just two weeks ago actually we aired our 636 episode which makes the Simpsons the
longest-running written TV show in primetime history we
surpassed the show Gunsmoke we want to gloat about it but there's no one alive
from Gunsmoke so we don't know what to do were kind of frustrated about it
looking into a lawsuit trying to relieve some of that pressure but anyhow the
show is this massive success worldwide financially any way you look at it
massive massive success and I guess I want to talk about why it's a success
and when people look at why the Simpsons is a success in my mind the most
important thing about it is the least known thing about it people look at the
show and we have these amazing animators with this star-studded incredibly
talented voice cast we have incredibly handsome writers but the real success of
the show that nobody frankly knows about is the environment the show has created
it and let me just back up one step to explain on live-action TV shows like
suddenly Susan like any TV show the way a production week processes or moves
forward is Monday morning you have something called a table read where the
actors sit around a table and read the script aloud for the first time from
that point on you start getting notes from the studio and the network and the
actors themselves and you start rewriting it so Tuesday it's almost a
new script based on these notes you do a rehearsal another round of notes another
rewrite Wednesday do it all over again and then you usually film the show on a
Friday and everyone is scrambling all week no one's able to find their best
footing or what is the best joke you're just reacting all week and you end up
having a show that's substandard like for example something Susan anyhow none
of that exists on The Simpsons the reason why is Jim Brooks I mentioned
earlier his his resume Jim is sort of powerful enough that he said to Fox if
we're gonna do the Simpsons as a half-hour show we want no interference
whatsoever from Fox and because Jim is Jim and foxes Fox they said yes they
agreed so the only if we backing up a second they're really The Simpsons
produced in what I call a creative paradise if we wanna do a story for the
most part we do it if we're gonna do a joke for the most part we do it the only
presence that Fox has in the making of The Simpsons is through a division of
Fox called standards and practices which is like the censor and their job is to
make sure nothing distasteful goes on the Fox a
they think right now nothing distasteful is going on the Fox airwaves we had an
episode I'm gonna say four years ago maybe where we had a big box type store
and we called it sprawl Mart and underneath we said a parody of Wal Mart
and for whatever reason but as an advertiser it was some business
relationship I don't know the center absolutely dug their heels and said you
have to change that you must change that back and forth we went you know you're
supposed to have no interference etc finally they insisted we changed it what
we changed it to was this sprawl Mart not a parody of Walmart we had an
episode three years ago that said sprawl Mart's still not a parody of of Walmart
and then like a year ago we had sprawl Mart now celebrating five years of not
being a parody of Wal Mart so and I wanted to get really into the nuts and
bolts and under the hood of our creative process and our innovative process in
the hope that it offers something to all of you that you can learn or take back
to your own jobs or your own personal lives and trying to be creative or
innovative to do that I'm gonna start talking about jokes and I'm not going to
talk about them in a fun entertaining way I'm gonna talk in the most dry
academic way this is a great time to check your emails I may check my emails
during this too but a joke is and forgive me if any of this sounds
patronizing a joke is a really great example of an innovation when it works
again I apologize it is patronizing but a joke is two parts there's the setup
and there's the punchline and for a joke to work the setup has to be something
that the listener can relate to understand and get on board with and the
reason that we laugh hopefully at a joke is because of this surprise we weren't
expecting it based on the setup it's a twist on what we thought and it's a good
innovation because of the surprise so it took something we're used to and it
turned it in a new way and that's how our good innovation works kind of it
takes something we're all used to and we can relate to and then it flips it and
that idea of being relatable is key to any innovation and particularly key to
our creative process because we work on this animated show where we have this
broad canvas we can do anything we want homers been to space he lived in an
underwater house he does things no human should ever do he went to Winnipeg
things no human should ever do but we connect to our audience always by being
relatable and the way we're relatable we always have a human emotion that is
connected with our audience and once we have that connection we then kind of
have license to kind of do what we want and have fun with it but we're always
grounded to the audience because of this emotion and it's not so much with
emotion it's about being relatable and connecting to our audience so it's
always always super important to us to be relatability partly to be relatable
and a quote I always offer up about this comes from the great comedian Sid Caesar
also late I'm only quoting dead people today it's the theme but Sid Caesar the
great comedian he said the guy that invented the wheel was smart but the guy
that invented the other three was a genius so Sid Caesar so that's the first
thing is really being relatable connecting to our audience the biggest
thing and then once we get to work we start sort of cranking out ideas start
sort of being innovative I talked about our process earlier when I sang about
the krusty example we start brainstorming and as soon as you talk
about brainstorming people are very quick to throw out the old adage well
there's no bad ideas in brainstorming that's not true there are bad ideas and
the truth is of course they're bad ideas at the Simpsons people call them Joel's
ideas but what we found is there's real value to bad ideas there's two real
things about bad ideas that are incredibly valuable the first is with
any bad idea it's a great chance to test indeed if you do have this creative
environment I talked about our creative environment but in a brainstorming
session you also have a smaller creative environment and if someone says
something that might be a bad quote-unquote bad idea if it's welcomed
into this session without the person feeling embarrassed or mocked for their
bad idea and making them want to pitch something else or suggest something else
that's what you want that's a good creative environment and every bad idea
tests that environment good ideas are great to embrace and easy to embrace
it's how you embrace and deal with the bad ones that really sort of test that
environment so we want that and we want ideas to come in because the other great
thing about bad ideas about any idea is that in any idea there's always a nugget
of something that someone hears and then can build momentum off and then have
their own idea and you start building momentum and we have found without fail
that the more this sort of avalanche of ideas come you end up getting to a place
you never would have got to as an individual you kind of need this train
to go sort of like if anyone knows the theatre of Improv it's always this yes
and you take what someone says and you build
on it and we always want to keep building on ideas an example of how that
works on the show we once had an episode where I showed you earlier you can see
here maggie has her suturing and it's not the doctor told Marge you have to
take away or sue their pacifier it's not good for it's bad for her teeth if
anyone has went in right now I encourage you to take it out it's bad for your
teeth so March takes it away and Maggie can't sleep and she's whimpering in her
crib all night and Homer can't sleep because he hears his little daughter
went brewing and crying and being a loving father Homer goes and gets her
the dog's toy and gives her that too stuck on instead so she's able to fall
asleep but every time she sucks on the dog's toy it makes a little squeak so
Homer still can't sleep so Homer gets a prescription for
something like ambien we called it nap e'en and he starts taking it and now
he's able to sleep but as you might remember there was a issue with ambien a
few years ago that people were getting up and doing odd stuff when they were
taking ambien happens to Homer he starts getting up he's eating he's walking
around bart sees this and realizes he has his own personal zombie slave and
starts getting Homer to do anything he can for him at one point Homer
asleep is driving Bart and his friend through town
all of a sudden Homer wakes up scared he tries to slam on the brakes can't do it
in time goes through a wall it's the Springfield Fire Department he knocks
out the fireman's pole hits the alarm bell which goes off the fireman sleeping
on the second floor think there's a fire they run to slide down the pole it's not
there they fall down they all break your legs and that's how we began the episode
where Homer becomes a volunteer fireman and then building on ideas so that's an
example I also talked about this avalanche the stream of ideas that we
always want and that's important to in the best way to get sort of the most
productive stream is to start with as broad a base of the stream I'm ditching
the stream analogy I'm going to the pyramid analogy make a note you want
kind of this pyramid to build the best idea and the best pyramid starts with a
broadest base at the bottom the most ideas that come in and the way you
maximize those ideas and the broadest base is sort of a different variety of
diversity of ideas and the way we sort of get a diversity of ideas is we use
our group of people at the show who are our writers and we try to have as
diverse a background as we can not just from their lives but also socio-economic
that gives us this diversity of ideas everyone has their own perspective and
they contribute ideas that we can then sort of pick and choose the gold from
and build to whatever is best at the top and when I talk about our writers I'm
talking about people that work at the show are not just talented they're often
geniuses as some people know most of our writers went to Harvard again I will
mention I did not go to Harvard I went to the University of Alberta which I
don't even think is the Harvard of Alberta it's kind of the Seneca College
of Alberta I would say anyhow so when I say that all of our writers are these
Harvard educated guys it immediate people think well that's not a very
diverse group and the truth is they are I mean even though they went to Harvard
we have African Americans we have Asians we have Canadians we have Hispanics
there's also this amazing array of educational backgrounds amongst our
writers we have a guy that graduated from Harvard Law School and worked on
Wall Street as a lawyer we have a PhD in chemistry teaching computer science a
PhD and electoral electrical engineering as I said I have an MBA another guy got
into Stanford Medical School and rejected it to come right for the show
his parents were super excited about that
we also it's not just the backgrounds or education it's also age we have some
writers that are in their 60s we have our youngest writer as 23 years old as I
mentioned the show is 30 years old so this guy has never lived in a world
without the Simpsons we've all decided it's probably the nicest thing to do
when the show ends we're gonna kill them I'm kind of looking forward to it but it
just seems like the right play anyhow so we have this diverse group we have this
creative environment we're generating tons and tons of ideas as I mentioned
before and to build that pyramid or to get to the top of the pyramid you're
throwing stuff away obviously the top is much thinner than the bottom and we're
wasting so much stuff we will sometimes spend you know I'll put it in in human
hours maybe no joke 60 human hours to get a single joke on the show it's a ton
a ton of waste it takes nine months to make a single episode of The Simpsons
and we are rewriting the show that entire nine months we're seeing
animation and we're starting to throw stuff away we even get to the point it
gets harder and harder to rewrite as we move along
those nine months because as the animation gets more polished it's
expensive and time-consuming to change it but sometimes we know we need to
change something for whatever reason and we will be like a day before the show
and we'll be sitting in front of the TV watching Homer's mouth flapping and
we're counting how many times it flaps and we're like okay we can replace this
seven syllable line with a new seven syllable line and we're sitting around a
room trying to think of something that we can just change the audio on on a
Friday it's gonna be on TV on a Sunday and I always look around I'm like these
guys with me are all from Harvard like these guys should be on Wall Street Wall
Street screwing the middle class and instead they're next to me like counting
the lip flaps of a cartoon oaf but anyhow the point is is not so much that
but we're just that we're always ready to change stuff for a better idea always
ready to exchange stuff and the real point is that creativity is not
efficient I always tell people if you tell me that your creative process is
efficient I'll say your creative process is broken because you need to be wasting
stuff to find the best stuff you need to know what's bad you know what's good I
always say that creativity is not like a a Tesla on auto drive but kind of like a
Ford Pinto being driven by a drunk driver swerving all over the road which
is how I got in from the airport incidentally so anyhow that's that's
another big thing for us is we welcome waste we welcome inefficiency another
thing is we often try to look at any problem we find that sprawl mark thing
is a good example when we get stuck we try to look at the problem from a
different angle and sometimes it's a hundred eighty degrees the complete
opposite side of it of a thing we had an episode not too too long ago where Homer
realized if he ate enough he'd get himself to waste 300 pounds and go on
disability and obviously he does it he gets so fat that one of our character
said his butt had its own congressman Republican I assume but anyhow when this
was when the idea came up and and we're like after this you know Homer got fat I
was talking about it and in the room there was this general feeling about how
depressed Homer was now burdened he was now sad he was and somebody just from
the back of the rooms like well what if he loves it and you could just feel
right away that's like wave this rush of creative energy because it was a new fun
innovative way to deal with this thing and we had this amazing episode called
king-size Homer where Homer like embraced and loved kind of being fat
Amin a disability and it was a real fun way to go so the point is sometimes
excuse me he's trying to look at the problem completely from an opposite
angle because like your first thought is not often the most creative it's the
most obvious thing and sometimes challenge yourself what if just for the
exercise sake we flip it and is there a way to address the problem that way