhythmically than ninety-nine percent of rock & roll.”
This hints at a plausible explanation for the show’s repeated underselling of the music of its guests: it’s a reflection not just of Groening’s boredom with repetitive rock but of the decreasing authority of rock & roll in general. The Simpsons saves its heavy artillery for society’s mightiest symbols, and rock simply doesn’t qualify anymore. Pop music in the Simpsons age is irredeemably fragmented, a handful of semi-connected shards, each of them too small to stand on its own as a symbol of cultural authority nor even as a universal language for the show’s audience. (Some might dig Phish, others the Stones, others an underground DJ or hip-hop hero or punk band). In the 1950s and 1960s, rock & roll was the primary voice of youth, and any cultural icon that hoped to talk to or about youth culture simply had to have a significant connection to it. No longer: pop music is the soundtrack for youth, but it’s also the soundtrack for middle-aged nostalgia and car commercials. Note that it’s Homer, not Bart, who goes to Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp. Mocking rock, perhaps, would be like taking the piss out of the weather.
Consider how The Simpsons has treated the biggest pop group of all time: the Beatles. Paul, George and Ringo have each appeared separately on the show, and not one of them has played or sung a single note. Ringo appears as the object of Marge’s long-ago schoolgirl crush, and then in present day as an eccentric millionaire whiling away his days in a lavish mansion, trying to reply to the stacks of Beatles-era fan mail strewn about the place. George Harrison pops up in an episode in which Homer’s mid-1980s barbershop quartet, the Be Sharps, enjoy Beatles-esque success, and Homer leaves no doubt as to where rock icons from twenty years in the past figure in his—and our—cultural priorities. “Hello, Homer, I’m George Harrison,” says the Quiet One at a Grammy Awards after-party. “Oh my god, oh my god!” Homer replies breathlessly. “Where did you get that brownie?” And when Paul McCartney and his wife, Linda, run into Lisa on the rooftop garden of the Kwik-E-Mart, Lisa’s amazed reply is even more telling: “Wow! Paul McCartney! I read about you in history class.10”In The Simpsons’ universe, the Beatles are merely a few more famous faces. They are not inherently hipper or more beloved or more relevant than a former president or an aging actor. They’re just another familiar detail used to enhance the realism of the show’s depiction of our culture.
If The Simpsons systematically downplays its pop-musician guests, it exaggerates the fame of another category of real-world visitors: intellectuals and practitioners of the classical arts. A handful of scientists, poets and abstract artists have been given prominent roles on The Simpsons—even, in some cases, the full star treatment. As I’ve already noted, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking shows up to critique the failed utopia constructed by Lisa and her fellow members of Mensa’s Springfield chapter, then discusses Homer’s intriguing theory of a donut-shaped universe down at Moe’s. The scientist and author Stephen Jay Gould was a key figure in another episode. And the painter Jasper Johns—celebrated for his iconic paintings of everyday objects—pops up repeatedly in an episode where Homer becomes an “outsider” artist; Johns is depicted as an incorrigible kleptomaniac. Each of these highbrow guests is treated with at least as much reverence as the numerous entertainers who’ve appeared on the show. A talk show would surely bring out a Kim Basinger ahead of a Jasper Johns (if it booked Johns at all). On The Simpsons, though, they’re equals.
The most elaborate example of this star treatment for academic icons comes in Episode DABF15 (“Little Girl in the Big Ten”), whose “celebrity” guest is the former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky. In the episode, Lisa pretends to be a college student so she can hang out with her intellectual peers, and winds up attending a poetry reading at a coffee house. The reader is Pinsky, whose oration of his poem “Impossible to Tell (My Two Joke Elegy)” runs at least as long as any given rock star’s performance on The Simpsons. The poem includes the lines “‘Bashō’ He named himself, ‘Banana Tree,’” and during the reading a group of pumped-up frat-boy types strip off their shirts to reveal letters on their chests that spell out BASHŌ. “Bashō!” they whoop. “Banana Tree!” one adds, pumping his fist. In Springfield on this night, the poet is a sports hero.11
The irony here is flowing about waist-deep: your average college jock wouldn’t know Pinsky from the janitor who cleans his dorm, and even serious literature students wouldn’t take their rapture as far as chest-painting. But the scene’s irony has multiple layers. Part of it, yes, stems from the fact that no one behaves this way at poetry readings. More subtly, though, the audience’s fist-pumping hero worship of Pinsky lays bare the absurdity of identifying so zealously with anything. If it’s silly to get so wound up about banana trees, why is it acceptable to do the same for sports teams and pop stars? What’s truly absurd is that we expect celebrities to be treated with such reverence and ecstasy. By shrugging its shoulders at the presence of superstars in Springfield and whooping it up over poets and scientists, The Simpsons has articulated a sporadic long-form critique of this founding principle of the cult of celebrity.
And in Episode AABF08 (“Sunday, Cruddy Sunday”), the show’s writers let us know this is all fully intentional. The episode details a troubled trip to the Super Bowl undertaken by Homer and a gang of Springfield regulars, and features guest appearances by retired NFL stars Rosey Grier, Dan Marino and John Elway, famed football play-by-play men John Madden and Pat Summerall, media baron (and Fox Network owner) Rupert Murdoch, and Dolly Parton (whose claims to fame presumably need no elaboration). It originally aired immediately after the Super Bowl, as a heavily hyped coda to one of America’s most over-the-top entertainment spectacles. With this much anticipation and expectation, you could almost forgive the show’s writers if they broke with tradition and let their guests milk their high-profile appearances for some serious self-aggrandizement. But they emphatically do not. The celebrity who gets the best lines in the episode is the deceased Vincent Price (impersonated by occasional Simpsons voice actor Karl Wiedergott), who camps it up in an automated phone message explaining why the feet are missing in the “Vincent Price’s Egg Magic” kit that Lisa and Marge use to pass the time while the boys are at the Super Bowl. The other big names are put to work in the usual fashion: as props in the adventures of Springfield’s permanent residents. In the final scene, John Madden and Pat Summerall do a sort of post-game wrap-up that underscores the incongruity of it all. “Did it strike you as odd,” Summerall asks, “that in a Super Bowl show with Dolly Parton we didn’t see any football or singing?” Madden: “I hadn’t thought about it, Pat. But in retrospect, it was kind of a rip-off! What a way to treat the loyal fans who’ve put up with so much nonsense from this franchise!” The bus pulls up just then, and the door opens to reveal Vincent Price in the driver’s seat. “All aboard, boys!” he calls. “I’ve been waiting for you.” Madden again: “Now I’ll tell you, that doesn’t make a lick of sense!” And it doesn’t, actually—unless the point is (and it is) to pointedly illustrate that the presence of a famous name or seven is no reason to change your daily routine. Celebrities aren’t more important than Homer, and they’re not more important than the deceased Vincent Price.
The moral of the story—a story the show has been telling since Tony Bennett was spotted out the window of an average American family’s car—is that they’re not more important than you, either.
If you’re a big star—or even a little one—and you’d rather not risk being mocked and underutilized by appearing as yourself on The Simpsons, there is always the option of becoming a full-fledged Springfieldianite. Meryl Streep played Reverend Lovejoy’s sociopathic daughter, Jessica. Glenn Close gave voice to Homer’s mother. Dustin Hoffman appeared under a pseudonym to play Mr. Bergstrom, Lisa’s beloved substitute teacher. The list goes on: Kirk Douglas as Chester J. Lampwick (the forgotten creator of “Itchy & Scratchy” and an inveterate Depression-style bum); Donald Sutherland as Hollis Hurlbut (curator of the Springfield Historical Society); Michelle Pfeiffer as Homer’s co-worker (and almost-lover) Mindy Simmons. There’s a surprising general rule to these guest-starring roles: the bigger the star, the less memorable the character. There’s no apparent design to this trend, unless the qualities that make someone a great onscreen actor somehow translate poorly to voice-acting. Meryl Streep, for example, is rarely anything less than riveting on the big screen. As Jessica, though, she’s merely competent.
Admittedly, there are some bona fide classics on the list of one-off characters voiced by screen legends. Take Kathleen Turner’s turn as Stacy Lovell, creator of the Barbie-esque Malibu Stacy doll. Her performance stands out in part because it never becomes simply a showcase for her sultry purring. Instead, Turner mixes in some boozy disaffection and pathos, and so the faded, debauched woman we see on the screen is Stacy Lovell, fallen titan of the doll-making world, not a Simpsonized Kathleen Turner. Same goes for Michelle Pfeiffer’s Mindy, a crude, gluttonous slacker (a female Homer, in other words, save that she’s a gorgeous redhead). Pfeiffer’s famous voice intrudes not at all on the character.
On one notable occasion, the show even tried its hand at celebrity stunt-casting. Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor was cast to utter Maggie’s first word in the final scene of Episode 9F08 (“Lisa’s First Word”). Although it was an extraordinarily small part—Maggie coos the word “Daddy” to an empty room—the size of the star suited the job, inasmuch as it ostensibly marked the first time Maggie spoke on the show.12 And tiny as the role was, it managed to provide an object lesson in the unique difficulties associated with using actors unfamiliar with voice work. The story goes that Taylor had trouble getting into character—her first readings were too sultry. In the end, it would be twenty-five takes before she got Maggie’s first word just right.
The most memorable celebrity-voiced Simpsons characters have been created by lesser lights in the celebrity firmament. Many of these have been wonderful one-offs. For example, Mandy Patinkin voiced Hugh, the stuffy English snob who becomes engaged to college-aged Lisa. Another classic: Lawrence Tierney’s crusty department store detective, Don Brodka, who catches Bart in the act of shoplifting a video game from the Try-N-Save. And then there’s the inspired casting choice of country-music legend Johnny Cash as the voice of Homer’s coyote spirit guide (a.k.a. “Space Coyote”) in Episode 3F24 (“El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer”). Who better than Johnny Cash, with his gravelly baritone, to give the proper heft to a line like “Clarity is the path to inner peace”—and then to provide the self-deflating counterweight when he starts gnawing on Homer’s pant leg moments later? “Sorry. I am a coyote,” says Cash’s Space Coyote, retaining just the right amount of righteousness.
In a few notable cases, The Simpsons frequent use of guest stars has even uncovered a major voice-acting talent. Two of the most prolific of these are Saturday Night Live alumnus Jon Lovitz and multitalented actor-comedian-writer-director Albert Brooks, both of whom have appeared on the show repeatedly, each adding a handful of great characters to the show’s pantheon.
Lovitz, for his part, specializes in pretentious dorks. He’s the voice behind Marge’s high-school flame, Artie Ziff, a self-important brainiac who gropes the future Mrs. Simpson on prom night and then offers her this rationale for keeping it a secret: “I am so respected, it would damage the town to hear it.” Lovitz also played Professor Lombardo (a night-school painting teacher who sees genius in everything from Marge’s portraits of Ringo Starr to the janitor’s work on the school railing) and Llewellyn Sinclair, the tortured artiste who directs Marge’s acting debut in Oh! Streetcar! And Lovitz appeared as the portly and pretentious film critic Jay Sherman, who boasts a fine eye for artful cinema, a booming belch and a tummy even more ferocious than Homer’s.13
As for Albert Brooks, his first appearance—in the second episode of Season 1—as Cowboy Bob, the fast-talking proprietor of Cowboy Bob’s RV Roundup, was a fine send-up of the smooth salesman archetype. A few episodes later, in 7G11 (“Life on the Fast Lane”), Brooks contributed possibly the finest guest-starring performance of the first two seasons as Jacques, the consummate playboy who teaches Marge to bowl and nearly persuades her to commit adultery. Brooks’s delivery—mildly French-accented, halting and overweeningly passionate—milked humour from nearly every line. (Nowhere more so than in Jacques’s heated description of the institution of brunch to Marge: “It’s not quite breakfast, it’s not quite lunch, but it comes with a slice of cantaloupe at the end. You don’t get completely what you would at breakfast, but you get a good meal!”)
Brooks really hit his stride in Season 5, when he gave sappy, superficial life to Brad Goodman, Springfield’s briefly beloved self-help guru. Brooks went for a subtle, slow-burn lampoon rather than broad caricature: his Goodman doesn’t ooze insincerity, he just lightly dribbles it. (As the minor celebrity Martha Quinn exits the stage of his infomercial, for example, Goodman turns to the camera. “She’s one of my favorites,” he says, just slightly overearnest. “I loved her in the thing I saw her in.”) At his Springfield seminar, he holds up Bart Simpson as the embodiment of the inner child he wants his clients to embrace. But Bart trips up Goodman’s speechifying by using a false name—Rudiger. “If we can all be more like little Rudiger …” Goodman enthuses. “His name is Bart,” Marge interjects. “His name’s not important!” Goodman barks, then rapidly reigns himself in and continues expounding pop-psychologically. For a moment, his voice hints at self-important rage before returning to polished professional empathy—in the process telling us far more about Goodman’s brand of bullshit than a cartoony explosion of anger would have. Through a dozen little touches like these, Brooks created a timeless Simpsons character.
His real masterwork, though, is Hank Scorpio, CEO of the Globex Corporation. Scorpio steals the episode, a rare instance of a Simpson—in this case Homer—being upstaged. Brooks brings hilarious satirical seamlessness to Scorpio’s paradoxical nature, his voice moving effortlessly from the we’ re-all-pals folksiness of the modern executive (“At Globex, we don’t believe in walls”) to the psychopathic posturing of a James Bond villain bent on world domination (which turns out to be his true goal). By the end of the episode, when Homer tells Scorpio he’s decided to resign and return to Springfield to please his family, these two sides have totally merged. “Well, you can’t argue with the little things,” Scorpio tells Homer, his voice bubbling over with compassion. “It’s the little things that make up life.” Scorpio tosses a grenade for emphasis—his giant supervillain’s lair of an office is under full-scale military invasion even as he and Homer chat. “Homer,” he adds, still empathetic, “on your way out, if you wanna kill somebody, it would help me a lot.” On the basis of his delivery of this line alone, Brooks’s place in Simpsons history is secure.
As good as Brooks is, though, he’s only the runner-up. For he and all other Simpsons guest stars must necessarily bow down before their undisputed lord and master: the late, great Phil Hartman. Hartman’s Simpsons work was so virtuoso and the characters he created so fully woven into the fabric of Springfield life that the term “guest star” seems like a misnomer. Hartman was a frequent cast member starting with the very first season and a contributor of two major recurring characters, but he never completely integrated into the full-time cast. (In part, perhaps, because he kept busy playing supporting roles in sitcoms—particularly NewsRadio—and movies.) Over the years, Hartman contributed nearly a dozen variations of his twin trademarks—the smarmy hustler and the overwrought voice of authority—on The Simpsons. He played the voice of God in an early episode and appeared elsewhere as both Moses and Charlton Heston playing Moses. He was a slimy cable guy (“Your door wasn’t locked in any serious way”), a football commentator named Smooth Jimmy Apollo (“the man who’s right 52 percent of the time”) and a self-important “bigger brother” for Bart. And of course Hartman portrayed that ultimate fast-talking huckster Lyle Lanley, the crook who uses a catchy song-and-dance number to con Springfield into buying a decrepit monorail.
But these—even the wonderfully amoral Lanley—are mere footnotes to Hartman’s crowning glory, a twin gem consisting of his two magnificently drawn recurring characters: the ubiquitous C-list actor Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz, hapless attorney-at-law. Taken together, Hutz and McClure represent the most significant contribution to the show outside of its permanent cast; indeed the show’s Golden Age is hard to imagine without them.
Hartman’s voice was a tool seemingly forged for the sole purpose of expressing self-serving bombast, brain-dead posturing and cloying showbiz smarm. And it was funny the way a habanero pepper is hot: deeply, insistently, to its core.
Take Hutz: he’s an ambulance-chasing lawyer, the proprietor of a shopping-mall practice called I Can’t Believe It’s a Law Firm, and a recovering alcoholic. Hutz learns his courtroom techniques by watching the odd episode of Matlock with the sound off in a bar and lures clients with infomercial-esque enticements: a smoking-monkey doll, a pen that looks just like a cigar (“Isn’t that something?”), an exquisite faux-pearl necklace (a ninety-nine dollar value, that). Hutz is a perfect showcase for Hart-man’s voice, a character defined by a toxically funny mix of salesman’s bluster, lawyerly pomposity and a vacillation between naive self-confidence and utter hopelessness that is Hutz’s (and Hartman’s) alone.
It’s hard to select a single representative example from the long list of classic moments in Hutz’s career as a talentless law-talking guy, but I’ll go with one that most fully combines the hopeless, the self-confident and the blustery. It’s from Episode 9F05 (“Marge Gets a Job”), in which the Simpsons retain Hutz’s services for a legal suit against Mr. Burns for firing Marge because she wouldn’t date him. “Mrs. Simpson,” Hutz booms, “your sexual harassment case is just what I need to rebuild my shattered career. Care to join me in a belt of Scotch?” He proffers the bottle, waving it across his desk at Homer and Marge, shameless and utterly oblivious of its possible connection to his shattered practice. “But it’s 9:30 in the morning!” Marge answers. “Yeah, but I haven’t slept in days,” answers Hutz, and starts chugging. It’s the delivery on this last line in particular—unrepentantly smooth, with the slightest hipster drawl on daayyys, as if he’s just a little proud of it—that nails the gag. Hutz could have been mere parody, but in Hartman’s care he became something a good deal more grand, the protagonist in a slapstick tragedy called Death of a Legal Salesman.
And then there’s actor Troy McClure, undisputed world champ of showbiz insincerity, a creature born to introduce tacky infomercials, shoddy educational films and formulaic Hollywood movies. The smarmy Hollywood type—like the shyster lawyer—has been done to death, but Hartman’s version breathed new life into the cliché with each appearance. McClure has became the apotheosis of the stereotype, a gut-achingly funny reinterpretation whose trademark introduction—“Hi! I’m Troy McClure! You may remember me from such films as …”—emerged as a shorthand way to describe any grossly artificial media figure.
Hartman’s career ended prematurely when he was murdered by his deranged wife in May 1998. “He was a master,” Matt Groening told Entertainment Weekly amid the media frenzy that accompanied his made-for-the-tabloids death. “I took him for granted because he nailed the joke every time.” Elsewhere, Groening and other Simpsons producers noted that Hartman’s death left a gaping hole in the show’s cast that could never be filled. (No one was foolish enough to even try to replace him as the voice of Hutz and McClure.) Bafflingly, though, precious few of the media retrospectives of Hartman’s career highlighted his work on The Simpsons. The New York Times mentioned it in a single sentence alongside his impression of Bill Clinton on Saturday Night Live and his role in the instantly forgotten Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Jingle All the Way. The Dallas Morning News lumped it in with his work in TV commercials. Time magazine’s Hartman appreciation made no mention of The Simpsons at all (though it did find space to note that Hartman was to appear in the upcoming film Small Soldiers). Only Newsday hinted at the importance of his Simpsons appearances. “His most lasting legacy,” the paper noted, “may be in the prolific voice-over work Hartman did for animated films and television cartoons.” Even here, though, The Simpsons is downplayed, listed alongside The Brave Little Toaster and Animaniacs as but one of many voice-acting gigs that will last because they “tend to be repeated even more than live-action programs.”
Understand: Hartman’s work on the show is his legacy. This is not just because The Simpsons is the most important and lasting of the shows on which Hartman appeared but because his voice-acting was the pinnacle achievement of his career. He is the exception to the rule that says major stars use The Simpsons as a tool for credibility-enhancing self-deprecation. The Simpsons allowed Hartman to elevate his acting to levels it never reached elsewhere. And to be a major contributor to The Simpsons is to make a permanent mark in the annals of pop culture. You will not remember him from such films as Jingle All the Way and Small Soldiers. You’ll remember him as Lionel Hutz and Lyle Lanley and especially Troy McClure. And that is more than enough.
For the most part, the hell that simply must be Troy McClure’s private life is merely hinted at. There’s inherent desperation, for example, in his willingness to host the infomercial series “I Can’t Believe They Invented It!” and star in crass educational films like Meat and You: Partners in Freedom. Only one episode—3F15 (“A Fish Called Selma”)—gives us a sustained look at McClure’s off-screen life, and in so doing it elevates McClure to a rarefied world inhabited by a select few Springfieldianite celebrities, foremost among them kiddie-television king Krusty the Clown, lunkheaded action-movie hero Rainier Wolfcastle and news anchor Kent Brockman. In Episode 3F15 McClure becomes a full-fledged member of Springfield’s homegrown celebrity culture, a Hollywood in microcosm that over the years has been the show’s most effective vehicle for satirizing the real-world cult of celebrity.
The show’s usual digs at real-life celebrity culture, no matter how sharp, are undermined by the simple fact that the celebrities themselves are expanding their own cults by appearing on The Simpsons, which has also enhanced the whole celebrity religion by creating such a hip, trusted, resonant institution for famous people to appear on. Nimoy may look like a bit of a buffoon on The Simpsons and Ernest Borgnine may be completely lost, but both of them have entered a higher plane of celebrity by appearing on the show. Does the Simpsonized Bob Hope look like a self-serving spotlight junkie as he hangs from the landing gear of a flying helicopter, asking to be set down at a boat show mere moments after escaping a riot at his Fort Springfield performance? Yes—but he also seems far cooler than he’s been since at least the Korean War.
Springfield’s own celebrities, however, have no off-screen personas to bolster. Their Simpsonian likenesses are the only measure of their characters. Thus does Troy McClure emerge, in Episode 3F15, as a creature of pure, unwavering egocentricity. He uses his dimmed star power to entice Selma into a date so she’ll give him preferential treatment at the Department of Motor Vehicles. He’s bored and mechanical until the paparazzi arrive, at which point he comes alive and kisses Selma on the cheek, hungry for the positive PR of being seen in public with a woman (even one as grotesque as Selma) to offset his widely rumoured penchant for engaging in strange sexual practices with sea creatures. In short order, he and Selma are an item, and a married couple soon after that, all so McClure can regain his Hollywood stardom. (He’s soon fielding offers to star in a buddy comedy with “sick freaks” Rob Lowe and Hugh Grant—both of whom had their real-life careers derailed by sexual indiscretions—and to play the sidekick in a major action flick.)
Throughout, McClure displays an unwavering self-absorption so complete it’s almost artful. “That’s too funny!” he tells Selma, his braying, ready-for-the-soundstage diction accompanied by forced laughter. “I can’t remember when I’ve heard a funnier anecdote!” More smug, laughter. Then: “All right, now you tell one.” Troy’s “on” in domestic moments, too, referring to practically everything as “fantastic,” including Selma’s iguana, Jub-Jub, who he also claims (in a paraphrase of a credit-card commercial) is “everywhere you want to be.” Even when Selma learns their marriage is a sham, McClure’s commitment to the cult of celebrity is unshaken, and he persuades her that the celebrity life—going to the best parties, meeting famous people, just plain being a celebrity—makes it all worthwhile. “Sure, you’ll be a sham wife, but you’ll be the envy of every other sham wife in town!” he reassures her. In the end, Selma can’t live with the hollowness of it. She won’t bring a child into their loveless marriage, even though her sham husband needs a child to land a big part. But McClure remains undeterred. First he suggests they adopt “some kid who wants in on the deal,” then he pops up on Entertainment Tonight as a “newly divorced comeback kid” hawking his next project.
There it is, celebrity life: empty, emotionally manipulative, rabidly careerist. So ugly that not even cruel, cynical, love-starved Selma can stand it. The suggestion is that you would have to be as hopelessly deranged as Troy McClure to live in such a world. The show is not alone in portraying the lifestyles of the rich and famous this way: a string of movies throughout the 1990s engaged in just such self-flagellation. Robert Alt-man’s dark satire The Player examined the moral connections between cold-blooded murder and the daily routine of a Hollywood producer. The jet-black Swimming with Sharks made this equivalency explicit, depicting a young wannabe player who tortures his producer boss to get ahead in film production. Indeed the Hollywood-is-morally-and-emotionally-bankrupt theme has inspired something verging on a subgenre, with films like Hurlyburly, State and Main, Living in Oblivion and even period pieces (L.A. Confidential, Barton Fink) and the occasional lighthearted comedy (Bowfinger) all vying to present the most vicious portrayal possible of the star-making machine.
Watch many a Hollywood movie, read any old celebrity profile, view any of a number of episodes of The Simpsons, and you’ll find the same argument: fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and achieving and maintaining celebrity requires inhuman ruthlessness. This is no kind of goal to shoot for, kids. And yet, kind of like The Simpsons’ simultaneous critiquing and elevating of celebrity, the message is received but doesn’t stick. We laugh at McClure’s venality, and still we worship the famous and yearn for some fame of our own. The cults of celebrity grow. And Krusty the Clown—burned-out, addiction-riddled, pacemaker-scarred Krusty, the biggest celebrity in Springfield—shows us many of the reasons why.
First off, there’s no doubt about Krusty’s place in the celebrity pantheon: he’s the wizened veteran, the total pro, a kind of no-bullshit old-Hollywood yin to McClure’s smooth-talking-flake yang. Evidence of Krusty’s old-time professionalism is abundant: he’s a stereotypical Jewish entertainer who keeps his faith hidden, a mensch’s mensch who shows up at a beauty pageant thinking it’s a Republican fundraiser, then bounds onstage the very next instant (his tie still undone) to hit his cue in the pageant’s song-and-dance number. Here’s a particularly telling example of the clown’s status as consummate pro: Lisa is in a recording studio to tape the dialogue for the feminist talking doll she’s helped create when Krusty comes barging in, a stack of cue cards in his hands. “All right, you Poindexters,” he tells the sound technicians, “let’s get this right!” Then he’s off at warp speed: “One: Hey, hey, kids, I’m talking Krusty! Two: Hey, hey, here comes Slideshow Mel—again—Sideshow Mel. Sideshow Mel. Three”—he laughs his patented hyuh-yuh-yukking laugh, and then—“Budda-bing, budda-boom, I’m done.” As he turns to leave, he tells Lisa, “Learn from a professional, kid.”
More than this, though, Krusty is a monument to the promise of celebrity. He attends gala movie openings and awards shows, jets off to Wimbledon, organizes benefit recordings, bets big on the ponies. He lives in a fabulous mansion, owns a private plane (the I’m-on-a-Rolla Gay) and once co-owned a racehorse (named “Krudler”) with Bette Midler. His high-rolling lifestyle sometimes reaches ridiculous heights: in one sequence, he lights his cigarettes with first a one-hundred-dollar bill, then an ultra-rare Superman comic, then a pearl necklace. (Never mind how he got the pearls to catch fire, there, Poindexter.) As his aides follow him from dressing room to limo, he barks orders for yet more frivolous glamour: “Put five thousand bucks on the Lakers … Hire Kenny G to play for me … My house is dirty—buy me a clean one.”
Krusty lives the celebrity life we all dream of, a life that’s much like being a great big spoiled kid who finally has the unlimited resources every kid always wanted. Which is to say that Krusty lives the life we see on Entertainment Tonight and on the red carpets of awards shows and in the meticulously constructed “in-depth profiles” that fill the pages of In Style and Vanity Fair. And so even if another set of media outlets—supermarket tabloids, post-rehab TV interviews, gossipy tell-all books—show us the high price of these posh lives (and even if Krusty’s pacemaker scar and omnipresent cigarette and occasional binge-induced blackouts do the same on The Simpsons), we live with both sets of facts simultaneously. We want the former and reject the latter, and maybe we assume that if we had the former we wouldn’t need the latter—who knows?—but at any rate we embrace this dual consciousness.
Episode 3F12 (“Bart the Fink”) offers a pointed answer to the question of why such a manifestly miserable world of phonies and cheats would be so enticing to so many. In the episode, Krusty’s ludicrously lavish lifestyle has finally gotten the better of him: he’s caught in a tax dodge by the IRS. There’s no jail time—“This is America,” an IRS officer tells him, “we don’t send our celebrities to jail”—but even garnished wages and foreclosed property are more than Krusty can handle, so he fakes his own death. The ever-vigilant Simpson children, however, discover him working under an assumed name at Springfield’s harbour. Bart and Lisa beg him to return to showbiz, but Krusty resists: he has realized he doesn’t need stacks of cash to be happy, he doesn’t care if he disappoints his fans, he can survive without an entourage of phonies. Finally, though, they find his remaining soft spot. “What about the great feeling that you get from knowing you’re better than regular people?” Lisa taunts him. Bart: “What about being an illiterate clown who’s still more respected than all the scientists, doctors and educators in the country put together?” That’s all it takes for Krusty to return to his celebrity life. This is what he can’t live without: the status. And it’s not really the money or the babes or the stuff for the rest of us, either. These things have their appeal, don’t get me wrong, but if they alone were the hook, then there’d be far more people clamouring to get into the porn business. No, what’s really alluring about the cult of celebrity is the idea that it can provide status, power, legitimacy, fulfillment. That being famous will, as the Springfieldianite’s sign outside the Baldwin-Basinger estate said, complete us. This belief is what makes it a cult, a secular religion.
We can see the same echoes of this holy celebrity allure—the hope of deliverance to the promised land—in other Springfield stars. It’s all over the place, for example, in Episode DABF06 (“The Bart Wants What It Wants”), which gives us a long look at the glamorous life of Rainier Wolf-castle. Wolfcastle’s actually more like our world’s celebrities than Krusty—a near-perfect mirror image of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And in DABF06, we learn he’s living the same kind of enviable Hollywood lifestyle right in Springfield: he’s got the big gated estate, the pretty daughter in private school, courtside seats at the basketball game, even a huge honking SUV—a Hummer, just like Arnie’s—that’s so powerful it can drive right over his estate’s gates. In the episode, Bart starts dating Wolfcastle’s daughter, Greta, offering both him and his father a chance to peek into the life of a star. They of course find it far superior to their own. “Everything in your house is sooo cool,” Bart tells Greta as he surveys her room, which is decorated with the props from Wolfcastle’s movie The Incredible Shrinking McBain. Then they sprawl on Greta’s super-sized bed and watch “Itchy & Scratchy” on DVD on a giant flat-screen TV. Meanwhile, Wolfcastle accompanies Homer to good ole Moe’s Tavern, which causes the pub’s regulars to lose their starstruck minds. They surround Wolfcastle, peppering him with questions about the exotic minutiae of his life. “Is it true that if I kill you I become you?” Moe asks in all seriousness. Wolfcastle, much too elite to waste his time conversing with commoners, brings in his authorized look-alike (Chuck, who lives in his trunk) to gratify his fans. And even that is enough: the illusion of quality time with a celebrity beats the humdrum lives of the hopelessly uncelebrated.
Even among Springfield’s less prominent celebrities there remain vague traces of the sense of a life lived in a magically flawless world. In Channel 6 anchorman Kent Brockman’s pompous demeanour and self-aggrandizing work, we see hints of a life lived importantly, of underlings ordered about and public figures mingled with. (We see the same in our own broadcast journalists.) In Mayor Quimby’s repeated dalliances with dizzy, curvaceous blondes and his cavorting with his Kennedy-esque brood, we see a modern aristocratic life, an enviable sense of entitlement, a life lived beyond the rules that govern the rest of us. And indeed even Springfield’s very own oddball celebrity—Bumblebee Man—occasionally displays some of the trappings of fame: guest appearances on Springfield Squares and Dawson’s Creek, hobnobbing at a TV-industry function with the likes of Krusty, simply being on TV in the first place. There’s enough there, in short—much as there is with your C-list celebs in the real world, all those Kato Kaelins and Mr. Ts and Joan Riverses—to suggest that even such a laughable personage lives a more remarkable life than yours or mine.
This, in the end, is how celebrity hooks us every time. As idiotic as a famous person might be made to appear, there’s still an intangible quality to the whole thing that’s somehow enviable. I mean, for starters, who wouldn’t want to be immortalized in an episode of The Simpsons?
1 Because “Demi” Is So 1993: “Rumer” and “Scout” are among the twenty-six children of Cletus the slack-jawed yokel and his wife, Brandine. These kids are roll-called onto the front porch to sample Marge’s pretzels in Episode 4F08 (“The Twisted World of Marge Simpson”), which originally aired in early 1997. Many of the remaining brood sport names that are either celebrity-derived (e.g., Cody and Cassidy, the names of Kathie Lee Gifford’s famous-by-association kids) or generally trendy (e.g., Jordan, Caitlin, Kendall) or simply goofy (e.g., Q-Bert).
2 Freeze Frame Fun: The Simpsons spins the endless abundance of celebrity scandal into an excellent freeze-frame gag in Episode 2F15 (“Lisa’s Wedding”). The episode features a flash-forward to 2010—the time of Lisa’s engagement to Hugh the English upper-class twit. Homer drags his daughter’s fiancé to Moe’s Tavern, where a TV set is tuned to the news on CNNBCBS (a division of ABC). “And tonight,” Kent Brockman announces, “the following celebrities have been arrested.” A list scrolls rapidly by: The Baldwin Brothers Gang, Dr. Brad Pitt, John-John-John Kennedy, George Burns, Infamous Amos, Grandson of Sam, The Artist Formerly Known as [the symbol adopted by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince], Tim Allen, Jr., Senator and Mrs. Dracula, The Artist Formerly Known as Buddy Hackett, Madonnabots: Series K, Sideshow Ralph Wiggum, Martha Hitler, Johnny Neutrino.
3 Are Too, Bart: The stark dissimilarity between the actress Nancy Cartwright and the smart-mouthed ten-year-old boy whose voice she provides has been mined for a gag or two. In the credits of a Season 2 episode, for example, Bart’s chalkboard lines read, “I am not a 32-year-old woman.”
4 Full Disclosure: I spent the summer of 1996 working at the Starbucks next door to the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, which is the preferred accommodation in the city for the majority of celebrities. I thus became quite intimate with the phenomenon of a passing encounter with a Hollywood icon, as I served lattes and such that summer to Rob Lowe, Martin Sheen, Dennis Miller, Sarah McLachlan, the guy who plays Paul on The Young and the Restless, and three of the four original members of KISS, among others.
5 Simpsons Shocker! Among the behind-the-scenes scandals and gaffes detailed in Episode BABF19 are these:
- Homer develops a painkiller addiction after sustaining injuries filming the scene in which he jumps Springfield Gorge on a skateboard. (“Fame was like a drug,” he explains, “but what was even more like a drug were the drugs.”)
- Marge squanders the family fortune on an ill-conceived line of birth control products. (“When people reach for their diaphragm, they don’t want to see my picture!” Marge admits.)
- Bart gets into a scuffle with Hawaiian Airlines flight attendants on the way home from judging a Miss Hawaiian Tropic contest.
- The whole Simpson clan gets into an onstage brawl at the Iowa State Fair.
- Lisa publishes a tell-all memoir entitled Where Are My Residuals?
6 Old Man Burns Redux: Pity poor old Monty Burns—emphasis, as usual, on old—who in “Homer at the Bat” can’t get the stars he really wants because they’re all dead. Burns’s softball dream team includes Honus Wagner (shortstop, Pittsburgh Pirates, 1900–17), Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown (pitcher, Chicago Cubs, 1904–12), and a right fielder who’s been six feet under for 130 years. Disappointed but undaunted, Burns dispatches Smithers to scour the professional leagues—American, National and Negro (final season: 1952)—for more lively ringers.
7 Simpsonian Soviet Realism: Before the newcomer Gabbo causes Krusty’s cancellation, he poaches the beloved clown’s main attraction: “The Itchy & Scratchy Show.” This sets up a stellar Simpsons one-off gag, as Krusty is forced to resort to broadcasting a cut-rate cartoon: “Eastern Europe’s favourite cat-and-mouse team, ‘Worker & Parasite’!” The cubistically rendered cat and mouse bob past backdrops of abstract art and bread lines, babbling to each other in a series of guttural bleeps and blips to a tinny soundtrack that seems lifted from a grim 1930s movie about the Stalinist purges. The closing credits read: “Endut! Hoch Hech!” Cut to Krusty, cigarette dangling derisively from his mouth: “What the hell was that?”
8 The Ramones Steal the Show: With very little lead-up or fanfare, the Ramones appear in Episode 1F01 (“Rosebud”) to deliver the best musical performance by a guest star in Simpsons history. The gig: Mr. Burns’s birthday party. Burns is already in horrible spirits when the legendary punk band takes the stage, introduced by Smithers in the style of the Beatles’ legendary Ed Sullivan debut (“Here are several fine young men who I’m sure are gonna go far”). “Ah,” Burns enthuses, “these minstrels will soothe my jangled nerves.” Not quite: after announcing that the gig sucks, the Ramones count off one-two-three-four and deliver a wicked-quick and wicked-fun punk version of “Happy Birthday.” Then, as the curtain falls, a band member addresses Burns directly: “Go to hell, you old bastard!” Burns, disgusted, turns to Smithers. “Have the Rolling Stones killed!” he orders. Smithers starts to correct him. Burns cuts him off: “Do as I say!” No doubt Mick Jagger slept fitfully that night.
9 Hullabalooza Rocks: The London Symphony Orchestra joins Cypress Hill for a few short bars of a symphonized version of “Insane in the Brain,” which turns out surprisingly funky. Sonic Youth later contributes a closing-credits take on The Simpsons theme—syncopated, punkified and awash in guitar feedback—that is, for my money, the coolest version of the show’s theme to date. My choice for runner-up: Yo La Tengo’s psychedelic take on the theme in Episode AABF02 (“Do’h-in’ in the Wind”).
10 Musical Bait ’n’ Switch: Later in Lisa’s meeting with the McCartneys, Paul asks her if she’d like to hear a song. “Wow! That would be great!” Lisa replies. “Okay!” says the Cute One. “Take it, Apu!” And so Apu does, belting out a mangled version of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” accompanying himself on a bongo as Paul and Linda bop along contentedly. It’s as good a monument as any to The Simpsons’ stubborn refusal to let its celebrity guests steal the spotlight.
11 Everybody Loves Poets Laureate: Robert Pinsky’s generous treatment in his Simpsons guest appearance may well have been the product of a mutual admiration society formed between Pinsky and the show’s writers. In 1998, while he was poet laureate of the United States, Pinsky penned a short love letter to The Simpsons in The New York Times Magazine. Entitled “My Favourite Show,” Pinsky’s article described the show as “brilliantly written for masterful voice actors” and argued that it “penetrates to the nature of television itself.” Three years later, The Simpsons returned the favour with its poet-as-rock-star treatment of Pinsky.
12 Maggie’s Other Lines: Maggie has spoken on six other occasions—including twice in dream sequences and twice in Halloween episodes:
- The Tracey Ullman Show: Maggie spoke her very first words in the original Ullman short, titled “Good Night.” Liz Georges performs the line, “Goodnight, Dad.”
- Dream Sequence No. 1: In Episode 7F07 (“Bart vs. Thanksgiving”), Bart imagines returning home to a hostile family after ruining Thanksgiving. In his fantasy, Maggie removes her pacifier and growls, “It’s your fault I can’t talk!”
- Dream Sequence No. 2: In Episode 8F08 (“Flaming Moe’s”), Homer wanders in a daze through a waking dream in which everyone he encounters—including Maggie—repeats the word “Moe” over and over.
- Halloween Episode No. 1: In one segment of Episode 2F03 (“Treehouse of Horror V”), Homer’s toaster becomes a time machine that transports him to strange parallel universes. In one of them, he returns from the basement to find Maggie at the top of the stairs. She pops her omni present pacifier out of her mouth and speaks. “This is indeed a disturbing universe,” she says, her voice rendered in the deep, ominous baritone of another A-list guest star: James Earl Jones.
- Halloween Episode No. 2: In Episode AABF01 (“Treehouse of Horror IX”), one segment centres on the revelation that Maggie is the daughter of the tentacled, perpetually drooling alien Kang as part of a cross-fertilization experiment. The whole gang—the Simpson family, the now-tentacled Maggie and the aliens (proud dad Kang and his buddy Kodos)—take their weird love triangle to The Jerry Springer Show, where chaos and destruction ensue. Afterwards, the Simpsons trick the aliens into leaving Maggie with them. “Come on, Maggie,” says Homer. “Let’s go home.” “Very well,” Maggie answers in Kang’s voice. “I’ll drive!” She laughs menacingly, and over the closing credits she mutters, “I need blood.” The voice work this time is by a regular Simpsons cast member: Harry Shearer, long-time voice of Kang.
- The Simpsons Movie: After the closing credits, Maggie says, “Sequel?”
13 The Critics Critic: Jon Lovitz’s movie critic, Jay Sherman, was the title character in the closest thing The Simpsons has had to a spinoff: The Critic, a cartoon produced by former (and future) Simpsons staffers Al Jean and Mike Reiss. The Critic debuted on ABC in January 1994 and ran for half a season before being cancelled. The following year, Simpsons executive producer James L. Brooks moved the show to Fox, relaunching it in the coveted time slot immediately after The Simpsons in March 1995 with much fanfare—and a shameless plug from the Simpsons themselves. In Episode 2F31 (“A Star Is Burns”), Sherman comes to Springfield to judge the town’s inaugural film festival. As he arrives in Springfield, we find Bart watching TV. “Coming up next,” a voice-over announces, “The Flintstones meet The Jetsons.” “Uh-oh,” says Bart. “I smell another cheap cartoon crossover.” On cue, Homer walks in with Sherman in tow. “Hey, man,” Bart greets him. “I really love your show. I think all kids should watch it!” He turns away in shame. “Eww, I suddenly feel so dirty,” he mutters.
Despite the self-parodic sugar-coating, this cheap cartoon crossover provoked unprecedented rage from Matt Groening, who had his name removed from the episode’s credits in protest. He explained his anger in a press release: “For more than six months, I tried to convince Jim Brooks and everyone connected with the show not to do such a cynical thing, which would surely be perceived by the fans as nothing more than a pathetic attempt to do nothing more than advertise The Critic at the expense of the integrity of The Simpsons.” Brooks, for his part, told a reporter that Groening’s concerns had led to changes in the Simpsons tie-in episode (such as Bart’s declaration of his dirtiness, perhaps?). Groening, Brooks added, “is a gifted, adorable, cuddly ingrate. But his behavior right now is rotten. And it’s not pretty when a rich man acts like this.”
In the end, The Critic failed to click with Simpsons fans. It was moved from its plum time slot after only five episodes and cancelled for good in May 1995.