The Simpsons

[King Ellis]

I am not, my inbox is always full!

[Benji]

A de facto strike has hit production of The Simpsons, with the key actors providing the principal characters' voices, Dan Castellaneta (Homer), Julie Kavner (Marge), Nancy Cartwright (Bart), Yeardley Smith (Lisa), Hank Azaria (Moe) and Harry Shearer (Mr. Burns), demanding raises from about $360,000 per episode to $500,000, Daily Variety reported today (Tuesday). With the actors refusing to record the dialog for upcoming episodes, production has been on hold, and it now appears that fewer episodes than the usual 22 will be turned out for next season, the trade publication said.

Source: IMDB

Jesus, they can certainly afford it, but that's still a massive raise, not to mention the fact I could swear they only recently got a raise didn't they? On the flipside, they probably demanded so much because it'll be drilled down in negotiations.

[Farmer Reil]

Half a million dollars, for reading aloud for about 20 minutes (much less, in Burns' and Moe's case). Fuck right off.

Also, what has this got to do with writers? ¬_¬

Edited May 21, 2008 by Farmer Reil

[Benji]

I'm still shaking off the writers strike

[Chris the Human]

I could care less. The Simpsons has been largely shit for close to six seasons now.

[Colly]

Just sack the lot of them and employ one naff impressionist to do all the voices poorly. They'll soon crawl back for their $360,000 a show, and it might actually make it funny for the first time since the millenium.

[Future-Shock]

Azaria and Shearer do more than just Moe and Mr. Burns. They probably have more lines then Kaver, Carwright and Smith on most episodes.

[Iain76er]

I could care less. The Simpsons has been largely shit for close to six seasons now.

couldn't*

This does seem the time to stop it. Hasn't been decent for years, and $500,000 to read sub-par writing is excessive.

[Chris the Human]

couldn't*

No, no - I could easily care less. I could not care at all, which isn't true. I do get the occasional chuckle.

[IAceI]

Seth MacFarlane has it sorted. Just do everything himself >_>

I've never been a massive fan of the Simpsons. $500,000 an episode is obscene for the amount of work they actually do.

[Skummy]

Just sack the lot of them and employ one naff impressionist to do all the voices poorly.

Except then you've got a lawsuit from the actors, which would end up a lot more costly than this, I'm sure.

The fact is, they can afford to be paid this much, because The Simpsons makes enough money - it's not about "rarr, give us more money for cars and women", it's about getting a fair percentage of the amount of money the show makes. And to those of who you saying that it's too much for "less than twenty minutes work", you really don't know how voice-acting works, do you? I'm not saying it's strenuous work, because while it can be stressful, it's hardly work, but it usually takes more than twenty minutes just to nail one line, let alone one episode, and I'd imagine several episodes are recorded in a day.

I'm not saying that the amount of money they're demanding is fair for the amount of work they do, but it's fair as a percentage of the amount of money the show makes - and that's how this kind of thing should work out, they're a big part of the show's success, and should be paid accordingly.

[Plankton]

Fox makes a ton of money off of The Simpsons, and it is in large part due to the talent of the actors (and, to be fair, they do more than just reading off of paper). I think if other people are making a lot of money off of your work, then it's okay for you to demand a large chunk of it because without you, the higher-ups wouldn't be making their money.

And I don't buy the idea that any voice actor could do their work. The famous Homer scene where he sings "I am so smart, I am so smart, S-M-R-T... I mean S-M-A-R-T," was a a legitimate mistake, and improved on the spot. The producers are always pointing out the little things that the actors do to make the show better. Of course they don't do the toughest work out there, but they are an intricate factor of a show that generates a lot of money, so they're certainly within their rights to ask for more. Sometimes it's not just the amount of work you put into a project, it's what your work helps generate, and the producers consistently point out in the DVD commentaries what the actors do to contribute. Plus, considering actors from shows like Seinfeld and Friends received several million per episode, by comparison, $500,000 is fair for the amount of work they do.

Basically, I feel the same way about this as I do about athletes making an obscene amount of money: it is ridiculous, but the money is being made; it has to go somewhere, and actors (like athletes) can make a very solid argument that their contributions are hugely important. The alternative is to either go through the trouble of reworking the contracts of other people who contribute so the money is distributed better (which, as we saw with the writers, is very complicated and would not happen), or a ton of it goes to a bunch of higher-ups. The actors deserve it.

[Lord Nibbler]

Plus, considering actors from shows like Seinfeld and Friends received several million per episode, by comparison, $500,000 is fair for the amount of work they do.

The Friends cast got $1,000,000 an episode for the last couple of seasons, and only Jerry Seinfeld got paid that much on Seinfeld.

[TheSqauredCircleMessiah]

They pull this shit all the time and do it in a united front. Honestly, I'd have the 08-09 season be the last (20 years is a nice round number) and just do a movie every two or three years.

[Plankton]

Plus, considering actors from shows like Seinfeld and Friends received several million per episode, by comparison, $500,000 is fair for the amount of work they do.

The Friends cast got $1,000,000 an episode for the last couple of seasons, and only Jerry Seinfeld got paid that much on Seinfeld.

Fair enough. I Googled this topic to be more accurate this time. Jerry Seinfeld was offered $5 million an episode for an additional season (which he turned down). The rest of the cast were netting $600,000 an episode. This is according to imdb. So this is still the norm of the business, and I think people would be hard pressed to argue that others deserve the money more than they do. I'm not saying it would be bad to disperse it more evenly among the crew, but few people are more responsible for the success of that show than the actors.

[Guest Mr. Potato Head]

Usually (back when I still frequented Simpsons-related corners of the web), the blame was put on Mike Scully. Apparently George Meyer was the real culprit. Either way, Jamie Weinman has a good explanation of why our favourite family went downhill in record time:

I promised to write a post about why I think certain jokes on The Simpsons and Futurama and some other shows are “comedy writer jokes,” that appeal more to comedy writers than to people who aren’t comedy writers. I’m a little reluctant to give examples, though, because any example I will give is absolutely certain to be funny to some (or maybe even most) people who aren’t comedy writers. So when I say these jokes don’t appeal to “people who aren’t comedy writers,” what I really mean is that they don’t appeal to me.

What got me back on this subject was the release on DVD this week of season 12 of The Simpsons, the last of four seasons run by Mike Scully. Scully gave almost unmatched power to one of The Simpsons‘ longtime writers, George Meyer, who by season 10 or 11 was so influential in the rewrite room that its whole comedy style was his more than any other person’s, including Scully. (On the commentaries you can sometimes hear the writers saying either that a joke came from Meyer ,or that it was inspired by his style, or that they’re just proud that the joke made Meyer laugh.) To me this is a partial explanation of why most of the Scully episodes are hard for me to watch, because Meyer specialized in a type of joke that is often more appropriate for his underground comedy magazine Army Man than a TV situation comedy. It’s sort of a joke about a joke, where the humour is supposed to come not from the characters and their reactions to their situations, but from the writer’s attempt to put his own ironic twist on the thing you might expect to hear in that situation.

The example I always use from season 12 of The Simpsons – I don’t know if Meyer came up with it, but it certainly is a Meyeresque joke — is when Grandpa Simpson says that he was such a great grifter in his youth that “They used to call me Grifty McGrift.” The line is supposed to be funny because it’s not funny, because in a spot that normally calls for a funny turn of phrase, the writer could not come up with any turn of phrase at all, and just repeated the word “Grift” twice. Another favourite George Meyer joke technique is to have a character describe a plan as “Operation ______” and then fill in something that’s just a straight, prosaic description of whatever he’s going to do: “Time for Operation Mail-Take.” “Now for Operation Strike Make-O Longer.” “Now for Operation Christmas-Remind-Her-Of-How-Good-Is.” (A George Meyer line that was cut from an early episode, according to a commentary, was “You couldn’t find Mr. Burns’ inner goodness with a Mr. Burns’ inner-goodness-finding-machine.”) It is not really a joke, it’s, as someone else put it, a parody of bad writing. And that’s why I think of it as comedy-writer comedy, because it references their own struggles in coming up with jokes and their own intimate knowledge of old joke structures. It never once sounds like anything an actual human being might say. This also applies to jokes that are based on the assumption that it’s funny to hear a deliberately awkward turn of phrase, like “Don’t worry, I’m not a stabbing hobo, I’m a singing hobo,” or “She changed her name to Appleseed and her family changed theirs to Buffalkill.” The main joke there is just that it sounds a little weird.

These jokes are fine in small doses, surrounded by bread-n’-butter character, situational and un-ironic jokes. (And in the good years of the show, Meyer came up with lots of lines that are just funny because of the character saying them, like Homer watching the Three Stooges and saying “Moe is their leader!”) But by the Mike Scully era, every episode was wall-to-wall jokes like that. It’s not just a George Meyer thing, because he’s not involved with Futurama, and that show has pretty much always consisted of nothing but jokes-that-aren’t-really-jokes (I’ve come to the conclusion that Futurama really is a pretty weakly-written show much of the time).

30 Rock has a lot of jokes like that too (most of them coming from Tracy, like “foxy boxing combines my two favorite things, boxing and referees!” — see, it’s funny because it makes no sense!), but manages to make up for it by including lots of simple, effective and even corny jokes. Writer-type jokes are fine, in moderation. When they take over,

I actually find The Simpsons more tolerable to watch now, when Meyer is no longer on the full-time staff, than I did in the Scully era; the actual quality of the jokes isn’t better — mostly consisting of really lame-o puns — but I find a pun to be a more acceptable than constant lines like “put down that science pole!” and “hey, what’s with the attitude? I just wanted some dealies.”

[GoGo Yubari]

I've come to the conclusion that Futurama really is a pretty weakly-written show much of the time

I officially declare this explanation invalid.

[MalaCloudy Black]

(I’ve come to the conclusion that Futurama really is a pretty weakly-written show much of the time).

I was going to stop reading right here, but then I figured "eh, I'm already at the end" and kept on. Aside from ragging on Futurama it was a decent read.

[caucasianheat]

The example I always use from season 12 of The Simpsons – I don’t know if Meyer came up with it, but it certainly is a Meyeresque joke — is when Grandpa Simpson says that he was such a great grifter in his youth that “They used to call me Grifty McGrift.” The line is supposed to be funny because it’s not funny, because in a spot that normally calls for a funny turn of phrase, the writer could not come up with any turn of phrase at all, and just repeated the word “Grift” twice.

I don't think the joke is about lazy writing so much as it's a pretty suitable character line for Grandpa, who always seems to invent backstories for himself which are implausible and full of dead or never-existent terminology and colloquialisms. It's also funny because, though grifting by nature relies on deception, his nickname ironically states outright that he is someone who tries to scheme money from gullible people. In theory, if he was a successful grifter, that nickname still wouldn't have been enough to dissuade the people he tricked, so the joke folds in a lot of humourous ways if you're (over)thinking.

I think there are examples of Simpsons writers airing out postmodernist humour that deals with the writing process, but this is a pretty shitty example when the Poochie episode (which Emperor Fuckshit covered extensively and nicely a while ago) is a really visible target that proves the point better.

[Emperor Fuckshit]

Very good article, I thought. Locating one of the major problems with the writing of "The Simpsons" in later series as its love for "intentionally" bad lines is spot on, I think. I'd never thought of that style as an exercise in self-referentiality before, but that angle makes a lot of sense. Self-absorption in a general sense was a big problem for the show in its later years, with its constant love of back-referencing and sly nods to the viewer -- writing that rests, almost literally, on past glories.

But the problem can also be linked to a general "Postmodern Turn" in comedy, away from the "straight" and emotive narratives of the sit-com towards either the dispensation of narrative or its ironic employment in a way that references the concept in abstract rather than actually utilising it without irony as a tool for doing comedy. Straight "gags" have increasingly come to be seen as un-cool -- they have to be displaced by non-sequiturs or delivered with a nudge and inside a set of inverted commas. The apex of this is a show like "Family Guy." Weinman makes the point that "The Simpsons" was a better show when it mixed its elements of post-modernism with strong narratives, nuanced and believable characters, and "orthodox" styles of comedy. It sounds like a bland point ("it's the mix that makes it"), but I think he's basically correct.

The phenomenon of the non-joke has become quite prominent in British comedy too, but for slightly different reasons. The obsession with "naturalism" that began with "The Royale Family" and became ascendant after "The Office" begat a style of comedy in which jokes actually became egregious. After all, the argument runs, most people in real life aren't very funny. So a "naturalistic" comedy must also cut down on jokes in favour of the comedy of embarrassment, "shocking" faux-pas, and non-sequiturs. There's a brilliant moment during the "I'm Alan Partridge" series one crew commentary in which director and writer Armando Iannucci says of one line written for Alan Partridge, "that's us writers transferring our inability to think of anything onto Alan, there." Neither of his colleagues (Steve Coogan and Peter Baynham) are amused by that little piece of self-deprecation -- they see the technique as a valid part of comedy craft, whilst Iannucci highlights the device for what it is.

One slightly worrying thing:

30 Rock has a lot of jokes like that too (most of them coming from Tracy, like “foxy boxing combines my two favorite things, boxing and referees!” — see, it’s funny because it makes no sense!

Um... that's not the point of that joke. Here, the viewer expects Tracy to say "foxy boxing combines my two favorite things, boxing and foxes!" -- a hackneyed and lame joke. Replacing "foxes" with "referees" isn't "saying anything", it's replacing one factually valid observation with another (un-expected) factually valid observation. I'll concede that it would be better if the second thing weren't a part of regular boxing as well. But I don't think the line is a good example of what Weinman is excoriating. He picks some good examples of the style from "The Simpsons", though.

Looking at the more frequent deployment of one comedy technique won't do as the end (or even the beginning) of a critique of the show. But I think it's a pretty good "in", which is about as much as you can hope for in such a short piece.

Edited August 20, 2009 by Emperor Fuckshit