Over the lifetime of The Simpsons, hundreds of writers, producers, and animators have helped shape the show, beginning with creators Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, and Sam Simon. Others, including George Meyer, John Swartzwelder, John Vitti, Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, Mike Scully, Ian Maxtone-Graham, Al Jean, and Mike Reiss have left their mark on the series and scores of scripts. Through his attorney, Susan Grode, Groening told me that he wanted to encourage critical studies of the show like this book. However, Grode said that because Groening sees The Simpsons as a collaborative and sometimes collective effort, the show should speak for itself, and he declined further comment.
More than anyone else associated with the show, Groening has been the subject of innumerable interviews and feature stories, but he has rarely spoken about the role of religion in his own life and the show, apart from his comment to Mother Jones about the portrayal of God. He told one British journalist that he considers himself a “crusader against injustice in my own little way. Of course, I’m not advocating the religion of ‘Simpsonism,’ although judging by the fanatics it is almost religious in nature. We cater to obsessive fans.”1 In an interview with Groening about The Simpsons for the Web magazine A.V. Club on April 26, 2006, Nathan Rubin asked, “From the beginning, the show has dealt with faith more openly and extensively than anything else on television. Was that by design?” Matt replied, “We had the ability to do it, and because it’s a cartoon, we can show all aspects of religiosity. It’s not just the family saying grace, which would be dreadful in isolation, but we also show eternal hellfire, the Devil, and even God, who is a 12-foot-high guy in a long white robe with five fingers and a big white beard. So that’s fun. We haven’t shown God’s face, except once in a ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episode when Kang and Kodos used an accela-ray on a boring baseball game and ended up collapsing the universe. Generally, you don’t see his face, but I always thought that we should show God’s head with a long, white beard, with his face blurred out because of internal illumination, but the top of his head would have Homer’s two little hairs.”
At various times, Groening has said he patterned the character of Bart after himself, the cartoon strip character Dennis the Menace (but not the television version), and the character of Eddie Haskell in the television series Leave It to Beaver. Haskell, he told a television interviewer, “was the bad kid, and he got away with stuff, and I liked that. I thought, ‘Eddie Haskell should have his own show and when I grow up, I’m going to do my own show and it’s going to star Eddie Haskell or a version thereof.’ Hence, Bart Simpson.”2 Springfield, he said, was named for the hometown in another early television show, Father Knows Best.
The cartoonist grew up in a middle-class home in Portland, Oregon, the son of Homer and Marge Groening and the brother of four siblings, including sisters named Lisa and Maggie. He told My Generation magazine in 2001 that his relationship with his father—who was himself a cartoonist, filmmaker, and advertising executive—was “contentious.” Homer Groening was raised a Mennonite and spoke German until he attended school, his son told the magazine. Matt recalled in numerous interviews that his was by and large a happy childhood; he favored Dr. Seuss books and, as an aspiring eleven-year-old cartoonist, began imitating Batman comics. He did get into periodic scrapes in elementary school that landed him, like Bart, in the principal’s office.
His career as a Boy Scout foundered on his refusal to cut his long hair and the trip on which he took the Gideon Bible from his motel room, thinking it was free. “The scoutmaster screamed, ‘You stole this Bible on top of everything else?’” he recalled. “So I prayed to God and said, ‘I know you’ll forgive me for not believing in you.’ . . . Basically I was a pagan.” Groening made good grades in high school and was elected student body president. He also spent a lot of time in his room, listening to rock music and perusing magazines famous for their cartoons—The New Yorker, Esquire, and Punch—and read a book that impressed him, Walter Kaufmann’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy. “I had a strong sense of bitterness and self-pity,” he said in an interview with Richard von Busack in 1986, published in MetroActive magazine in 2000.
The teenager continued to do good deeds, even without the Boy Scout merit badges. For a time he worked in the kitchen of a convalescent home. But he was rejected when he applied to Harvard in the mid-1970s. Instead, he went to Evergreen State University in Olympia, an experimental, progressive college where he was editor and cartoonist for the campus daily, The Cooper Point Journal, and a friend of the artist and cartoonist Lynda Barry. He enjoyed his time at college and returned the favor by situating the Simpsons’ household on Evergreen Terrace.
Early influences on his comic art were polar opposites: Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, and the ribald, 1960s undergound cartoonist R. Crumb. Groening moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s, recalling that he lived in “a seedy Hollywood apartment.” He did a variety of odd jobs and hawked his original comics until he launched his alternative comic strip, “Life in Hell.” One of his strips was entitled “What Not to Say During Moments of Intimacy” and included this one: “O My Lord in Heaven, forgive me for this vile sin I am about to commit.” For nearly a decade, he worked on the strip in his garage, “lonely and socially backward,” he told TV Host magazine in 1989.
In the late 1980s, award-winning film and television producer James L. Brooks, a fan of Life in Hell, tapped him to help develop cartoon vignettes—which would later become The Simpsons—for The Tracey Ullman Show. It was a good match. Brooks had also produced The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi for television and made the Academy Award–winning Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and Jerry Maguire for the big screen. Brooks said in a broadcast interview that he believes that “television is probably one of the last stands for writer control. A writer can still control his work almost utterly on television.”3 At a meeting of the Television Critics tour in January 2007, Brooks reflected, “The thing I love most about the show is that you can do any form of comedy. You can do low comedy, high comedy, romantic comedy. You can take it any place.”
Groening, who by some media accounts has had his ups and downs with Brooks since they began working together, gave much of the credit for the series’ success to the producer. “It was his clout that allowed the show to be made without compromise,” the cartoonist said.4 Neither Brooks nor Groening nor anyone else present at the creation was prepared for the worldwide phenomenon The Simpsons became. Over the years since, Groening has played a diminishing role in the show’s day-to-day production, telling interviewers he sticks his nose in the door every so often and keeps an eye on his characters. “Matt is good at keeping the writers honest,” said Mike Scully. “If he thinks Homer is becoming too insane, he’ll pull us back.”
In 1999, Groening launched another animated comedy for Fox, Futurama, set in the year 3000, where one target of satire was the “Church of Robotology.” Here again, Groening took a shot at Scientology, which is ironic in light of the fact that Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, is an outspoken Scientologist. In a 1997 interview with National Public Radio, Cartwright said that once she started practicing the religion in 1989, her reaction was, “Oh, God. This is cool.” She said that Scientology is different from other faiths: “not like a real religion . . . you don’t pray.” She said she found both a spiritual life and a husband when she discovered Scientology. The writing of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard “totally makes sense to me,” she said, and in her autobiography, My Life as a 10-Year-Old Boy, she describes Hubbard as a “humanitarian,” although she makes no other mention of Scientology in the book. One of the show’s writers told me that producers vetoed an episode-length swat at Scientology in fear of the group’s reputation for suing and harassing opponents. Other character voices part ways with the parts they play. Harry Shearer, the voice of Ned Flanders and Reverend Lovejoy, said in an interview with the online magazine FilmForce that these two parts no more reflected his personal spiritual and theological views “than doing the voice of Otto (the stoned school bus driver) has affected my choice of intoxicants.”5
Groening’s interview with Mother Jones was one of the most incisive and revealing of his moral moorings. In both The Simpsons and Futurama, he said, he has tried to use the guise of light entertainment to wake people up “to some of the ways we’re being manipulated and exploited” by modern American culture. The Simpsons’ message, in particular, is that “your moral authorities don’t always have your best interest in mind. Teachers, principals, clergymen, politicians—for The Simpsons, they’re all goofballs, and I think that’s a great message for kids.”6 In a more recent interview with the Spanish language newspaper La Opinion in Los Angeles, he said that the show was “secretly educational, not for giving sermons or giving lectures about morality. The Simpsons is good for children because it’s about learning how to tell a story.”7 Despite the series’ underlying support for marriage, family, and values, Groening’s wife, Deborah, told the Seattle Times, “Republicans and religious fanatics don’t always get Matt’s intentions. . . . [They] keep trying to convert Matt because they’re worried he’s going straight to hell—the real hell.”8 And, at one point, the burly, bearded father of two acknowledged that he did not permit his own elementary school age sons to watch The Simpsons.
Without live, aging actors and their egos to deal with, The Simpsons has evolved into a writers’ medium. “As a writer,” said Mike Scully, an executive producer who joined the show in 1993, “you really get spoiled on The Simpsons. I tell all our younger guys to enjoy this while it lasts, because you’ll never have it this good again from a creative standpoint.” Groening admitted that if he hadn’t help create the series he probably wouldn’t have been hired to write for it. “It’s next to impossible to break into the inner circle unless you went to Harvard with one of those eggheads,” he said, later referring to them as “Harvard-grad-brainiac-bastard-eggheads.”9 Richard Appel, a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School, left a job with the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan to write comedy in Los Angeles, where he joined other members of the Harvard Lampoon on The Simpsons in the 1990s. “It’s like there’s a conveyor belt now of people coming out here,” he told the New York Times in 1997.
When I first approached Simpsons writers in 2000 to ask them about the frequently positive portrayal of faith in the series, they seemed extremely reticent to acknowledge this fact, even when presented with example after example. It didn’t fit the show’s edgy, antiauthoritarian image and reputation. Their fallback position— always offered on an off-the-record basis—was that the large role of religion in The Simpsons was merely “creative desperation.” No one on the staff imagined the series would last as long as it has, and they simply began running out of situations for their situation comedy, especially one in which characters did not mature or fundamentally change. For a variety of cultural and economic reasons, religion had not been worn out by previous decades of network sitcoms. Thus, religion in The Simpsons. This may be true, at least in part, but I have my doubts. Writers, even the most cynical on the surface, tend to be thwarted idealists—disappointed or, as one observer suggested, “mugged by reality.”
Typical of the writers who have shaped the series from the beginning is George Meyer, who started writing for the show in 1989 and wrote the episode “Homer the Heretic.” Raised in Arizona, the oldest of eight children in a Catholic household, he was an A student in school, on the speech team, editor of the school paper, and an Eagle Scout. At Harvard, he was elected to head the Lampoon, the fabled humor magazine. After graduation, he was accepted to medical school but gravitated to comedy writing, working for David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. Scully called Meyer “the best comedy writer in Hollywood.” The myriad of writers, producers, and consultants listed at the end of each Simpsons episode makes it nearly impossible for anyone outside the show to know (or recall) who was responsible for what joke or what plot twist. Much of the credit, most agree, goes to Meyer.
“I felt I was a happy kid,” Meyer said in a 2000 New Yorker profile, which was written by David Owen, his Harvard roommate and longtime friend. But, as a Catholic, “I did feel that I was made to shoulder a lot of burdens that shouldn’t have been mine—such as the frustrations of older women wearing nun costumes. People talk about how horrible it is to be brought up Catholic, and it’s all true. The main thing was that there was no sense of proportion. I would chew a piece of gum at school, and the nun would say, ‘Jesus is very angry with you about that,’ and on the wall behind her would be a dying, bleeding guy on a cross. That’s a horrifying image to throw at a little kid. You really could almost think that your talking in line, say, was on a par with killing Jesus. You weren’t sure, and there was never a moderating voice.”10
Another import from the Letterman show—and former Lampoon president—was Jeff Martin, who wrote for the series for three of the early seasons. Martin also came equipped with considerable knowledge of evangelical Protestantism. He is the son of William Martin, the author of A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story and With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, and professor of the sociology of religion at Rice University. “We were active in church when the boys were growing up,” said William Martin, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. The family attended a Church of Christ in Massachusetts and, later, a moderate Southern Baptist Church in Houston, which he described as being “ecumenical, with evangelical roots.” Family ties were also strong, William Martin said. “Nearly all of our relatives are actively religious, and Jeff saw a very positive representation of that tradition.” His son “grew up recognizing that there were a lot of healthy and positive aspects to it, seeing the good sides of sincere, positive, true belief.”
Martin admitted that he and his wife were skeptical about Jeff’s move from the Letterman show to The Simpsons: “When he told us he was going to California to write an animated show about a loser working-class family, we thought, ‘This is a bad career move.’ ” But at Rice, being the father of a writer for The Simpsons has turned out to carry considerable cachet, he said. “I get lots of mileage out of it.” He never missed an episode and, early on, found himself providing informal script consultation to Jeff. “He would call about scripture or reference or phrase or a song—some technical point.”
For his part, Jeff Martin said, “I knew I could always call my parents” for background information on religion, in addition to calling on his own memories. “My extended family contains many, many people who have an abiding faith that sustains them.” Not surprisingly, he liked writing for the Flanders family. “Their religion obviously gives them a great deal of happiness and guidance, and the writing staff has respect for that. Ned is a truly nice man.” But Jeff said he had a particular affinity for the two boys, Rod and Todd: “I’d have them singing songs I learned in vacation Bible school when I was a kid.”
As an industry, comedy writing is dominated by Catholics, Jews, and atheists, which made Martin a valuable resource in creating episodes of The Simpsons. In the months-long process— which is at once cooperative and competitive—script ideas are proposed, outlined, written, rewritten, and polished, often by more than a dozen writers and producers on a single episode. “I was in a minority as a Protestant, but I wouldn’t say anyone deferred to me. It wasn’t a case of me being an expert, although I suppose I did have more hands-on experience with a Protestant service.” Martin moved on from The Simpsons to become cocreator of another animated series about a family, Baby Blues.
Steve Tompkins, a veteran of three seasons with the series during the mid-1990s, was another writer who brought a Protestant perspective to The Simpsons. His insight is valuable because he is also a distinctive voice for religious values in Hollywood’s high-powered world of animated comedies. Most of the writers on the show “were atheist Jews or atheist Christians, and only two of us were churchgoing Christians when I was there.” Yet, when Tompkins and I first spoke, for a short article in Christianity Today magazine, he admitted to being wary of being identified as a Christian in print, in part because the label can be the kiss of death for a comedy writer. “The two are seen as antithetical,” he said, sounding perplexed by the notion that a self-described class clown like himself should have to choose between the kingdom of heaven and a successful writing career. “I do believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that he was crucified, and that he rose again.” Tompkins was raised an Episcopalian in an upscale Massachusetts town, where he attended the same church as the novelist John Updike. As a child, he recalled watching Davey and Goliath, an early animated show produced by the Lutheran Church that used biblical themes, before going to church on Sundays.
Tompkins drifted from faith in his twenties, like many young people. While writing for The Simpsons, he had what he called a “reconversion experience,” one he emphasized was unrelated to his comedy writing. Because he had not fallen out of faith, Tompkins hesitated to call it a born-again experience: “A little slice of me made itself known again. When that happened it informed my life, but didn’t transform my life.”
In the fall of 2000, Tompkins showed clips from Simpsons episodes while speaking at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, on a program entitled “Does God Have a Sense of Humor?” as part of the school’s “Reel Spirituality” series. He admitted that writing for Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa was a challenge. “There were some rabid atheists at The Simpsons,” he said, yet it was not as much of a challenge as believers might think. “If you look at The Simpsons, no matter how twisted the story, no matter how profane the jokes, goodness wins, goodness prevails. No matter how much those writers pride themselves as being atheists, probably deep down, they’re not. They have love for humanity, and they love those characters.” (Like many Christians, Tompkins equates believing in God with loving humanity and assumes that not believing is the same thing as not loving humanity. Atheists, who sometimes prefer the term “humanist,” say they act in a moral and humane way because it is the right thing to do, not because they are bound by some supernatural set of beliefs.)
Tompkins too is a graduate of Harvard University and the Lampoon, and so was well equipped for the vigorous cut-and-thrust of The Simpsons’ writing regime. “You pride yourself on being able to pitch jokes on any subject, no matter how blasphemous or sacrilegious,” said Tompkins, who has also written for comedies such as In Living Color and Everybody Loves Raymond. “Whatever your religious beliefs might be, the process doesn’t injure your personal spirit at all.” In fact, he said, being able to participate fully in this raucous “room” can inoculate writers from concerns that they are pushing a particular agenda.
“At The Simpsons, you are reined in,” Tompkins said. “You can’t stick your neck out and do anything that’s overtly religious on its face. You must undercut it. There’s a gag reflex in comedy writers to undercut any honest religious sentiment. It is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to make a comedy writer quote scripture with a straight face.” The key, he said, is “respecting the faith of the characters because it’s true to the characters. I think that’s what’s going on in the best moments of The Simpsons. Marge’s faith is respected because that is a huge part of who she is as a character. Homer has no faith, so we use him to tromp over Marge’s faith, or whatever needs to be done comedic-ally.” At times, the show does seem to engage in “blasphemy for blasphemy’s sake, an omnidirectional assault on all that’s sacred.” It helps, he says, that “no one really takes its blasphemy seriously. The things that should be mocked are mocked, and the things that shouldn’t be mocked are mocked.”
Tompkins worked on several Simpsons episodes that dealt with religion, the church, and faith, including the one in which Ned, like the Bible’s Job, has his faith tested. “There is a tremendous amount of affection for Ned” among the writers, he said. That episode, “Hurricane Neddy,” used as its comedic premise a faithful Christian singled out for devastation, and “how a person behaves in times of crisis.” Still, he insisted that, for the most part, he is a secular writer. “I had no ax to grind at The Simpsons. I believe the quality of humor is in indirect proportion to one’s true belief. The more those beliefs are put in, the less funny it gets. The characters on The Simpsons do not represent the writers’ faith.” This is in contrast to Touched by an Angel, where, he said, “the stories those show-runners are creating really represent the way the world should be, could be.” Touched by an Angel takes a more direct approach, using its content to communicate the message, Tompkins said, a conscious choice which works well for that show. “The Simpsons doesn’t do that. The mark of good writing is letting the message be true to the characters, to honor their beliefs and keep them sacred to the character.”
Ian Maxtone-Graham is an articulate representative of nonbelievers on The Simpsons staff, and he confirmed Tompkins’s observation about the show’s frenetic writing and rewriting process. This is especially true when it comes to the matter of credits for writers. “The titles don’t mean much,” he said. “Everyone’s in the room and pretty much everyone moves up the ladder to ‘co-executive producer.’ Then there are the ‘consulting producers’ who—it’s too complicated. We’re all writers. The ‘writer’ of the episode wrote the first draft. It might be their story; might not. They might keep 80 percent of their jokes and lines. Most likely they’ll keep way fewer. To my knowledge, no Simpsons writing credit has been disputed or arbitrated by the Writers’ Guild. The first-draft guy or gal keeps the writing credit come hell or page one rewrite.”
Maxtone-Graham, who has written many episodes, also confirmed Tompkins’s description of the theological mix among writers: “There are many, many atheists in that room.” A graduate of Brown University, National Lampoon magazine, and Saturday Night Live, Maxtone-Graham grew up in New York in an Episcopal family but never attended church. “I don’t believe in God particularly,” he told me, “although I always enjoyed Christmas carols. You don’t need to believe in all the religious details to have it work. You don’t have to believe in a higher power.”
Music has been a path to spirituality of a sort for Maxtone-Graham. He helped write the popular “Hanukkah Song,” cowritten and introduced by Adam Sandler on Saturday Night Live, as well as a Kwanzaa song for that show. In the early 1990s, Maxtone-Graham also wrote new lyrics for the classic “Silver Bells,” which was sung by Glenn Close, who was hosting the holiday SNL, in her opening monologue. The Academy Award–winning actress was accompanied by about a dozen residents of her hometown in upstate New York.
“It was in the middle of a huge blizzard in New York,” he recalled. “These poor guys—none of them performers—had come down to sing on national television. I had spent several hours teaching them the song, and I conducted them, quite inexpertly. Everyone was nervous, but they did a hell of a job, and the audience loved it. At the end of the song, they dropped artificial snow onto the stage, and the effect was just magical. A colleague came up to me and told me it had made her cry. It was a deeply moving experience, one of the greatest I have ever had as a writer. It was a hugely emotional moment for me. And I’m sure that’s what got me interested in writing ‘religious’ songs.”
After joining The Simpsons, Maxtone-Graham made a study of Christian rock music. His nonbelief notwithstanding, Maxtone-Graham wrote the episode in which Maude Flanders dies, including the moving, contemporary Christian rock song that sets up the dramatic reconciliation between Ned and his faith. This preparation helped him understand the characters’ religious life. “It seems like a natural, everyday thing that they go to church,” he said, “but they are not slavishly devoted to organized religion. They like the routine of going to church. And that’s probably the way most people feel. They all have their skeptical moments.”
It was while writing for The Simpsons that the skeptical Maxtone-Graham developed his own serious interest in religion and in the Bible. He stumbled across the book Gospel Truth: The New Image of Jesus Emerging from Science and History, and Why It Matters, by the journalist Russell Shorto. In part, Maxtone-Graham said he liked the book, which relies on the scholarship of the Jesus Seminar, because the author does not come from “a religion-hating background.” He was so impressed with the work that he loaned it and gave it as a gift to other Simpsons writers. Before long, he was reading Jesus: A Life and Paul: The Mind of the Apostle, both by A. N. Wilson. “I was fascinated by the truth behind the New Testament. It turned me into a Bible know-it-all, but it didn’t make me more or less religious. I admire many of the things Jesus said, but I’m not religious. I never was.”
In writing about religion for the series, he said, “there is an attempt to universalize things without losing the Middle American flavor of their church, to leave it open to many intelligent people who are atheists.” Thus, in writing about Flanders’s crisis of faith following Maude’s death, the viewer can interpret Ned’s return to the church as God’s answer to his prayers, or, for skeptics, that Ned simply found the inner resources to cope with his loss. “It seemed to have a message that works for both sides,” Maxtone-Graham said.
Mike Reiss is one of those “Jewish atheists” on the show’s writing staff. “I know Jewish culture,” he said. “I was bar mitzvahed, but I’ve never been a believer. It’s a rich culture full of interesting quirks, yet sometimes I wish Jewish kids would go to karate class rather than Hebrew school.” Reiss grew up and attended synagogue in a Connecticut city that was home to only fifty Jews out of a population of fifty thousand. He went to Harvard, where he roomed with future Simpsons writer Al Jean, who would become his longtime writing partner. Both worked on the Lampoon, where Reiss said Jewish and Irish students tended to congregate.
His atheism notwithstanding, Reiss said, “I don’t know any show that covers religion like The Simpsons does. The very best episodes are the ones that take a big, big issue like religion and look at it, and turn it upside down and examine it from all angles. We know there’s no one answer to these things. It’s one of those really big topics we come back to a lot, and I’m glad we do.” If The Simpsons seems to favor religion, he said, it’s more of a case of “being nice by accident. . . . As writers for the series, we go to church partly for mockery and comic value, for its ripe comic potential. Homer is always punished for his sins, and always punished way out of proportion. But there has always been a basic humanity to the show, and sometimes that manifests itself religiously.”
Not that there aren’t limits, even for an atheist, he said. “Every writer has built-in boundaries, a taste level that they won’t cross. I consider myself one of the most conservative guys. The name ‘Jesus’ comes in as a punch line every so often. The show has gotten more sacrilegious as time has gone on. There’s much more leeway. The cartoon format provides a buffer against these hard issues. The best live action sitcom couldn’t play with religion the way The Simpsons does. You can’t beat the cuteness factor, it looks so innocuous.” The show’s writers have learned through experience that viewers are willing to accept jokes and situations if they are presented in an animated form. In a larger sense, humor does not touch the same nerve with the faithful as drama. The Last Temptation of Christ, a serious attempt at portraying the gospel, attracted far more Christian protests than the outrageously blasphemous Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
In an interview with the Australian magazine Encore in August 2005, Reiss said, “We try really hard not to have a political message with The Simpsons. When we do an episode or cover a topic and we start to feel like we’re preaching or pushing too far in the one direction we’ll take a right turn and go in the opposite direction. I think it’s one reason we’re popular; any point of view watches our show and goes, ‘Oh they support us.’” Being able to have it both ways, Reiss said, has its advantages. “It’s a good lesson not only in entertainment but also in politics. That is, never say anything. Or say just enough to make people think you’re on their side. You can generally see our bias come out. Another thing is that we make vicious fun of Republican conservatives on our show. We had an episode where we showed that Dracula was a member of the Springfield Republican Party and the guy who wrote that joke is an archconservative Republican. He wrote that joke because that’s the funny joke to make about Republicans. You take a stand because that’s where the comedy is.” That may have been what the writers had in mind years later, when they had Homer, as a Puritan taking the wheel of the storm-tossed Mayflower, promise Marge he would stay alive long enough “for all you fundamentalist Christians to take over by the twenty-first century.”
In 2000, Reiss wrote a children’s book called How Murray Saved Christmas, in which a Jewish delicatessen owner fills in for Santa Claus. Although there were some obvious Jewish references in the manuscript, Reiss said that his editor, a gentile from North Dakota, kept pressing him to add more. It was the same dynamic he experienced when he and Al Jean wrote Simpsons episodes together. Everyone assumed that he was the source of any “Jewish” material, when, in fact, as often as not it came from his Catholic partner. “In the writing room, Jewish people are there to provide authenticity—and pronunciation,” Reiss said. “It’s the gentiles who get a real kick out of this stuff.”
“I consider myself someone who believes in the teachings of Jesus Christ but who is not a huge fan of organized religion,” said Al Jean, who returned to the job as The Simpsons’ show-runner in 2001. “We respect everyone’s belief.” Jean began working on the show in 1989 and, with Reiss, is credited in over 200 episodes, which provides him with perspective on the way the presentation of religion in the series has evolved. “Often things on the show grow of their own accord,” he said. “We didn’t set out on the show with an agenda. But very early on we showed characters going to church, and we began exploring that venue, which was obviously very rich. So, for example, we looked at the Ten Commandments as source material. As writers, we are always looking for aspects of life that are undercovered or underrepresented on TV, and religion is definitely one of them.” And the frequent inclusion of and favorable slant on faith? “It wasn’t because of any conscious attempt at the beginning,” he said. “We didn’t want to take cheap shots. It was a subject that was not explored much in prime-time sitcoms. We’re not perfect, but we definitely are very thoughtful and funny. The show is something a family can watch.”
Jean acknowledged that there are some taboos in the religion area; crucifixion or resurrection jokes are generally off limits. “People are very sensitive to those things,” he said. “Images of Christ on the cross, things like that can’t avoid offending a huge group of people. We’re pretty cautious about that.” Crossing such lines, he said, “would erode all the goodwill the show generates and would undermine the show’s moral messages.”
While there are people on the staff who may now be irreligious, he said, religion plays a part in The Simpsons because the writers were raised in middle- or upper-middle-class homes where faith and observance were part of their lives. “We’re just aiming to depict what we saw as reality. We just want you to believe these are real people. Without a doubt, religion has been accepted in the show because it is reflective of life, but we never forget that comedy is the real point of it all.”
Particular care is taken not to single out one denomination or another for praise or pillory, Jean said. “I can’t say one faith is right over another.” Salvation by faith is eclipsed by salvation by works for a very simple reason. “As writers, we’re always interested in dramatic actions. Works are more interesting to watch than grace.”
Over the years, The Simpsons has made fun of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Hindus. Jean, a Catholic, admitted that Muslims have also been largely off limits. In one episode, however, Homer explains that Muslims once worshiped turtles and badgers.
Inverting history, he says, “Thank God we’ve come to our senses and worship a carpenter who lived two thousand years ago.” Jean said, “One reason [for largely ignoring Muslims] is, I don’t think we’ve had a writer who was Muslim,” noting that there was a chill resulting from the Salman Rushdie affair. “It’s a faith where you don’t want to offend, because we’re not Muslim, and we’re not sure what might be offensive.” In retrospect, it was a wise choice, given the worldwide outcry in 2006 over Danish cartoons—widely reprinted in Europe—that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad.
As early as October 2005, there were indications of the cultural pitfalls of integrating The Simpsons’ brand of humor with Islamic sensibilities. Officials at an Arab cable network, MBC-TV, announced that they would be initiating broadcasts of The Simpsons in Arabic, just in time for the holy month of Ramadan. “I think The Simpsons will open new horizons for us to the future,” Michel Costandi, the network’s business-development vice president, told the Wall Street Journal. “We are opening up a new genre of programming in the Middle East.” Of course, there would be some changes, in addition to prominent Egyptian actors such as Mohamed Heneidy voicing the roles. The family would be called “al Shamshoon,” and Homer would be known as Omar. Bart would be Badr. In accordance with Qur’anic law, beer became soda and Moe’s bar was gone. Also gone were Homer’s beloved pork chops. Doughnuts became the Arab confection known called “khak.” Barbecued Egyptian beef sausages replaced hot dogs. No mention was made of how Krusty, the Jewish clown, would appear.
Arabs on the street in Muslim countries and Arab American academics voiced skepticism that something so uniquely American could be translated into another culture, despite the fact that the show already airs in more than seventy countries worldwide. After watching a promo for the Arab version of the show, As’ad Abu Khalil, a professor at California State University, Stanislaus, denounced the cultural hybrid as “beyond the pale” on his “Angry Arab” blog. “It was just painful,” the self-proclaimed “huge fan” of The Simpsons wrote. “The guy who played Homer was one of the most unfunny people I ever watched.” Later, after watching a complete episode, Abu Khalil amplified his initial reaction, which was quoted in the Wall Street Journal story: “It was worse than what I had expected, but at least I knew what the problem was. . . . It became obvious while watching it that none of the people who either translated, or produced, or acted in the series had watched or understood the original Simpsons. The entire personality of Homer was missed. . . . It is just worse than being unfunny: it is painful to watch. You feel sorry for the original talents behind the real Simpsons, and you feel sorry for the Egyptian actors being part of a most unfunny show. And it is obvious that those who translated the show were not people who know idiomatic American English expressions and nuances. So much of the show was missed.” Al Jean, The Simpsons’ show-runner at the time, was equally doubtful about Homer’s transformation. “Well,” he said, “if he doesn’t eat bacon and, you know, generally act like a pig, which I know is also against Islam, then I don’t think it’s Homer.” In the end, Fox quietly killed the deal, citing provisions in the standard syndication agreement that require network approval for all script and content alterations.
Why do the writers and creators believe the role of religion in the show has gone unnoticed until the 1990s? “Two or three things can pigeonhole a show,” Jean said in 2000. “Our pigeonhole was that we were the outrageous show that had no conscience. We got this bad boy image since the beginning, but over the past ten years it has evaporated. We’re a little less outrageous compared to South Park. People are looking beyond the surface. There is a thoughtful core to the show. We believe in the little guy, the triumph of the family. Our characters are real; they want love and companionship in the end.”