When a schoolmate convinced me that The Simpsons was more than just some fad prime-time kid's cartoon/T-shirt sales device, and I actually watched the show, I was hooked and I was amazed. Even three decades later, having watched all of the episodes from its eight-season "golden age" countless times, The Simpsons still seems like magic to me. How did the writers pack so many jokes into those first 178 episodes? How did the rhythm seemingly never go slack (especially when we're talking about seasons 2 through 7)? How did it pile in so much wit, originality, and genuine hilarity when every other comedy on TV was lucky to squeak out a couple of good laughs over the course of an entire season? Were its writers some sort of alien beings like Kang and Kodos? Had they been enchanted like some sort of pacifier-producing monkey's paw? Were they the biggest men in the world and covered in gold...14-karat gold?
Yes, writers like Sam Simon, John Swartzwelder, Conan O'Brien, George Meyer, Jennifer Crittenden, Al Jean, Mike Reiss, and the rest were almost supernaturally funny, but what really set them apart from the other TV comedy writers of their generation is that they just worked really, really, really hard. They put in twelve hour days. They worked weekends. They managed to shove three weeks of work into a two-week episode turnaround schedule. They kept themselves sane by ritualizing lunch orders. A lot of times, they didn't really keep themselves sane, which is why writer burn out on the Simpsons staff was pretty high, and why the show couldn't maintain its outrageously high quality for more than eight seasons. That it was so good for as long as that is a pretty stunning feat in itself.
The amount of work that it took to make The Simpsons the hands-down funniest show that has ever been on TV is the big takeaway from Stupid TV, Be More Funny, but there's so much more in Alan Siegel's new book than making-of accounts. Siegel surveys the comedy scene of the nineties that spawned the show and the artifacts that originally gave its writers a taste for the anarchic (Bill Dozier's Batman and MAD Magazine were two big influences). He explains its Tracey Ullman Show origins, revisits the Bart-obsessed popularity of its first season, offers anecdotes about its guest stars (Ringo! Dustin Hoffman! Leonard Nimoy! Peter Frampton!), deals with its official and unofficial merchandise, scrutinizes its controversies, and explains how it literally changed TV and, yes, the country, in a way that isn't glib or stretched but perfectly cromulent.
There are fascinating bits of trivia (The Simpsons might have been black and white; Roy from "Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie" was inspired by a serious suggestion from a clueless network exec, who thought the show needed to be refreshed with a new teen character who gets biz-ay consistently and thoroughly; etc.). There are deep looks at pivotal episodes like "Lisa's Substitute", "Marge vs. the Monorail", and "Brush with Greatness". And there are constant reminders of the jokes the show krazy-glued to the culture. Weirdly, reading a lot of these jokes in this book made me laugh out loud at them for the first time in years, even though I've seen them played out on screen countless times in the interim. It's probably because I was having such a ball reading Stupid TV, Be More Funny, the Simpsons book I didn't realize I've always wanted to read until I was reading it. Thanks, Alan! You truly are the king of kings.
