Upstairs in the toy-filled nursery of a house perched on bluff`s edge in Pacific Palisades, a chubby toddler named Homer started howling a few Sundays ago as his mother hoisted him into his crib for a midday nap. Downstairs, in the kitchen, Homer`s chubby, bearded father listened calmly to the din. ”I can relate to that,” he said with feeling. ” `I`m not tired! I don`t want to take a nap! You can`t do this to me!` ”
Little Homer surely was not alone in his outrage and grief. Other 1-year- olds must have been crying, with equal cause, at that very moment. Just as surely, though, none of their fathers had the same take on their plight.
For Homer`s dad is Matt Groening (pronounced GRAY-ning), creator of the hit television series ”The Simpsons,” as well as the syndicated cartoonist who draws ”Life in Hell,” a panel that appears on more than 200 alternative newspapers nationwide. And Groening relates, with deadly accuracy and delicious wit, to what kids and all the rest of us must endure in this vale of toys and tears.
”The Simpsons” is a prodigy of pop culture if ever there was one, a prime-time cartoon series that`s livelier and more vividly human than most live-action shows.
Since its debut on Fox Television early this year, this 30-minute family comedy has dumbfounded the industry`s demographers by grabbing off a huge and still-expanding audience of little kids, trend-wise teens and hip adults; has won its Sunday time slot against the three other networks; has made it to No. 5 on the Nielsens, the highest of any Fox series; and, as the network`s highest-rated offering, has prompted the 3-year-old network to slate it smack against NBC`s ”Cosby” on Thursday nights.
Making the old new
When ”The Simpsons” first went on the air, viewers and critics alike were surprised that the show had exhumed one of television`s hoariest formulas: a sitcom, albeit animated, about a blue-collar family living in a standard-brand American suburb. But ”The Simpsons” is a startlingly bold, often outrageous, depiction of contemporary life as a comic chaos where values are garbled, feelings are ignored and loved ones keep colliding like bumper cars at an amusement park.
Still, the show is also remarkable for its subtlety, developing most of its laughs, and sometimes its darkness or tenderness, from specific character traits and emotional truths.
”I think of the Simpsons as real, individual people,” Groening says.
”If others want to relate to them as symbols of American life, that`s fine, but they`re not my idea of what the family is-they`re a family. What drives the Simpsons in general, which I find particularly funny, is their urgent struggle to be normal, whatever that is, and then failing at it every step of the way.”
Father knows worst in the Simpson clan. Heading the family is Homer, a flabby oaf with perpetual 5 o`clock shadow who works, incompetently, at a nuclear power plant. (Groening`s father`s name is Homer, too, but Groening named his animated paterfamilias after Homer Simpson, a character in the Nathanael West novel ”The Day of the Locust.”)
Mother knows better, but it rarely helps. Her name is Marge. She`s a wrenchingly good-willed, gravel-voiced saint in polyester clothing, and her blue hair is done up in a giant beehive, or maybe a small termite nest.
Then there`s Maggie, the baby who must have been epoxied to a pacifier;
Lisa, the daughter with a predilection for bop chords and melancholia; and Bart, endearing Bart, the Peck`s bad boy of a son, with his unquenchable life spirit and his yellow, spiky head that suggests a crown roast.
A 30-minute meltdown
Most episodes turn on the family`s misadventures. Homer disgraces himself in front of his son, a la ”The Bicycle Thief,” by nearly causing a meltdown while Bart`s class is visiting the power station. Bart gets beaten up by the school bully, then retaliates in all-out war with the help of a local gun freak. Lisa loses track of the purpose of life but learns the meaning of the blues. (”The blues,” a saxophone player tells her, ”isn`t about feeling better; it`s about making other people feel worse.”) Marge almost has an affair with a suave French bowler, who invites her to brunch. (”What`s brunch?” she asks in her inviolable innocence.)
Groening, at 36, has become a certifiable cultural icon; waiters recognize him in restaurants and give him free appetizers. Yet the more you get to know him, the more you suspect this bearish, immensely likable man of being essentially the same cheerfully shrewd subversive he was in the 1960s, as a kid in Portland, Ore. Or in the 1970s, as a young writer and cartoonist on the alternative newspaper scene in Los Angeles. Or in the 1980s, as a fledgling TV talent introducing his fractious Simpsons, as bit players in 20- second segments called bumpers, to Fox`s ”The Tracey Ullman Show.”
What delights him most about his success is that it`s the result of doing all sorts of things that adults warned him not to do when he was a kid in school, like daydreaming, doodling and drawing.
`Misery in education`
”You are what you are basically despite school. I think there`s a lot of unnecessary misery in education. I certainly felt it. Just the idea of punishing a kid for drawing stacks of cartoons, of ripping them up and throwing them away. Some of the stuff was senseless and immature, but other stuff was really creative, and I was amazed that there was no differentiation between the good stuff and the bad stuff, or very little.”
The middle child of five siblings, Groening grew up in a fully animated home, to say the least. The other Simpsons are named after his family, too, including his sisters Lisa and Maggie. Bart, however, is just an anagram for brat. (Groening is a Dutch name, as he recently discovered, but he`s also of German, Norwegian and Russian extraction, what he calls ”three of the unfunniest ethnic groups.”)
His mother, Margaret, once taught school, and his father, Homer, is a retired cartoonist, filmmaker and advertising man who used to subscribe, during Matt`s childhood, to every general-interest magazine in the country.
”I`d see cartoons from the New Yorker and Punch and was always being guided by my dad in what was good and bad animation.”
After grade school, which Matt imagined to be Stalag 17 and where he fantasized about making the Great Escape, high school in the late 1960s was Easier Rider.
Myths of the `60s
”The mythology about the `60s was that everybody was smoking dope and had long hair and was listening to the best rock `n` roll of the day, but I remember kids having to have their hair cut and conform to a dress code. But there was a college nearby, Portland State University, where they had underground films, and great rock groups came to play, and where they hated the Vietnam War, so I got to be in two worlds; I played football and also marched in anti-war parades.
”I`d wanted to say, `OK, I can play your game and win,` and I did. It was fun, except that those were very troubled times, and I lived in a de facto segregated neighborhood, and the kids I grew up with, rich white kids, were racist to varying degrees. There were incredible racial tensions in my high school that all exploded in a snowball fight when I was a senior, and my friends started it. It was the football players who were the instigators of this whole thing.”
As college beckoned, Groening applied to two preposterously disparate schools, Harvard and Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Wash. Harvard couldn`t discern any talent, but Evergreen did. ”Evergreen was heaven for talent: brilliant teachers really talking about what they were enthusiastic about, no limits on the cameras and tape recorders and media tools you could check out.”
At the progressively unstructured Evergreen State, Groening studied philosophy and literature but declared no major because none was required.
”Some of it was silly. They refused to use the word `class.` It was
`seminars` or `coordinated studies programs.` But if you got past the jargon, it was really great. I also met Lynda Barry there. She was this crazy girl who did the wildest cartoons I`d ever seen and was very inspiring to me. She showed me you could do cartoons about anything.”
The kids grow up
Now the characters Groening gave birth to in the privacy of a quiet room are prime properties of an industrial empire that employs hundreds of other gifted people to write them, draw them and give them voice, while Groening is only one of three executive producers who supervise the show and guide its development. (Already, there`s serious talk of a Simpsons feature film.)
Millions of families all over America are welcoming Groening`s brainchildren into their homes and taking them to their hearts. Groening knows this, and it makes him as glad as all outdoors. It also makes him think back, with bittersweet wonder, to the little kid he used to be.
”I would have been much happier if I`d known I was going to grow up to write a cartoon book called `School is Hell,` and have a cartoon show on TV, if I`d known I was going to make up for all that wasted time sitting in the principal`s office, staring at the ceiling and counting the dots in the tiles. ”I think about that a lot. I think about being 10 years old now and watching `The Simpsons,` because I know if I`d seen `The Simpsons` as a kid, it would`ve been my favorite show.” –
