The most audacious feat of multimedia crosswording
The best single puzzle from the first century of the crossword was published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times on November 16, 2008. It has more than a passing connection with the episode of The Simpsons that was broadcast that night—“Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words”—and the story starts the previous spring.
One of the writer-producers from the Simpsons team attended a talk at University of California, Los Angeles in May 2007. The speaker was New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz and came in the wake of the documentary Wordplay, in which we get an affecting glimpse of the intense world of crossword tournaments (see the chapter FAST above).
Simpsons supremo James L. Brooks was inspired by these scenes and decided to afflict Lisa with a love of wordplay and send her to a “Citywide Crossword Tournament”—hence the meeting that followed the UCLA talk, at which it was agreed that Shortz would help out with the story of Lisa’s new hobby and make a cameo appearance. That was nowhere close to the ambition realized in the broadcast episode, but for the time being, it was an excellent fit.
(It should also be noted that The Simpsons has contributed handsomely to the English language: Homer’s annoyed grunt is a more satisfying sense of DOH than “Fiber of the gomuti palm,” as those three letters were clued in the first-ever crossword; MEH is a splendid way of expressing indifference; and until the line of dialogue “it’s a perfectly cromulent word,” English had been lacking a facetious way of insisting that something is legitimate in order to convey that it isn’t.)
In the story, an irrepressible Lisa becomes a crossword convert. Her school superintendent finds her making crossing words out of the playground’s hopscotch squares—a compulsion to see puzzles where none exist that is familiar to solvers old and young—and he inspires her to enter a puzzle tournament. Naturally, she reaches the final.
Homer, gambling in a nearby bar, bets against her, and when Lisa discovers his treachery, we witness some heartbreaking scenes: Homer is at a loss for how to make it up to his daughter, and a distraught Lisa gives up on solving altogether. Toward the end of the episode, Marge suggests that the New York Times puzzle might be a cheering way for Lisa to spend a couple of hours.
Lisa’s fire is reignited: “A couple of hours?! I can do the Sunday puzzle in less than one hour. ‘Couple of hours’!”—and on completing that day’s puzzle in record time, she notices something unusual hidden in the main diagonal: DUMBDADSORRYFORHISBET.
Yes, a chastened Homer has persuaded Will Shortz to publish a puzzle with an apology in the form of a secret message. That might seem like a fanciful piece of fiction, but as we saw in the chapter NINA above, advanced-level constructors are prone to using the diagonals or perimeters of their puzzles to conceal secret messages.
Yet there’s another reason why DUMBDADSORRYFORHISBET is not unrealistic: It was real. That is, the puzzle that Lisa solves was an actual puzzle, printed in the edition of the real-world New York Times that was published on the day of the episode’s first broadcast.
This is where Will Shortz went one better than the Simpsons team’s ambitions. He had commissioned Merl Reagle, one of the NYT’s most playful and imaginative constructors, to construct the grid. Three decades before, Reagle had gone to an alternative weekly called the Los Angeles Reader and suggested that they publish some puzzles he’d been compiling. As he approached the building, he was hoping to meet the paper’s cartoonist, the then little-known Matt Groening, who of course went on to create The Simpsons. He discovered that he had just passed him on the way in. Talking to the Times’s crossword blog in 2008, he ruefully recalled:
If I had arrived just 15 seconds sooner I would’ve had the chance to meet him and tell him how much I liked his comic and I’ve always imagined that we would’ve been at least casual friends from that day on. I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought about those 15 seconds.
In 2008 Reagle made up for this missed opportunity in spades, designing all the puzzles featured in “Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words”—including those Lisa makes from the hopscotch squares. Even though none of the grids appears for long, Reagle was insistent that any solvers among the viewers should feel that the show had taken the trouble to get the crosswords right.
This attention to detail is sadly lacking in most television crossword props. Devoted solvers get used to having the illusion of reality punctured by glimpses of asymmetrical grids or implausible clueing devices, even in programs and films where the attention to detail is otherwise impeccable. Pity the ardent crossworder when he or she beholds in unbelieving horror the complete absence of 1 acrosses or 1 downs in the puzzles containing apparent kill orders in espionage series Rubicon, or the action-comedy movie Hot Fuzz, in which the puzzle tackled by Billie Whitelaw’s hotelier has a jaw-dropping 59 percent proportion of black squares.
If you want to avoid a subset of your audience drifting off, harrumphing, “Since when did a national newspaper allow two-letter entries?,” the lesson is a clear one. If you need a fictional crossword, tell your props master or mistress to subcontract the work to a constructor. Any constraint the script might put on them is just the kind of challenge they like, and for no other reason than that they can work within it. At one point in “Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words,” Lisa’s tournament rival announces: “I think I’ll warm up with a bunch of Qs,” and dots his competition grid with them. It’s a gag, but Reagle constructed a workable grid with Qs exactly where the animators had arbitrarily thrown them.
As for the final puzzle, everyone involved was aware that the reveal would be incredible for any viewers who had solved that day’s New York Times puzzle. There is the odd Simpsons reference—MAGGIE hidden in TEXASA&MAGGIES, for example, but nothing that would arouse suspicions of conspiracy. Unless, that is, you’re so familiar with the show’s theme tune that you noticed that the other diagonal contained the letters:
F A B D C A F D B B B C B B B C E F F F F
These are the final twenty-one notes of the melody; the E is in fact an E-flat, but Reagle had of course made sure that the answer containing the E was, well, EFLAT. Otherwise, the plan was that solvers should work on what they believed was a completely normal Sunday puzzle, then see yellow animated fingers working on the same grid that same evening.
Even in the unlikely event that anyone spotted that message in the diagonal, DUMBDADSORRYFORHISBET, it would have meant nothing to anyone who hadn’t been working on the show. One of the greatest pleasures in themed puzzles is what crossworders call the “penny-drop moment,” but never before or since has the pleasure been as delayed or as gratifying as watching Lisa mutter some clues you’d solved that morning before realizing that the denouement of the episode has been hiding in plain view.
There is a good overlap between those who solve the NYT on Sundays and Simpsons viewers, and minds were undoubtedly fried. New York magazine’s Nitsuh Abebe was solving while he watched, and says, “There was this slow and uncanny real-time convergence between the two.” He began to wonder if he was “just imagining arcane connections between television and reality,” and the moment of revelation was “like being Bruce Willis at the end of The Sixth Sense.”
And that was not all. The fictional Reagle adds that Homer also asked him to include an implausibly demanding acrostic relating to a subplot in which Lisa decides to change her surname from Simpson to Marge’s maiden name, Bouvier. So the first letters of the clues read, in order: DEAR LISA YOU MAKE ME SO HAPPY REALLY REALLY REALLY HAPPY SORRY HE TOLD ME I NEEDED A HUNDRED FORTY FOUR LETTERS WHAT WAS MY POINT AGAIN OH RIGHT BOUVIER OR SIMPSON I CHERISH YOU.
This idea for the acrostic came from the real-world Reagle; while he might have regretted it when the scriptwriters sent back a message that meant so many clues had to begin with the letter Y, the worlds of crosswords and television would be so much poorer without this remarkable feat of construction.
(There are other ways of scrambling solvers’ minds, of course—not all of them as welcome . . .)