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One day this spring, in a poky basement corridor at the Fox studio complex in Los Angeles, the chief animator for The Simpsons, David Silverman, bumped into Matt Groening, who created the show two decades ago, and the following exchange ensued: "Wouldn't you say getting hit on the head is a good way to make people laugh?" Silverman asked, grinning.
"Well, hey," said Groening (pronounced "graining"), wearing a yellow floral polo shirt and jeans, "we're both fans of Laurel and Hardy." Oliver Hardy, some have suggested, was the inspiration for Homer Simpson's catchphrase, "D'oh!"
"Hardy did 'D'oh!' a little bit," Groening said, "but really it was [Scottish-born actor] James Finlayson."
"James Finlayson! Yeah!" replied Silverman excitedly. "He really went for it! Like: 'D'ooooh!'" Silverman reflected on this. "And, you know - Edgar Kennedy, too. He was the master of the slow burn: 'D'ooooooooooh...'"
"He did it, too?" Groening asked.
"Yeah. You know, in Duck Soup, where he plays the vendor, and they're driving him crazy? He's, like, 'D'oooooooooh...'"
Groening mentioned Way Out West, a Laurel and Hardy film. "Finlayson has a nice big 'D'oh!' in that. Right to the camera." He nodded to himself. "Yes. That's very crucial."
"Of course," he went on, "it's Dan Castellaneta" - the actor who provides the voice of Homer - "who's the genius, because originally, in the script, it was just written as 'annoyed grunt'. And Dan knew all about Finlayson. There's a scene in that first Krusty The Clown episode of The Simpsons, where Krusty's basically throttling Bart, and you cut to Homer and Marge, watching. And that's when he said 'D'oh!' for the first time."
For a few moments, they fell silent. "You know, this guy was just talking to me about Homer, the Greek poet," Groening said after a while, "and I think we could do an episode with Homer Simpson as the Greek Homer."
"That'd be great!" Silverman said. "We'd have the 300 Spartans, Plato, Socrates, all the rest. We'd get it completely wrong."
"Yeah," Groening agreed, sighing happily. He seemed to be in a reverie. But he soon snapped out of it. "All right," he said, unsmiling again, "I gotta go write some more jokes."
The Simpsons is the longest-running animated show in television history, the longest-running sitcom in American television history and the most internationally syndicated show in history. It is broadcast in more than 45 languages, in more than 90 countries, and has generated more than $2.5bn for Fox. It is also "the deepest show on television" (according to Canadian philosopher Carl Matheson) and "one of the most amazing feats, not just on TV, but in the whole entertainment world" (according to Ricky Gervais). It's "a corporate-manufactured show that openly and self-reflexively parodies the very consumer capitalism it simultaneously promotes", according to an earnest book of essays, Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons And The Possibility Of Oppositional Culture, one of countless academic studies analysing its contributions to philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, mathematics and linguistics. Oh, and it's also a celebration of family or an indictment of the American family, a vicious insult to Christianity or a celebration of Christianity, depending on whom you believe.
All of which might seem a heavy burden to place on five bright-yellow, boggle-eyed residents of the mythical settlement of Springfield (town motto: "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man") were it not so clear that Groening always meant it to be this way. "The history of TV has traditionally been not to do anything that would scandalise Grandma or upset Junior," he once said. "Our solution on The Simpsons is to do jokes that people who have an education, or some frame of reference, can get. And for the ones who don't, it doesn't matter, because we have Homer banging his head and saying, 'D'oh!'"
There are, presumably, a few places left on the planet where the influence of the world's best-known dysfunctional family has yet to be felt. But they're getting fewer, and will be fewer still when The Simpsons Movie - awaited for years by fans with frankly religious fervour - arrives in cinemas next month. The list does not, for example, include the isolated Kenyan hill village of Tabaka, known locally for the quality of its soapstone carving. Later this year, the Tabaka tribespeople will begin producing officially licensed busts of key Simpsons characters: the lazy, weak-willed but fundamentally good-hearted patriarch Homer, his wife Marge, delinquent son Bart, idealistic daughter Lisa, and vaguely sinister baby Maggie, as well as Mr Burns, the evil owner of the nuclear power plant where Homer works, Groundskeeper Willie, the show's demented Scottish school caretaker, and several others. (The village is one of around 600 Simpsons licensees, producing everything from armchairs to Bart Simpson asthma inhalers. Talks are under way to use the characters' voices for in-car satellite navigation systems.)
"Tabaka is about 10 hours outside Nairobi by bus, on bumpy roads, and they're only just starting to get electricity," says Paul Young, a business studies graduate from Darlington who had the idea for the statues, recruited the Tabaka carvers, and persuaded Fox to let him license and distribute the figures through his company, Craft Village. For almost a year, the carvers made prototypes by using Simpsons toys and T-shirts as source material. Eventually, Young made a return journey to Tabaka with a handful of videotapes, commandeered a TV and VCR, found an electricity source and showed the villagers their first episodes of The Simpsons.
"They loved it," he says. "Not all of it really travels across cultures - there's the language barrier, and a lot of subtle references to American films. But the slapstick and fart jokes, they certainly travel. Now, whenever we go back, it's always, 'Bring us more Simpsons videos!'"
The animators and writers on The Simpsons - there are more than 200 in all - talk about their work in a wry, self-conscious way, because it is an unremitting production line of joke-writing and character-drawing - but, on the other hand, they do work on The Simpsons. Many first encountered it as children. "I grew up with The Simpsons," says Jennifer Moeller, an animator on the show and movie. "And then all of a sudden I'm drawing him. Which is kind of a thrill. But it's also a job." When people find out what Moeller does for a living, they tend to pepper her with questions, which gets tiring, so usually she says, "I have a desk job."
The production line begins, months prior to each series, with a meeting of writers at the Fox HQ. It can last for several days, until a series' worth of storylines has been generated. Often enough, this means deciding which well-known film or TV show each episode will parody, and the process is getting harder: so many have already been referenced, in the course of more than 400 episodes, that one instalment of the cartoon South Park, which arguably owes its existence to The Simpsons, is wearily entitled Simpsons Already Did It. There have been Simpsons parodies of The Shining, Citizen Kane, Gone With The Wind and The Godfather, along with any gameshow or reality series you can think of. "It took me ages [to think of a new plotline]," Gervais, who guest-wrote the episode Homer Simpson: This Is Your Wife, told me. "I said yes to writing it before I really thought about it. I was sitting there thinking, 'God, what can I do?' when my girlfriend said, 'Have they done Wife Swap?' I called to check and it turned out they hadn't." (Gervais ended up playing "a squeaky little hybrid of me, David Brent and a posh English bloke in an American sitcom. I just wanted to have [The Simpsons] on my gravestone, really.")
Gervais's experience was of a writing process so collaborative that it was impossible to pinpoint where the crucial ingredients were coming from. "Matt Groening rang me up because he'd seen The Office on a flight, ages before it was shown in America. I did a very rough sketch and wrote a song. So the only things that were mine were the song, a couple of jokes and the Wife Swap idea, which was Jane's anyway. So I mustn't take too much credit - I said as much once, but they said no, no, that's always the case. Whoever it says 'wrote' the episode goes through the same process. So that made me feel slightly less guilty."
The Simpsons universe is defined by a set of alarmingly strict rules. Characters can never age or develop - Maggie has learned precisely one word in 20 years - and every storyline must be fully resolved by the end of each 21-minute episode, a restriction that would be the death of most sitcoms and all soap operas. "In the early days, we were incredibly rigid - everything that happened had to be something that could actually happen," says Jim Brooks, the show's avuncular founding producer. "For years, we wouldn't go into outer space, for example. And we begged our actors not to do any publicity, so as not to break the illusion that these characters really existed." (It finally visited outer space in an episode entitled Deep Space Homer, guest-starring Buzz Aldrin, in which Homer, distressed that the nuclear power plant's Worker of the Week award has been given to a rod of carbon, rather than to him, is driven to offer his talents to Nasa instead.)
Significantly, what does not happen during the writing process is any kind of inspection of the script by Fox executives. The network was in a state of financial crisis when the show began, enabling Groening and Brooks to secure a non-interference clause - with the result that a mainstream Murdoch-owned US TV channel has spent two decades broadcasting, in prime time, a cartoon that makes jokes about sex and religion, builds storylines around gay love, and even openly mocks the rightwing absurdities of its sister network, Fox News Channel. "I'm sorry, Marge, but I refuse to live under the same roof as a member of the liberal media!" Homer complains when Kent Brockman, the local news anchor and egomaniac, temporarily moves in. "Did you know that, every day, Mexican gays sneak into the country and unplug brain-dead ladies?" Nor does the show promote a particularly earnest attitude towards drug-taking. ("Fame was like a drug," Homer famously declares in one episode, "but what was even more like a drug were the drugs.")
Animated series can sometimes get away without paying large sums to well-known actors to provide voices: after all, the celebrity's biggest asset, his or her face, isn't visible. The Simpsons started out modestly in this respect, but 20 years and several fraught contract negotiations later, its main voice artists have become highly paid stars. The headline names - including Nancy Cartwright (Bart), Castellaneta (Homer), Harry Shearer and Hank Azaria (various parts) - make a reportedly "comfortable" six-figure dollar sum an episode, in return for a few hours of recording that can be completed, if necessary, away from LA. This flexibility is what allowed Tony Blair to take a guest role: his lines were recorded in 10 minutes in Downing Street, one week when Al Jean, the "showrunner" who oversees the series from day to day, happened to be in London on other business. (In the resulting episode, The Regina Monologues, Homer, visiting Britain, crashes his car into Buckingham Palace, but is released from custody on the condition that he returns to America and takes Madonna with him.)
"I gotta tell you, [voicing The Simpsons] is the most fantastic, easy job in the world," says Azaria, whose Simpsons roles include the whiny-voiced bartender Moe Syzslak. Plus, you get to meet extraordinary people, he says, slipping into a reminiscence about Stephen Hawking's multiple appearances. "But the strangest part is what [the public] will come up and say to you. You know, there's been over 400 episodes - we don't memorise our lines, because we're sitting there reading them into a microphone. So people will quote lines to me, and I'll have no idea what they're talking about. Somebody came up to me recently and started saying, 'Stupid non-magical son!' I was, like, 'What are you talking about?' "
However excited people get when they meet Moeller, there is nothing romantic about the process of animation itself, which is divided between two California studios, where the main images are drawn, before being shipped to South Korea, where more than 100 "in-betweeners" laboriously draw the frames that give the illusion of smooth movement. The difficulty of Moeller's work depends entirely on the scenes she happens to be assigned in any given week. "You can be very lucky. You can get Homer thinking to himself, which usually just involves his forehead or his eyeballs," she says. "Or you can get a shot with the whole of Springfield running towards the camera" - an undertaking that might take days.
The secrecy surrounding The Simpsons Movie has been intense, but Variety, the industry newspaper, has already revealed that the plot is built around storylines involving religious fundamentalists and global warming. It can also be revealed that there is a scene, controversial inside Fox, in which Bart skateboards naked. This is the kind of opacity one expects of politicians, not cartoonists, and sure enough, after a recent screening to a small group of international journalists, the question-and-answer session felt more like a UN press conference.
"How do you keep yourself informed about what is going on in other countries, internationally?" a Brazilian reporter asked Al Jean. "If you're going to do a joke about, for example, Brazil, how do you make sure the joke is correct?"
Briefly, Jean looked baffled, then said, "You can't think of all the people in the world whenever you write a joke."
"Do you know," asked a worried-looking Spanish journalist, rising to his feet, "who is going to do the voices for the Spanish version?"
"We've been personally scrutinising the tapes for every language it's being translated into," Jean said, apparently sincerely. "I think I can say that, in the Spanish version, we are using the same actors for the major characters as in the show."
The journalist seemed relieved. "That's very good news for the Spanish," he said, and sat down again.
It has been observed elsewhere, several times, that Matt Groening bears a surprising resemblance to a Simpsons character. But here's the thing: Matt Groening does bear a surprising resemblance to a Simpsons character. His skin may not be yellow, and he does not suffer from an "overbite" (the defining characteristic of every Simpsons mouth), but he is broad, big-cheeked and he scoops the air with his large hands as he speaks, which makes meeting him (especially in a room full of human-sized Simpsons cutouts) slightly unnerving.
Among fans, the moment Groening invented The Simpsons has attained the status of legend, and there are several versions of it, but a sufficient number of the participants recall it similarly enough to suggest that it's probably fundamentally true. In the mid-80s, his main job was drawing the comic strip Life In Hell, an often deeply cynical cartoon, syndicated in various "alternative" newspapers, that had its origins in his appalled response to arriving in LA from the friendlier milieu of Portland, Oregon, where he grew up. (He still draws Life In Hell every week, often after midnight, after a day on Simpsons business.) Brooks, meanwhile, was producing a weekly comedy show starring the Slough-born comedian Tracey Ullman and needed to fill some one-minute-long slots between segments, known as bumpers. He thought Groening might like to animate Life In Hell.
So did Groening - up until the moment he arrived in the lobby of Brooks's office, where it suddenly occurred to him that this might require him to give up the rights to his characters. Instead, in the space of four or five minutes, sitting in the lobby, he sketched out the five members of The Simpsons family, naming them after his own father and mother, Homer and Margaret, and his sisters Lisa and Maggie. Using his own name seemed a little self-absorbed, he said, hence "Bart". (He now has two sons himself, named Homer and Abe.) Groening was in his early 30s at the time; he is now 53, and the Simpson he reminds you of is not Bart, but Homer.
Watching the Ullman bumpers today, you're struck by the haphazard stubbiness of the characters, as well as a focus that is almost entirely on slapstick, not satire. The animation looks amateurish and shaky, where the present-day Simpsons style of movement is minimalist, bold and precise. This, it turns out, was the result of a misunderstanding: Groening thought he was providing rough sketches for animators to use as source material, but the animators simply used his rough sketches, adding in-between frames to make them move.
Fox, taking a gamble only an ailing network would risk, invested $10m in the first series before it had seen anything but the Ullman bumpers. (Ullman later sued for a slice of the profits, and reached an out-of-court settlement.) It was the first time a major US channel had aired new animation in prime time since The Flintstones, which debuted in the 60s. The first episode, a Christmas-themed affair called Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire, was broadcast in the US on December 17 1989. Though it had been absent from the bumpers, Groening's jaded take on popular culture seemed fully formed. "If TV has taught me anything," Bart says at one point, "it's that miracles always happen to poor kids at Christmas." ("It seems impossible," he muses later, "but I guess TV has betrayed me!")
The viewing figures began to climb rapidly, taking everyone by surprise. "There were these little things that started happening, where I thought, 'OK, something's going on here that is a little bit out of the ordinary'," Groening says. "I remember some random graffiti - a picture of Bart on the side of a fence here in LA. And then, in 1990, I remember seeing bootleg Simpsons merchandise - a black Bart with Nelson Mandela on a T-shirt being sold on a street corner in New York. It was just so ridiculous." The same year, Bart appeared on the cover of Time, and shortly afterwards Groening saw his first Simpson tattoo. "I was shocked. And dismayed, actually, that I had somehow contributed to people mutilating themselves." He laughs abruptly, then pauses. "But now I see it all the time. It seems like half the time I buy a CD in Hollywood, the person has a Simpsons tattoo. It's bizarre. Especially when I can't work out who it is, because it's not too well drawn."
However, it was the first president Bush who put the show on the cultural map conclusively, using his 1990 State of the Union speech, in the middle of a doomed election campaign, to condemn what many perceived as the show's celebration of dysfunctionality and "slacker culture". (Bart Simpson T-shirts bearing the slogan "Underachiever - and proud of it, man!" had begun to sell well at the time.) "America needs to be a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons," Bush scolded, prompting - inevitably - a Simpsons episode in which the family watches the Bush speech on TV. "Hey, we are like the Waltons," Bart says. "We're praying for the end of the Depression, too."
For all its distrust of authority - politicians, bosses and the news media are uniformly portrayed as corrupt - it's easy to overstate the subversiveness of The Simpsons. You might even see it from the opposite perspective - as having lent a crucial underground credibility and youth appeal to Fox's deeply corporate operation. Its treatment of organised religion, for example, is markedly softer than non-viewers might expect: the character of Ned Flanders, irritating Simpsons neighbour and hokey evangelical Christian, has been embraced by many US Christians, and The Simpsons has featured often in American church sermons.
"I definitely was influenced by the counterculture, growing up," Groening says, "and it seems to me that unless subversion is at least an element of what you're doing, then it's no fun. But it's also an entertainment product, no bones about it. And is it possible to be subversive in something so commercial? I can't say. I try."
But it is slapstick that remains the sacred principle, the element to which all others are subservient. "On the [Simpsons] TV show, a joke has to pass muster about 100 times before it gets on the air," Groening says. "On the movie, it's probably 1,000 times. There are jokes that were funny the first 350 times, and then, the 351st time, we go, 'Ah, I'm kinda tired of that', so we change it. And what stays in are the most obvious, dumb, visceral, kneejerk, mayhem gags. Any time a character falls down, gets kicked in the face, hit in the head... anything involving head injuries. We work so hard on the wittiest dialogue, involving sophisticated references to books and movies, and then what gets a laugh is Homer belching after drinking beer. It keeps you humble."
I asked several key Simpsons personnel whether they thought they would still be making new episodes five years from now. Nobody was undiplomatic enough to say no, and Groening spoke of a pain barrier analogous to running a marathon: several years ago, he argued, they broke through it, and now their capacity for generating new storylines seemed limitless. Brooks was cagey, and Azaria still less sure: "I'm pretty sure we'll be doing it in another year or two," he said.
In online forums dedicated to Simpsons appreciation, you will find plenty of fans who say it is a very long way past its prime, but you'll also find plenty who believe it isn't: viewing figures in the US may have slipped several million below the 13m of the show's first season, but for both Fox and Sky One, which broadcasts it in the UK, The Simpsons remains a crucial part of the schedule, destined to be shown in repeats until the end of time.
The Simpsons And Philosophy, a book of scholarly essays subtitled The D'Oh Of Homer, argues that the appeal of Homer is timeless because he speaks to fundamental conflicts about what gives us pleasure in life. We all occupy different points on the continuum of pleasures - from the noble joys of family (which Homer plainly appreciates) to the debased joy of gorging yourself on doughnuts or beer (likewise). "There is something that is ethically admirable about Homer [even though] he [is] not virtuous with respect to his bodily appetites," Raja Halwani, a Chicago academic writes.
It doesn't undermine Halwani's argument, though, to point out that another, simpler kind of timeless appeal is involved, too - an ingredient that's crucial for alchemising the satire and the reflections on human nature into something not just clever, but actually funny. "I think it's got this reputation as a children's show, among some people, because even if you don't understand the jibes at religion or politics, there's enough there to entertain six-year-olds who like brightly coloured cartoons involving a bald man hitting his head," Gervais says. He considers what he's just said. "Although, you know ... I laugh when the fat, bald man hits his head. I could do without the politics and the religion, actually, as long as the fat, bald man hits his head."
· The Simpsons Movie is released on July 27. All cartoons by Matt Groening. The Simpsons™ and ©Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
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