Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 16, 1993 TAG: 9303130222
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELIZABETH KOLBERT THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
SHOW'S CREATOR RIDING `SIMPSONS' TIDAL WAVE
Matt Groening would like to tell you a few things about his family: His father, Homer, is not bald; his sister Lisa does not play the saxophone; his sister Maggie is not mute; his mother, Margaret, though, used to have "huge hair."The world is full of literalists (Elmer Fudds, Groening would say). So it is not surprising that when people learn that the creator of America's favorite dysfunctional family, the Simpsons, named the characters after his closest relatives, they want to know if he is, well, you know, a little hostile. He is not. In fact, to prove that he didn't mean anything by naming a fat, incompetent slob like Homer Simpson after his father, he named his first son Homer, too.
For a man who has become famous on the strength of his dark musings, starting with "Life in Hell," his weekly comic strip, Groening (it rhymes with complaining, his publicist says) comes off in person as surprisingly benign: big, bearish and still a bit astonished to find his jokes getting so out of hand. Over lunch on the 20th Century Fox lot, he tried to dispel a lot of misconceptions about "The Simpsons," about television and about comedy in general.
"So much humor is based on `life is horrible, sex is nasty and you can't trust anyone,' " he said. "Of course, those are all true. But that's not my point of view."
It is six years since "The Simpsons" made its debut as a 20-second segment in "The Tracey Ullman Show" and three years since it became its own series on Fox Broadcasting. During this time the show has done for animated cartoons what "thirtysomething" did for yuppies: proved that despite some annoying tendencies, they can be successful in prime time.
Over the years, "The Simpsons" and its irreverently unsentimental outlook have provoked a mountain of commentary about the decline of American culture. By now, though, the damage, such as it is, has clearly been done: the show has entered the very pop culture it pokes so much fun at. Indeed, the biggest danger the show seems to face is that it will lose its power to surprise. But for now, at least, it continues to thrive; it is consistently the most-watched show in its time slot, Thursday evenings at 8 (on WJPR Channel 21/27), and is Fox's No. 1 program.
More than just a television hit, "The Simpsons" is also a mass marketing phenomenon: probably not since Mickey Mouse raised his ears has a silhouette appeared on as many paraphernalia as Bart Simpson's crown-roast-shaped head. There are Bart cake pans, Bart bicycles and Bart pinball machines, Bart note cards, Bart soda bottles and Bart game books. From his office on the Fox lot Groening cheerfully presides over this merchandising mania. He notes with a chuckle that he has just received the lastest shipment of Simpsoniana: Bart golf balls.
"I feel like it's a tidal wave I'm surfing on," he said. "And to be honest, the whole `Simpsons' project was a project to see how far I could go in the mainstream. I may be going to hell, but I did embrace all the stuff - the T-shirts, the Bart phone, the chess set, all of it."
At 39, Groening still observes many of the customs of the youthful counterculture where he got his start: his hair is longish, his attire runs toward T-shirts and sneakers, and instead of business cards he hands out his phone number on little bits of torn paper. But while he used to drive a beat-up Dodge Dart, he now drives a sleek new BMW. And he has "gone Hollywood" enough, he concedes, that when he is picked up by a limousine, he no longer feels that he has to keep the chauffeur entertained for the whole ride.
From his friends at the "alternative" newspapers like The Village Voice that run his comic strip, Groening gets a fair amount of flak, he says, about "selling out." He simply shrugs and buys more computer games, like the electronic ant farm that once caught his fancy.
"When I was a kid, my friends and I used to put on puppet shows, make comic books, and I decided that's what I wanted to do, to play in every medium," he said. "I don't consider anything beneath me."
Groening identifies closely with the oppressed children of America, sitting at their desks, waiting to cause trouble. In conversations over two days and several venues - at a party at his friend Frank Zappa's house, over lunch at the Fox commissary and in his office - he revealed a deep association with the adolescents who form the core audience of "The Simpsons." His office at Fox has the frantic clutter of a teen-ager's bedroom. In the spirit of youthful rebellion, he makes pointed digs at Fox in front of network officials. His spirit of solidarity with children extends to his own sons, Homer, 3, and Abe, 1, toward whom, he confesses, he is "indulgent and spoiling."
"I had a real strong sense of drama as a kid," he said, "and I couldn't believe adults didn't remember what it was like to be a kid. I vowed I would never forget what it was like."
By his own description, Groening behaved as a child much as Bart Simpson would if only he had more scholastic aptitude. Growing up in Portland, Ore., he did well in school, but was frequently hauled down to the principal's office for smart-aleck conduct, like drawing cartoons.
After attending Evergreen College in Olympia, Wash., Groening moved to Los Angeles to become a writer, but he didn't really have any idea how to get started. One of his first employers was an aging B-movie director who needed help both getting around and writing his memoirs.
"It turns out I was the latest in a long line of writer-chauffeurs," Groening said. From this and other joyless jobs, "Life in Hell" was born.
The weekly comic strip chronicles the miseries of Bongo, the one-eared rabbit, as well as those of Akbar and Jeff, the lovelorn look-alikes. It was Groening's girlfriend, Deborah Caplan (now his wife), who in 1984 gave the comic strip its first lift by forming a small company to publish a collection of his cartoons, "Love Is Hell." These days Groening, who lives in Venice, Calif., tries to stay home one morning a week to write "Life in Hell." Of Akbar and Jeff, he said: "People always ask, `Are they lovers or brothers or both?' And I always say, `Whatever offends you the most.' "
The Simpsons are offspring of Bongo, Akbar and Jeff, only slightly less hapless. They were created when James L. Brooks, the producer of "The Tracey Ullman Show," asked Groening to create animated segments for the program. Groening planned to use the figures from "Life in Hell." But he realized that Fox would own whatever characters went on the air. So he resurrected a family he had created in high school as an answer to what he saw as the co-opting of "The Catcher in the Rye."
"I wanted to write something they couldn't teach in high school because it had too much foul language," he said.
Groening describes "The Simpsons" as a decidedly perverse take on some of the most popular shows of his childhood, like "Leave It to Beaver." "Bart is like what would happen if Eddie Haskell got his own show," he said. "He was a deviant."
Indeed, "The Simpsons" has something to offend almost everyone: the cops sit around eating doughnuts, the teachers are lost without their answer books, the parents are losers and even God is a malcontent. Television and those who watch it are remorselessly lampooned.
Groening has several theories for the success of his unusually caustic brand of humor. Unlike most shows, which he finds sluggish, "The Simpsons" is written to move at a manic pace. Some of the funniest jokes, he says, can only be caught on a still frame. But when pressed, he concedes that he is not sure what makes his critique of Middle America so appealing to Middle Americans.
It may simply be, he speculates, "that people don't get it."
In the early days of "The Simpsons," Groening used to preside over all aspects of production, from scripts to story boards to voice-overs to animation. Now, though, "The Simpsons" offices at Fox, housed in what looks like a cheap motel, run on a routine, and he has eased off a bit. He is starting to think about other projects, like developing a show starring the Simpsons' favorite entertainer, Krusty, the dissolute clown.
Every week or so Groening gets a new offer to develop a movie or a cartoon or a situation comedy. He hates having to choose among them, he says, because doing one means not doing the others.
A critic of most of what is on television, Groening sees the popularity of "The Simpsons" as a challenge to the writers and producers who have been inundating America with successive waves of innocuous situation comedies.
"The excuse was that the networks never let you get away with anything," he said. "But I don't consider `The Simpsons' a compromise in any way. We're calling everybody's bluff."