41–50 of 57 posts
Anyone read his self published novels?
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They were written and then endlessly workshopped to increase the number of jokes per minute. I believe the goal was 6 per minute during early seasons of the Simpsons. Obviously that is really hard to do and its fallen out of style.
Because animation takes so long to produce there's a lot of time to polish and dial the jokes.
There's so many jokes in vintage Simpsons episodes that I can't understand how they were even written. They can't have made sense on paper. The writing was amazing but so was the cast and the writers had to have so much faith that putting a stage direction Homer shrugs and grunts would be devastating at the right moment. It can't be understated how big an impact they had. Every show, even non-comedy, has borrowed inf…
My favorite is Mr. Burns answering the phone "ahoy-hoy". It's funny on so many levels, and it requires an amazingly esoteric bit of knowledge in a time before it was easy to find that kind of stuff on the internet.
I remember seeing the episode and understanding the joke... it was just meant to make Mr. Burns appear *really* old.
Maybe I just had a ton of useless/esoteric knowledge as a kid -- that's likely too.
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I learned from this interview that The Simpsons are what popularized the word "meh." I had no idea that it was not a common word before this.
This is probably the quintessential example of what I'm talking about. I was actually surprised to learn they didn't coin it themselves. It's not even a word, but it has so much meaning. It's an entire mood and everyone knows what it means. Lisa says it to Homer in an offhand exchange. It's not even a joke but I will never not laugh at it.
https://archive.is/80lqM
There's so many jokes in vintage Simpsons episodes that I can't understand how they were even written. They can't have made sense on paper. The writing was amazing but so was the cast and the writers had to have so much faith that putting a stage direction Homer shrugs and grunts would be devastating at the right moment. It can't be understated how big an impact they had. Every show, even non-comedy, has borrowed inf…
I learned from this interview that The Simpsons are what popularized the word "meh." I had no idea that it was not a common word before this.