In an engaging conversation, Mike Reiss, co-creator of The Simpsons, shares with Shrabasti Mallik the difficulties he has while searching for stories and what it takes to keep the laughter flowing
They are not your regular cartoon family but you cannot deny that you see some traces of your father in Homer Simpson, and bits and pieces of yourself in Bart or lisa. We have laughed with them, cried with them and at times, even raised a question on two on their antics.
So you can very well gauge our anticipation when we were invited to meet Mike Reiss, the man behind these iconic characters. In his mid-50s, he would come across no less than a teenager on a real happy high. He will laugh with you, crack jokes, make you feel at ease in an instant and talk to you for hours on end as if you were a long lost relative. Traits of someone behind 25 glorious years of brain wracking comedy, we guess.
“I try to be serious but it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. It’s not that interesting and it’s not fun and I don’t think it’s interesting to hear the Simpsons be analysed either. I think that people would rather hear fun stories about it,” he attempted to say with a straight face but spilled out with laughter within a split second.
We caught up with him after his session at the MTV Youth Marketing Forum, where he spoke about 25 years of the show, showed clippings of a few favourite episodes, touched upon the different scandals and how different countries react.
While The Simpsons have found success, Reiss said that the series hasn’t always had a smooth ride. The writers have received negative feedback, including several times when they sent the Simpsons around the world. “When we send the Simpsons to somewhere (outside the US), we get in trouble,” Reiss said.
For example, in the episode where the Simpson family went on a trip to Rio de Janeiro, Reiss said he and the other writers got complaints from that government on how their country was depicted in the episode (rats running around). “We did a show about Brazil specifically because the people love the show so much. And we wound up being sued by the country it offended how we depicted them and that was pretty bad to be sued by the whole country,” he laughed.
However, he recalled receiving the best response from the Czech Republic. “I was there for a week trying to figure out why and I found out that they are very sad people and I realised that, what we do for comedy on The Simpsons is really how they look at life. They really believe that politicians are corrupt, that the police are incompetent and doctors and teachers don’t care. Those are our jokes but those are their day to day life. That way they relate to the show,” he said.
When he joined the show, Reiss thought that it would run six weeks. So everything that happened after 1989 has been a surprise to him. “It is like a happy gift and I am amazed that we still keep going,” he pointed out.
But with continuity of the show came the need for more content and it did not come easy. According to Reiss, it was very hard, “Not writing the characters, not writing the jokes but finding fresh stories to tell. That is the only part of my job that is very hard. But once we get a good idea then it is so much fun to work on the show and everybody involved in it so talented and so funny. Talented people are not always that nice.”
Any fan of the show will now that The Simpsons began as a three-minute segment on the Tracy Ullman Show. But when the demand came in for running the show as a primetime one (for 30 minutes), the creative team faced a challenge. “The biggest challenge was that there hadn’t been an animated show for adults, ever, and we were inventing something brand new after The Flinstones, which was made 30 years before. And there were no records on how to go about it. In fact, in the first 13 episodes, we had to literally learn the techniques ourselves,” said Reiss who was also the showrunner for seasons two and three. “That was petrifying. I thought I would ruin it. Those were my least favourite years,” he reminisced.
We came to know that the show was always hand-drawn and hand-painted. Fifteen years into the run of show, people started wondering if things could be done by computer. “The animators said, ‘No! People will see the difference.’ I wasn’t there when this happened, somebody said, ‘let’s do one episode that’s by computer ink and paint. We won’t tell anybody. We’ll put it on the air. If one person calls in and asks, What happened to the showIJ It looked weird tonight,’ we’ll never do that again. So, we picked one episode, at random, with computer ink and paint. Nobody in America noticed. We’ve been (using) computer ink and paint ever since,” said Reiss.
With over 600 episodes, four Emmy awards and a movie to its name, the caravan is only moving ahead. And the co-creator of the characters credits his team of writers for it.