Chapo Trap House - BONUS - Behind the Laughter: Mike Reiss

Episode Date: June 30, 2018

Virgil and Matt sit down with longtime Simpsons writer Mike Reiss to discuss his new book "Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets and Outright Lies From a Lifetime of Writing For The Simpsons". Also the co-creator of The Critic and creator of Queer Duck, Mike has written for the Simpsons off and on since its creation, and with him we talk about our favorite family, Thomas Edison's cinema-busting goon squad, the traitor Leon Trotsky's whereabouts, and Star Trek cast members' thoughts on trains. Be nice to Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikereisswriter Buy Mike's Book: https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062748034/springfield-confidential/ Hell, buy our book too: http://chapotraphouse.com/book/​

Hey everybody, Virgil Texas here with Matt Christman. Today we are going to take a brief reprieve from the darkness that's slowly consuming us all to talk Hollywood. Sitting with us is Mike Reese, screenwriter, playwright, TV writer, TV producer, published author known for co-creating the critic, creating QueerDoc, and best known, of course, for his long-running involvement in the cultural, phenomenon, paramount artistic achievement that changed the face of comedy, homeboys, and outer space. Mike, what was it like to work with The Flex? He was all right. That was a really nice job at homeboys and outer space.

I think it was because we knew we were creating art. It really felt like those homeboys were in outer space. It's fun. You know, this is where we lose the entire audience as I talk for the next half hour about homeboys and outer space. You'd be surprised. That would be a landmark episode for us. But I mean, it was even at the time I worked there, the show came on the air and no one would believe it, but the LA Times said this is the best new comedy of the year. And that was why I went there. I was helping a friend, but it looks special. And by the time the network and the studio got done with it, it was gone after 17 episodes,

at which time it was considered one of the 50 worst shows of all time. And I've just never seen. I don't think it was ever going to be great art, but it was. I've never seen that level of kind of interference with the show before. And as you write in your memoirs published this month, Springfield Confidential Jokes, Secrets and Outright Lies from a Lifetime of Writing for the Simpsons, that premise of two kind of buffoonish delivery men in outer space was recycled to make future trauma. It was it's it's future drama. It's just you watch the show. It's future drama.

I'm not accusing Matt Groening or David Cohen of stealing it because I don't think they were big fans. I don't think they were among the five or six people watching the show. But it is too. It's impressive that they had found all new writers for this show was a guy named Eric Van Lowe created it. And as soon as the show went off the air, four of them went off and created Family Guy, one of them we poached and brought him right over to Simpsons. And then he created F is for Family, which is a big animated hit on Netflix. So everybody, you know, emerged unscathed from the thing.

And one of the actors on the show, the funniest guy, not flexed. The funniest guy on the show, we brought him right over to the Simpsons and he's our newest voice actor, Kevin Michael Richardson. Well, you're going to get a nasty DM from Flex. I'm here for it. I'm here for Flex Beef. Well, as I said, your memoir has been released this month. And I read it. I finished reading it last night. I enjoyed it. There were a lot of spoofs and goofs and gags and gossip.

And yeah, my question for you is what is your ghostwriter secret? I'll tell you how it came about. This guy, Matthew Klickstein, who I'd never met. I never met. He'd phoned me. He wrote our book too. He phoned me. He's the guy. He wrote an oral history of the Nickelodeon network that was actually a bestseller. Very well loved. So he called me and he said, Mike, you and me are going to go on the road.

And we're going to see Mike Reese's America. That's going to be the book and there won't be any Simpsons in it at all. And we're here two years later. It's all Simpsons. I've never been in a car with the guy. We didn't go anywhere. I wrote the book too. This is a real kind of writer's vanity. I got to say he did some great stuff if you actually did read the book. He interviewed all my coworkers and colleagues and all the way.

And these are my people. I thought were my friends, but they don't return my calls. But he talked to Judd Apatow and John Lovitz and we drop it in throughout the book where I'm telling my story and then John Lovitz gives his version of it. Judd Apatow. He got him to write the introduction. It's basically a Rashomon story with John Lovitz. Yes. Yes, it is.

John, he's, you know, he was dragged into writing doing the critic. He really, really didn't want to do it. And now it's all he wants to do. He really wants to reboot the show. Yeah, that was an interesting part of it. So you and your former partner don't want to do the critic. And I assume all of Hollywood doesn't want to do it either. But Lovitz is just practically begging in your book to just do the critic again.

And I'll be the first to volunteer. I'll do it. You'll do it. I don't know. You'll do it. Well, in what sense? We just need somebody to make the critic so we can do the voice. So we would make the critic in there. How hard could it be? It's a little outreach.

You know, we're just trying to give poor John Lovitz a job. I just don't want to go back and do the critic again. It's the show, even when the critic was success, when the critic character was successful, it was kind of a depressing show. And now he's clearly the character must have fallen low because there's no more TV critics. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. What would Jay Sherman be doing? Would he be like a Yelp power user? God.

Grim. Well, you did. You did bring the critic back for that series of vignettes for online. Yes. That was very frustrating, too. I remember watching those and it was like the total was completely different. He was married. I think he had a girlfriend. I think I don't remember them well. It was something they came to us.

It was during the dot com boom and they said, the critic can do what he's never done. A movie can be in theaters this week and you can have the parody on the air online next week. And we said, great, you know, quicky flash animation. So we made these 10 episodes and then they just sat on them. They sat them for a solid year and we kept saying, what are you doing? They said, we're debugging them. So by the time they came on the air, they were parodies of movies nobody remembered.

You know, big, you know, we did an episode parodying Blink, the Madeline so movie. And so I don't know what that is. Oh, it's a classic class. I think you ask your parents, ask your friends. They're always talking about blank. Just don't ask me. That was it. It took longer to get them online than it did to get a regular episode of the critic on the air.

So very frustrating, stupid experience. And we weren't getting paid for it. That sounds like the Internet. Well, we cracked the code. We're getting paid for it. We're getting paid to talk about movies that nobody remembers. That's true. Questionable quality.

You say that, but I think Gotti will be remembered for generations to come. I'm thinking more about the cobbler. We saw the cobbler. Well, you're the target audience for the cost of acting. We were alone and it was one of those movies. It was just my wife and I in the theater where you're thinking the movie, the characters might as well talk to us. It's just Adam Sandler could be going, Mike, I don't know whether I should keep making shoes or not. That is, that's a magical experience.

And that's happened to me exactly once when I was in college. I had this friend and for a week he just kept talking about this movie and quoting from the trailer. It's an obnoxious trailer. And then we went and saw it. We were the only ones in the theater and that movie was Wild Hogs. Wild Hogs? Oh, the motorcycle movie? Yes.

And there was, they had the script. They were ready to make Wild Hogs too. It was all ready to roll. And then they weren't able to make a sequel because there was that biker massacre in Texas and it's a little poor taste. You know, no such thing as bad publicity. The cobbler, wait, I got to mention because I know once we leave the cobbler and we're never coming back. You'd be surprised. I sold a script to Adam Sandler, a dramatic script and he was going to do it and he said,

and we've got this director we love. There was a whole package ready to roll depending on the success of the cobbler. We're going to reunite the cobbler team. And so it was just this horrible feeling to walk into the theater and it's just me and the wife and I go, it's not happening. Wait, why was it contingent on the cobbler being successful? They it was we wanted to reunite the director of the cobbler and Adam Sandler. Oh, not that you wrote like cobbler fan fiction. I wrote cobbler too.

It's like a situation. It does suggest a sequel where like the crime fighting cobblers. Yes. Dustin Hoffman and Sandler they're teaming up at the end and they're like, yeah, and there's the laundry guys and there's all these other. You could have like a DCU like or like a Marvel extended universe of different people with like blue collar jobs in New York. Right. So the second crime. The second film is just a superhero movie.

Yes. And it just explores this world emerges from the revelation at the end. I think we had this exact same observation when we talked about it the first time. But they could do spin off movies too, like they're doing with the Star Wars stories. Yeah, like there's one about the garbage men and their special powers. There's one about Taylor's. There's a million deli owners. It's a million of them.

They all sound too interesting though. I think you're you're way expanding like expanding the cobbler universe. I mean, this should be like the milliner. There's that's not bad. I mean, I'm sure 90 certainly 98% of Adam Sandler fans are going. What the fuck is a cobbler? Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

The coming dessert coming this fall, haberdashery. There you go. So do you want to talk about your life? No, not particularly. I mean, we've covered it between the cobbler and homeboys. I got the job. I mean, I read the book. I don't want to give too much away.

It's it's all in there and all the Coke Field threesomes in the 80s. So that was that was a blast to read about. Well, then let's cut to the Simpsons. You were there from day one from day one. Everyone thought it would be a massive failure. That was it. There was there. One of our writers, Jay Kogan is the son of a very famous TV writer,

as famous as TV writers get. And his father begged him not to take the Simpsons job. He just knew it was not only not going to be successful, but it sounded like career poison. I don't know why to work on a cartoon show on the Fox network, which was a brand new entity at the time. And nobody wanted to do it. And Fox had not had a hit by that, right?

It was 21 Jump Street. Married with children. Married with children was a hit by 1989. Yeah. Yeah. No. It debuted as a hit and the critics liked it too. And then 21 Jump Street was a hit.

It was a little strange. Everybody was so against it. But I took the job. I wanted this other job. I was working on It's Gary Shanling show, which was on Fox. It was the lowest rated show on TV. And I was on summer break and Alan's white bell,

the creator of the show was doing a show called the boys. And it was it started Norman fell and it was set at the Friars Club and that's the gig I wanted writing for Norman fell. And I couldn't get it. I got turned down for the boys. And my second choice was the Simpsons, which was the job nobody wanted. And I took it and I didn't tell anybody what I was doing

because I thought I've hit rock bottom. Can you imagine though, if you'd gotten that boy's job, you could be on season 30 of the boys with like a CGI Norman fell or something. You could be responding to all the fans who are mad that the boys are just not as good as they used to be. And they don't like that. The network made them out all these girls to it.

And they think that's cultural Marxism. So, I mean, on paper, you had James Elbrooks, who James Elbrooks very big, very successful producer. Yeah. And a network that was it was cool. Right. It was it was the edgy new network. It wasn't.

No, it wasn't cool. It was vulgar. It was vulgar. It was what I mean. Yeah. Sleazy. You know, not like today. But yes, I mean, it had just the terrible reputation back then.

And yeah, I again, I just was not proud. It was it was a shipwreck of a project. We they housed us in a trailer. They didn't even think we rated walls. But it was fun. And I think if there's a secret to the success of the show, it was we thought nobody was going to watch it. So we just it was a fun summer job and we just did whatever we

wanted. And there had not been. And I never really realized this. There had not been a prime time animated show in the past 30 years. Right. It was the Flintstones. What was the Flintstones? I mean, it was one in a row.

It was just the Flintstones since the Jetsons weren't even a prime time show. I think that was a syndicated show. It was just the Flintstones and nothing else. And so yeah, we were and when we were starting the show up, we didn't even know how to do it. The the poor animators didn't know how to crank out a weekly animated show because everyone who had done it was dead.

And get me Hannah and Barbara. Yeah. Well, this is coming at the end of the eighties, which in my opinion was was basically a dead zone for TV animation. I mean, I grew up watching like the Saturday morning cartoons. So I guess I look at them fondly for that reason. But I mean, an objective appraisal is that it's they're cheap.

They're incredibly cheap cartoons. Yeah. And then the Simpsons comes along and you have Matt Groening, who is this underground cartoonist who's kind of a big deal, right? Yeah, life in hell. Yeah. Yeah.

He was big. I was a fan of his. I'll tell the story real quick. It's in the book, which was he wrote a local cartoon strip and underground cartoon trip. And it was here in the Village Voice, too. About rabbits. They looked just like the Simpsons.

It was called Life in Hell and they just had giant ears. And that's why Marge has her tall bouffant was his conception at the time was when the show ended, the last episode Marge would take her hair off and she had giant rabbit ears underneath. And, you know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. They could still do that. Don't count it out. I would love to be canon.

We've seen Marge with her hair down multiple times. He had two. I did. The other idea he had was that, you know, and again, he didn't know what the show would turn into. He, he said, Homer is Krusty. And he, oh, you didn't know that. No.

You've seen, if you've seen certain episodes where Krusty's got his makeup on, he looks exactly like Homer. And this was Matt Scheme. He said, oh, it'll be a great irony that Bart loves Krusty and hates Homer. And then the big reveal at the end is all these years, Krusty has been Homer. Oh my God.

So that would have been our last episode. Marge is a rabbit. Homer is Krusty. God, that would have blown people's minds. That really would have blown. Yeah. But my point in saying that is that grading is art. You know, that was a very unique thing to bring to television.

Like you hadn't really seen, I mean, arguably like any like interesting or unique animation in decades. Yeah. Well, certainly the Flintstones look good. It's the hardest thing in the world because I've done other animated projects, including the critic where to make something where it looks completely different and yet instantly appealing.

And that's what the Simpsons are. You just like them. You like them when you see them. The critic was designed by committee and it really looks it and no two characters look the same. And it just, it just never looked right. And another thing that you know, and of course the Simpsons premieres, and it was a huge, huge success.

Instantly. Upon premiering. From the first night. Yeah. And something you know that's, you know, kind of unique about it. That was the kind of the new trend is just the, the, the Gatling gun of jokes. Right.

And so even in the first season, which was slower objectively than the seasons that emerged in the mid 90s. And nothing had really had that kind of comic brio on television up to that point, except another show that I think you said you worked on Sledgehammer. Oh, okay. Yes. Right?

Did you? I did work on Sledgehammer. Yeah. It didn't move as fast as you may remember, but it was, it was fast and funny and it did a lot of pop culture jokes. Well, I thought it was that airplane style, which was also like kind of an early forerunner. Yeah.

It hit me the other day. Oh, airplane. That's, that's what changed everything. I'd like to think it was us. Let's get those guys. Yeah. I remember I was in college and they were testing airplane. They had this very half ass version of it.

They were showing it. Didn't have an end. Didn't have a score. And they showed it at Harvard. And I remember I was with Al Jean and we're going, wow, that's really good. That is special and different. And three years later, we got a job writing airplane to airplane

to airplane, they call it airplane to space. It's twice as good as a shuttle to the moon. It's a very funny, very funny movie about the air, the space shuttle blowing up. And we did like the promotion you did for it in 1986. I think Sledgehammer is best remembered for it was, it was Sledgehammer was a reverent kind of absurd cop show parody. Right.

Yeah. Dirty Harry send up. And I think it was best remembered for they thought the show would be canceled. So they ended the first season with a nuclear bomb going off in Los Angeles and killing everyone. And then they were picked up for a second season. Yeah.

I was gone from the show. I go, I was like anyone else. I'm going, how are they going to get out of this? And it was the creator of the show, Alan Spencer just had the smart, cheap idea to show the end of the last season. The bomb goes off and then the title came on Sledgehammer the early years. And now they want it again, you know, just like the critic

two seasons languishing in the ratings and now they want to bring it back. They want to reboot it. And good luck. People are terrified of new ideas. They don't want anything new. So the Simpsons premieres and you all, you also got the job because, and this was a kind of a running joke in the book

because Tom Gamble and Max Bross turned it down. Right. I got airplane too because they turned it down and then I got the Simpsons because they turned it down. And I'm just waiting to see what they'll turn down next because they've been a godsend to me. Yeah, that should be, you know, that should have a column and variety, whatever they decline.

So who was there with you? Who was gay? We were all gay. And again, that I think came across in the show. That was what we were shooting for. So it was, we didn't even work. You know, that first season we were all kind of scattered because again, it was this smelly trailer with bad

carpeting and so it was like, we didn't have a writer's room. We would sit with Sam Simon and write some scripts and then we had John Beatty, John Swartz, Welder, George Meyer. That was the team. Oh, and J. Kogan and Wally Wally Darsky, but no real writer's room. We didn't work as a group too much. And then second season, we all wound up in a room together.

And Matt told me when he got your book, he immediately just searched for Swartz Welder's name. Yeah. Yeah, he's, it shows you if you want to be a phenomenon, if you want to be an international man and miss three, you don't have to do anything. He's just a regular guy. He didn't seek this out.

He's just a guy doesn't go to parties and doesn't feel like giving interviews. And that's it. And suddenly that's made him JD Salinger. That's he's Banksy, you know? And when you meet him, I mean, he wrote really funny scripts. He wrote 59 episodes of The Simpsons, three solid seasons of the show.

And you meet him. He's just like one of your dad's friends. He's just, he's a Republican who smokes. He wears dress shirts. He loves to talk about baseball and old, old Westerns. He's the least mysterious man you've ever seen in your life. I don't saw this comedy. I find very enigmatic.

And you quoted this joke in the book when people ask where Springfield, he just says Springfield is in Hawaii. Yeah. I like that. He has a couple of good quotes. He says, someone asked him what his, his secret of writing Homer is. He says, I write Homer as a big dog.

And it suddenly makes sense. And he loves Homer. He made Homer what Homer is. But he would turn it in scripts and we go, well, this is a very nice script, but where's Marge and Lisa? I just put the girl in somewhere. Well, I mean, yeah, it's, it's a pair of things. I love stories.

If you ever read his books, the Frank Burley books, I mean, they kind of read like Simpson's scripts that everyone said this is too crazy to do. Yeah. Anybody who loves sports and welder loves his book should buy, loves his script by his books. They just, he just keeps cranking them out. It's, it's clear, you know, nobody told him he doesn't work

at the show anymore. He just keeps, just keeps churning these very, very funny, crazy books out. Is that a real publisher? Kennydale books. I don't, I think that's the street he grew up on. Kennydale. So he's not really a reckless.

He is not a reckless. Where does he live? I want to go. It's so funny because I could give it away where a die hard fan could find it instantly. But he lives, he lives on a ranch and it's, you know, I've never been there, but I hear he'll shoot you if you see someone coming up my property.

He, he, he just mentioned one day offhand. I have every newspaper ever printed. It's like, what? There's a good story. A woman who used the right for the Simpsons went over to Seinfeld and when they were working on Kramer, she would just pitch these things that Swartz welder said and they would always go too crazy.

So things he said were too crazy for Kramer. What was the one he said about Lincoln? I think he said Abraham Lincoln was an asshole. The other thing he did, he, when he got high, you know, he'd been a very successful advertising man. And then I think he was, I don't know what turn his life took, except he knew a lot about soup kitchens. He really would tell you, he knew way too much about what

they served at soup kitchens and he drove the world's worst car that had no upholstery. He just had springs and, and, and so you think, all right, maybe he's not doing so well, but he was working at the Simpsons. He's making a decent living for the first time and he takes the money and he bought a painting by Hitler. That's a kind of thing that's funny in the 90s, but today

you get the wrong impression. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's purely for the art. It was a little landscape. I remember a watercolor. He comes in with it. It's like, shouldn't you get a car pole three first?

Is that the priority? Oh, I found the paragraph in your book. Not all of the craziness was confined to a script. Sports welder would often make pronouncements like the best exercise is to run 10 feet as fast as you can and then stop short or Lorne Green invented rap music. Yes. That was a good one.

Again, too crazy for Kramer. So. No, the first season was not without controversy, obviously. And the big one that people still discuss this day, a mystery that you resolved in your book was why was Smithers Black in the first episode? And I always assumed, not the first time, but I always assumed

that it was some kind of like color correction thing. You know, some kind of production error. No, it was, you know, we, we knew we should have people of different colors on the show even then. That was it. We made Smithers Black. They're sort of, he's olive colored. He's green, really.

Yeah. It was odd. It's the Simpsons palette, but he was black. And, you know, we make the shows. We see him in rough black and white animation and it was only when they rolled back in color, we said, oh, this looks terrible. It's the one black guy in the show and he's kissing up to his

boss all the time. And, you know, it really, it really had a plantation feel. So we just went, okay, he's white now. But so then, you know, we chose our main characters who would be black and white and Asian. But we told the animation house, look, make sure when you see the crowd, there's some black people in them. And this is, we're telling this to our animators in Korea.

And the next show came back and anyone who was homeless or a criminal with black. Why is the show animated in Korea? Well, you know, we always thought it's cheap, right? I always assumed that we all felt kind of guilty. These must be sweatshops or something like that. And it turns out Korean animators make more money than American animators.

And it was just, it was the work of one guy. It was a South Korean animator came to America. He did all the early Pink Panther cartoons. And when he got established, he went back to his home in Seoul and set up these big studios. So it was just, that's where the good work is done. Huh. It was that.

And like, it was like Eastern Europe too, right? Yeah, Eastern Europe. They would make very, you know, we parodied it famously on the show, the worker in parasite cartoon. And that's no joke. I went to the Slovakian animation festival and they had a night of Slovakian cartoons. And you just wanted to project it on the side of a goat.

It was out in a park. It was a wall. It was shown on a wall and this kind of overgrown amphitheater. And you watch these cartoons. Capitalism has been successful. You just wanted to drink bleach. Now I'll kill myself. So Simpsons huge phenomenon right off the bat.

And you write, Simpsons mania was 1990 was the height of Simpsons mania. It was impossible not to get excited. Simpsons t-shirts were everywhere. Bootleg Simpsons t-shirts were even more widespread. Black part. Mexican Bart. Bart smoking a joint.

Bart stuck in a woman's ass. Fox. I heard bootleg police. That's a thing apparently. Who impounded millions of illegal t-shirt. How does Fox have this army to have merchandise? We brought in the bootleg police, the bootleg army. Yeah.

And they, it was some insane number like 35 million t-shirts. They rounded up making this. It's not hard to make a t-shirt, dude. They were so, I mean, they far, far outnumbered the real t-shirts, but we had 35 million of these shitty t-shirts. And there was this idea, let's bring them. Let's give them to Ethiopia. All right.

Just send them there. And then somebody said, how is that going to look? Where you see a field full of starving Ethiopians wearing Bart Simpson t-shirts. Yeah. My favorite of them, my favorite knockoff was where the Gulf War themed ones where Bart is in the military outfit and he's strangling Saddam Hussein or he's launching a missile into

Baghdad or something. And he's like, eat my shorts, Saddam. Those really got the show. I wrote that one by the way. Well done. Yeah. When I was going through the book, I'm looking through my notes now and I just kind of flagged all the things that made me go,

aha, I never realized it. And apparently to you too, one was that Arne Pies helicopter traffic report is called Arne in the Sky instead of Pie in the Sky. Right. Did you get that joke when you saw it? I got that. I got that.

I don't think I did. I think because of the, the rhyme. I got it. It just doesn't, you know. I got that joke. I got it. Well done. Yeah.

It's just full of. In fact, I remember sitting back and being like, ah, Arne in the sky. You stroked your beard. Wiping your eyes. I pity the sad fools who are watching this episode and not getting that joke. They're robbing themselves of humor by being dull.

Well, did you get this one? Ten years after Jeff Martin named Homer's Barbershop quartet, the B sharp. I looked at a piano and realized there is no B sharp. Also, how did you look at a piano and realize that? It's just keys. There's no letters. I know how a piano works.

I can do other things. Oh, and one interesting one was the clown bed that Homer makes for Bart. People have really taken a shine to that. It is a real bed. It was my father made that bed just to back up. It was just Homer made a clown bed. It was just a bed shaped like a clown's body with a big clown face

at the head of it. And he made it for young Bart, like toddler Bart. And it scared the shit out of Bart. And he sat up all night hugging his knees, going, can't sleep. Clown elite me. And that became a Jeff and a meme and all those things. I don't understand. But my father built that bed.

He built it and the face was even more horrifying. And it was good. It was my brother. It was for my little brother who's an artist. So I said, recreate the bed and he drew it. It's in the book. You can see my father, a lovely man, terrible carpenter, worse painter. He was one.

He drew it. So the clown had a big pink nose and nostrils. And there's like anyone who draws a clown nose, no nostrils on the clown and then just these big gaping black eyes, soulless, dead eyes and the thing. So we had to saw the head off the bed. It was too scary. So now my brother for the next five years slept in a clown body

with a neck stub. And we didn't throw that in the head. We just shoved in the back of his closet. So it was like the movie it you'd open his closet and see this leering clown in the back. It's good for you. It's good as a kid builds character. So you take us through the steps of producing an entire Simpsons

episode and it's a lot of steps, 23 steps, 23 steps. I think two of those were joke steps though. Yeah. Wow. That's close reading. I never thought anyone would read. There's a lot of people fought their way through it. It's 23 boring steps.

Because everyone has how do you make the show? I really want to know. I think it's interesting. When we do the four three writer blah, blah, blah, and they're so zoned out. So I put it all down there and I thought it'd be really boring. And then I had to read the audio book and even I'm there. Jesus Christ. How many more steps is this?

It was so painful just to read it. But it really shows you. It's hard work. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I guess we'd be blasé about it too because people ask us how we make the show. I hear we roll out of bed at 4 p.m.

We get drunk and then we find our way to a microphone. I know you do 23 versions of every show. We can make it tighter. This question can be more incisive. All of our shows are recorded nine months in advance. We do a live table read where we play it for other podcasters. They get edited down actually from an originally about four hours. And then we have to slowly cut down to about an hour to an hour and 20 minutes.

You live in New York, but you fly in once a week? Yes. About 12 years ago, I cut down to a day a week at The Simpsons. I go in every Wednesday. And Wednesday is just like any other day of the week there. And I hated L.A. I hated it every year, the 26 years I lived there. So my wife said, well, let's get out of here.

The Simpsons won't run forever. And she said, she noticed I complained the least in New York. So we moved to New York and that's it for the past 12 years. I fly to L.A. Tuesday night. I work Wednesday and I fly out on a red eye Wednesday night. And I'm like a carpet bagger where I'm proud. I don't even spend 24 hours a week there. It's about 22 hours.

What didn't you like about L.A.? I got surprised because most people, they get sick of New York and moved out. Oh, I've just been happy every day in New York for 12 years. L.A. just sucks. I mean, I can be boring about it. Oh, the traffic is terrible traffic and spread out. And that's all you need is just anything you want to do is this this time suck. You get there.

You're in a bad mood. Maybe you'll have a good time. Then you got to get back in the car. There's traffic at two in the morning. Traffic jam at two a.m. You go, what the hell is this? And then on top of it, it's just not that great anyhow. It's ugly to look at the museums are terrible.

The restaurants aren't that good. I don't see. I think show business and entertainment would be better if the business was set anywhere but L.A. If it was in Albuquerque or somewhere, Columbus. Well, you know, we can blame for it. Thomas Edison. Yes, I know.

I blame him for a lot of things. Wait, what? Well, he had a patent on early film film technology and the first, the original movie studios were all in New York and Jersey and Jersey and they would shoot in lots in that Jersey or like streets in New York, but they were always getting hassled by Edison's goons. He would literally send goon squads to like knock over their shit and try to sort money out of them for using his technology. And the early studio heads just moved.

They said, where do we go? They'll be the farthest away from Edison and his army of thugs. And it was a traffic is so bad. They'll never be able to get to us. In fact, one early director Thomas Ince actually had a cannon in front of his studio as a way to sort of like intimidate the Edison goons. Well, this is all to make films that are called like man washing a horse. Yes.

Very ironic for Thomas Ince. Wasn't that? His cannon didn't save his life. It did not from William Randolph first back to the old Hollywood back to the show. That was a great. That was a great anecdote. He directed in our first season. That's how old the show is.

Let me tell you a story though. Speaking of old Hollywood, we work at Simpsons at the Fox at the Fox. We work at the Fox. We work at Fox in the new writers building and they call it the new writers building because it was built in 1932 and it's old and one one day we work on the second floor. Al Jean is leaning against the balcony and it just gave way. The whole thing fell just this giant chunk of wood. He could have been killed.

But so then I was at a film function and they're showing a newsreel from 1932 and they go and here we are at the opening of the new writers building at Fox and who came in to cut the ribbon. Why it's Leon Trotsky. He christened our building. It wasn't him. It wasn't actually him. It wasn't him.

No, it was an impersonator as it was part of a publicity stunt to promote some movie about Russians. I'm out of here. Good day. Good day. I know where Trotsky was every day of 1932. He was not in Los Angeles. He was busy conniving against the Bolshevik Revolution.

It wasn't Trotsky. He was busy running his international campaign of sabotage. He was sowing away at the balcony someday. Al Jean will be here. He's like Boris Badmove. But so when you're both talking about this, you touch on that hot button issue of what's the problem with Appu? Oh, yeah.

And apparently he wasn't originally he wasn't to be an Indian person in the American. He was a just generic clerk. And it was clerk and his line was 35 cents, please. And at the time it wasn't a racial thing. It was just a comedy cliche even in 1989 that all convenience stores clerks were Indian. And it was probably based on reality for some reason that might have been something they gravitated to. So I put in the script, clerk, 35 cents, please underneath.

I wrote, he is not an Indian. And then we get to that line at the table reading. And I think the story I hear Sam Simon leaned over to Hank Azarian said, yes, he is. And Hank read it with an Indian accent and it just got this giant, giant laugh. And Appu was an Indian from then on. And you know, I gotta say for 25 years, nobody ever complained about Appu and Indians would say he's the only Indian on television. So even now, I don't know.

I don't know how big this controversy is or I don't know how many offended Indians there are, but a guy made a documentary and that's been the end of Appu or in fact, just to clear this the matter because I didn't realize this two years before the documentary, we already said, all right, this is an issue. We made our own episode. We did that documentary, but faster and funnier with the same jokes where we had an actual Indian actor on the show play Appu's nephew and he tells him, you sound like a white guy doing an Indian accent.

And then we retired Appu. He seems to have noticed, but you haven't seen him in two years. Wait, so he is retired. You've retired Appu. You haven't seen him in two years. He hasn't had a line. Well, I watch him on FXX, so they come on later. They do come on.

And in a strange order, usually. We're not going to, I don't know, I don't think we're going to erase the past and I don't know what to do. I don't know. But I mean, as you make, there are certainly are people out there offended by the character, but I've never met one of them. They all come up to me. I like Appu.

Or they go, he's the stereotype like everyone else on The Simpsons. And, you know, I think they like that inclusion, but I don't know. It's not my issue. They're fine. We got 199 other characters. Nobody notices he's gone. Well, as you make clear the narrative, it's not your fault. Yeah, I guess so.

Another thing about that is I, and again, I never, I never got the understood the premise of the bumblebee man until I visit LA and I turn on the television and I see one of the Spanish language shows and it's just this, this fat man in a diaper and he's got like sauces spilled all over him. He's crying and there's no dialing. I just hear the studio audience laughter, this huge gales of laughter. Yeah, it was a show, you know, when you live in LA, your first 30 cable channels are Spanish TV.

And whatever the fuck this, this, he was a cricket. It was a regular man dressed in a cricket outfit and it was on all the time and you'd flip from channel to channel. It was always on. And it's funny because I've heard the shows, the show still gets in South America, 95 million viewers a week. It's this giant hit. And the other funny story I heard was the guy who plays the cricket, it's like us doing

The Simpsons. He didn't think it would go anywhere. And apparently at the time he was like the Robert De Niro of Mexico and how he's just cursed the next 50 years, being the cricket diaper. Oh God. You talked a little bit about the celebrity guests you've had on you had Dustin Hoffman on famously as Lisa's substitute teacher. Why did he agree to appear under a suit in it?

Yeah, it's one of those things. They drop it on you after they've recorded their part and it was, it's just two of them. I guess it's Dustin Hoffman and Michael Jackson didn't want to use their names and we've never done that since. And I think it's been sort of a rule since then that you got to, you got to use your own name. But certainly Dustin Hoffman, it places you in time. It was like 1992 and it didn't seem good for an Oscar winner to be doing a voice on

the cartoon show. But since then you've had your fair share of Oscar winners. Yes. Yes, we had. You also had George Tkai come on. Is it Tkai? Take the K. Take the K.

All right. Let me re-take that one. You also had George Tkai come on. Tkai. Damn it. Damn it. I'm going to get letters about this. And then you invited him back on to do the famous monorail episode and he just said

mechanically, I don't make fun of monorails, yeah, that was a shocker. That was he worked on, I think the San Francisco mass transit board and just thought this would hurt monorails this episode. So we didn't get into K had already been on the show and he was, he was fun. And so we wanted him back. And so we, again, we had to settle for our second choice, which was Leonard Nimoy. And he came on the show and, you know, and how often do you want Sulu and you wind up with Spock?

But he, he came on and he said, I'll do the show as long as you don't do any Star Trek jokes. And we go, fine. And so we wrote them apart, we record it, we animate it. And then at the, at the end of the scene, we beamed him out of there like a Star Trek. We fucked Mr. Spock. Take that Nimoy. Yeah.

He was doing our show for 400 bucks. And then he did come back. He did. He came back in our Springfield files, X files crossover. And it was again, I'm directing him and the show ends with everyone singing good morning starshine. And of course, Leonard Nimoy is famous for making a horse's ass of himself singing the ballad of Bilbo Baggins.

If you grew up in that era, I mean, it was just sort of, okay, you know, here's two things I love colliding into something I really hate. So I'm directing him in the Springfield files that ends with everyone singing good morning starshine. And I go, Mr. Nimoy, can you really belt this out? And he goes, I know what you're trying to do. You should have, in, after he recorded his lines, you should have inserted a whole bunch of anti-train stuff into that episode, just shots of trains.

If you look at it a certain way, that could be seen as a episode hospital to mass transit. It's just a bunch of graft and unnecessary bunch of, you know, so any, any sharp can show up and, and, and, and Pat is margins with bad material created of an attest shaking. Yeah. Yeah. A guy in a straw boat or came in and sold him a monorail. Yeah. Mary would never fall for such a shameless huckster.

Never. Ha. You touched on this a little bit earlier, but the fans, you travel the world. Yes, I do. And been to both the North and South Pole. Yes, I have. How? Yeah.

How the hell do you get to the South Pole? Do you have only like five people done that to the South Pole? It's the North Pole nobody goes to because there's nothing up there. You're going to just come on. You go there and say, you can come back on a podcast. Yeah. I went to the North Pole. It's cold.

It's like going to space to me. I don't know. We wanted to do that, too. That did not make the book. I forgot. My wife and I were, were in contention to go to Mars. They just need, they needed a middle-aged married couple to go to Mars and the presumption was and die up there.

Yeah. They just said, let's get a middle-aged and childless. So who cares? And we volunteered. We got Neil deGrasse Tyson to endorse us and then the whole project fell through. But yeah, space. So we were talking on the ride over about going to Afghanistan. We had an Afghanistan driver, Afghani driver saying, don't go there.

You told one story. I think this was in, it was either to run or South America someplace like that where, you know, you got the hemisphere similar, I've never been to either place. How would I know? It's exactly the same. What a coincidence. You know, you went to some place and you had a, I don't know, a tour driver or something like that who was just harassing you and just saying anti-Semitic things.

Oh, yes. It was Australia. Australia. That's right. You were so close. You couldn't be more far off. Yeah. I'll tell the story with my great Australian accent that sounds like Kerry Grant doing

the cowboy and you'll see because we, we booked a tour of Darwin. I said it was Cairns in the book. This is what you, this is bonus material. The only get here. He's taking us around and he says, what do you do, mate? And I said, oh, I write for the Simpsons and he goes, that's a bloody stupid show. And I said, gee, everyone in Australia loves the show. He goes, yeah, my daughter loves it.

Every time she quotes your show, I got a smack her in the face. Jesus Christ. And I said, this is your daughter with leukemia you were talking about. He goes, yeah, that's someone who says, I hate how you people make fun of religion on your show. And I said, well, that's funny because two weeks ago we were just endorsed by Pope Benedict. He goes, well, he's that bloody stupid wanker, ain't he? And then he shows us the, the waterfront in Darwin and he goes as the waterfront built

by the Jews. They got no taste whatsoever and I said, well, you know, I'm Jewish and he taps me on the nose goes, oh, I can tell, man, it gets fast. This guy. Yeah. So at the end, the tour ends and I'm going, how, how much do you tip the anti-Semitic child beater? Well, you got to tip bigger.

Yeah. And so, so as I'm leaving, he goes, you mind if I get an autographed script from my daughter and I go, no, it'd be my pleasure. And he goes, and one for me too. I read that and I just thought of our own fans immediately because that's roughly, those are our interactions with them. They invade against us constantly, explain how we're doing our jobs incorrectly. And then they say, yeah, where's the next episode?

I want to listen to it. I don't get it. Yeah. I don't get it. The Simpsons fan sites, none of us can bear to look at them because they're, they're so mean and Al Jean who's run the show for 20 years will just wade through all this bile every week just in case there's a nugget of helpful feedback, you know, and they're the ones who told us, oh, Homer's getting too mean Homer's getting too stupid, too stupid.

And Al absorbs that even though the previous hundred comments are, Al Jean should die. There was, there was one week he was, he was in a car wreck on the way to the office. He just typed, I think I'm, he tweeted, oh, I was in a car wreck. I made it to work in time. Someone wrote, I wish you had died. And people, people would come up to you and they like conventions and started, they would say very, you know, nice things about you and the show and they would say, oh yeah, by the way, I'm this, I'm, I'm Al Jean should die 67.

Yeah. On this website. I'm the guy who bishes about your show every single week. But you do touch on, you know, the, the, the big criticism, which is that the show's not as good anymore. Yeah. And I thought that the point you made was, was, was pretty, pretty good that, you know, look, I mean, the show's been on for like 30 years.

If at a certain point, you know, you do so much with the original premise that the show was to, you have two paths you can take. One is to become boring like mash did, or to become zany like Seinfeld did. And you obviously picked Zany. We picked Zany. We try to be boring when we can. I mean, whenever anyone comes in with a real life kind of grounded story, we haven't touched on it.

It's like, wow, great, let's do it. You know, but we got to make shows. And so the show at least gets weirder and faster and funnier. We hope even it can't be fresh. It can't be new. We can't get away with a story like Lisa is sad anymore. You know, every, everybody in the Simpsons family has been to jail some of them multiple times every, even the baby, they've all, whatever the baby is called, they've all been to jail.

We're out of those, you know, grounded, normal stories, but we'll keep going. We'll keep going. People can stop watching when they get tired of it. But because nobody wants the show to end, I mean, like in the room, you don't want the show to end. We don't want to have a blast doing it. It is really fun. I really enjoy, you know, that's why I fly across country.

I really love the job. I'm happy going into work. We get along. The whole crew gets along. I mean, the book, if you buy and you must buy my book by the book, there's there's some scandal on page 30. And then there's another scandal on page 220. And that's it.

Nothing bad has happened there. The drama never stops in this book. But it's it's it's not the money you barely you wrote in the book. I don't know how facetious you were that you are entitled to one percent of the profits of the show. Correct. And because of some accounting side of hand, you are entitled to nothing. I got I have one percent of the Simpsons profits.

And God bless him. I get a quarterly statement show is still not in profit. They lose a little on every t-shirt. It's no joke. I get, you know, all that merchandise, 30 years, syndication, everything, theme parks, beer. Now they make beer, you know, we're so close to meth. And we make all that stuff.

And, you know, every three months I get a statement, we are a hundred and fifty million in the red. But it's doing it for the love of it. That's it. It is a charity. We are Greenpeace. I take it to an account or to a lawyer to look at it. And one guy finally told me, maybe your grandchildren will see something.

So I'm 58 years old. I got to start having children so they can have kids to get some of this Simpsons money. But you did take a break from the show and you and Al Jean went off and made the critic. We made the critic show that is, I mean, finally remembered for being as funny as the Simpsons and as smart as the Simpsons. Oh, that's nice. Well, that's great. Yeah.

I'll tell you one more thing. The motivation of this book, you know, being a click steam or shopping it around. And someone said, we got to write about the critic. And I said, you know, I'm not really a fan of the critic and I'm not, it failed so much and it's funny, but I wanted it to be more like the Simpsons, to be heartfelt and cleverly plotted. And it's just jokes. So I tell click scene and I tell I said, I'm not really a fan of the critic and he goes,

that's our angle. And he ran to the publisher, he doesn't like the critic. And we go, and they lit up too. I guess they've never heard a show creator not love his own show. That was going to be the whole angle of my angry picture on the cover, hating the critic. That's interesting that you said you wanted it to be more heartfelt because one of the reasons you point to for the critic's failure is just the interference from the networks, which the Simpsons were immune to because of James L. Brooks made a deal with Fox and

so just let us do what we want. I want it in print. Right. And they did. They did. No notes whatsoever. But in the critic, you took notes, you had to suck up to studio, has two different studios. Right.

It was just sort of built into the show. It was not a warm. Normally those people are the ones saying, yeah, too many jokes make it more heartfelt. Yeah, they were fine. When we were on ABC, they couldn't, you know, they didn't want to do the show. They, they knew it would be trouble, but Jim Brooks had a deal. Whatever he brought them, they had to put on an ABC. So we put it on the air.

We opened it. We had great reviews. We had huge ratings and two days later, my secretary walks in with a big box and I go, what's that? And she goes, that's hate mail. And there's, there's two more boxes in the hallway and ABC was right. The people who watch ABC hated the critic and we were gone in six weeks. You know what?

I thought the Simpsons would last six weeks that finally came true. This is what people do to a show they don't like. And we were off the air and then we went to Fox the next year where we were a hit. We were a big hit following the Simpsons. But the new president of Fox just hated the show and he called me every week. I hated this week. Hi, it's John, I'm calling. Yeah, I know what you're calling.

You hated the show and he just yanked it off the air after 10 weeks, I think, and replaced it with a show called House of Buggin. I'm like, was Ammo House of Buggin House of Buggin. That was the problem with the critic. Not enough bugging. And then the guy, then the guy lost his job a few months after that. The man came, he was literally at Fox long enough to come in, hate the critic, cancel the critic, put on House of Buggin and then he got fired and he's never resurfaced.

You know, he's never been seen again. You Google him and it's just 1992 to present question mark. He's living in the House of Buggin, the fall of the House of Buggin. So after that, you did a few other jobs and then you got to make QueerDoc or the internets for dial up internets that we, you know, it's abused the term ahead of its time. But we were making three minute cartoons for the internet that took an entire evening to download and people would tell me, oh, yeah, I just set the internet going. I set the download before I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning, there's half

your three minute cartoon. And a few months after that was the dotcom crash and a small recession that took place in the early 2000s. And that was it. It was QueerDoc was on. It was very popular. It broke the dial up internet when it came on and was so popular and it's still the thing I'm proudest of.

You can see them all on YouTube, but QueerDoc was about a gay duck and gay cartoon characters and there were just I just read an article that there weren't and this is 2000. There were no gay characters anywhere on TV after Ellen's off the air. It was pre Ellen. Really? I thought Ellen was nineties. They might have that was straight Ellen. There was a straight Ellen.

She came out on the show. It was not. It was I'm telling you I was first. I'm telling you. Okay. I was the first one with this thing. Wait, wait, wait, didn't QueerDoc go on TV after Queer is full? Yeah.

Okay. Wow. My whole stuff. Whatever. No, no, you were the first. You were the first. No, no, no, no. Somehow this works.

I think Queer. Whatever. 2000. All right. Sorry. I'm not even my crease. I'm sorry. Your door was open.

I saw it so nice. I believe it's true though that at the time in 2000, because by the time it was hitting showtime, it was 2001 when all of TV was gay. So I don't know. He was, he was the first and then, you know, three days after it aired a reporter flew in from Germany to interview me about QueerDoc and I'm not gay. And so I kind of had to hide my straightness, my undeniable machismo. This is what the liberals want, by the way.

I mean, I saw QueerDoc after the fact online and it's delightful. I highly recommend it. It's a sort of campy kind of humor that you don't see that often. Yeah. It was so much fun. It was just, you know, after doing The Simpsons so long where everything's been done, here was the first gay cartoon, first cartoon character where it was wide open. I go, oh, let's do the gay Christmas episode, brand new territory, Halloween, whatever I

felt like it was so much fun to do. And the fans loved it. The fans were really, really happy and I won every gay award you can win. And nobody was really upset that it was created by Straight Man. Well, I didn't say it. I just, I didn't, I didn't come out or I'm straight. I just didn't say anything. And a reporter came to the house once and I hid my wife in the bedroom and I took down

our wedding photos. I mean, I didn't what the liberals want. I didn't blow the guy, but I never, I never said one way or the other. And then I was finally outed about a year into it by the New York Times that they wrote about QueerDoc and they liked it. And they said, Mr. Reese, who is straight and my father, who didn't believe anything until he saw it in the New York Times was so relieved. Finally.

And then QueerDoc released a movie in the mid 2000. I saw the QueerDoc movie. I liked it a lot. I'm very proud of it. Avoid Third Act problems. I like that. I always appreciate that. It's a nice short movie.

Yeah. It came out, Variety called it the best animated movie of the year. Take that ratatouille. See, I didn't get ratatouille. I saw like five minutes of it on TV and I'm just thinking, what the hell is this? It's a rat that can cook. I hate that. Awful.

But no, I recommend it. I would recommend to the audience to check out QueerDoc and definitely check out the QueerDoc movie. It's it's it's life was a thrill ride. They're all, I think, illegally on YouTube in beautiful prints. So I recommend it. Everything I've done is for free on YouTube. All the critic episodes are on YouTube.

Pirate the critic, Pirate QueerDoc, but buy Mike's book. Buy the book. Don't. And the illegal downloads of the book I've already seen and with Russians, everything is a Springfield Confidential Russian, Russian, Russian PDF collusion. Yeah. That's what we're talking about. Buy the book.

Buy the book. Buy the book. We will put a link to purchase the book. Why Rice's book, Springfield Confidential, Joke Secrets and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for the Simpsons. Also buy the Chapeau Trap House. Yeah. Buy the book too.

Buy that book. And that book. Michael Shwelder's books, the Frank Burley series. You have so many books to buy, listener. How many of your listeners buy eight books a year? They buy no books. I don't know. Our fans are pretty literate.

They'll get up to three. Yeah. They've read over a million posts. That's the book. That's a book. That's what you don't just say. They don't buy the books. They have no reason to buy the books because the posts are free.

You can also find Mike on Twitter. What's your Twitter right? My Twitter is at Mike Reese Writer. Ah, R E I S S is Reese don't like Reese don't follow at Mike Reese, right? That's sports writer Any possible Nazi? You guys are delightful there's a lot of fun till next time Oh