20 Questions: Matt Groening

Ten years ago, Matt Groening was making money by delivering copies of the Los Angeles Reader, an alternative newspaper that had begun running his talky, simplistically drawn comic strip called "Life in Hell." Today, he delivers just the strip--to more than 200 newspapers, whose readers ignore their own feelings of victimization long enough to sympathize with such unlikely protagonists as a rabbit named Binky, his one-eared illegitimate son Bongo and two possibly gay identical twins named Akbar and Jeff. (The strip also contains a host of nameless and deleterious authority figures.) Late last year, a new family of Groening characters--the Simpsons--debuted on TV, giving the Fox Network a Sunday-night hit that has cemented its immediate future.

Groening (rhymes with "braining") is a reasonably sloppy bear of a man given to wearing big loud shirts and making ruthlessly funny observations on the mess we've gotten ourselves into. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, as the son of distressingly sympathetic parents, he vowed "never to have to write a résumé," a goal facilitated by his attendance at Evergreen State College in Washington. "It had no grades and no required courses," he explains. "It was a magnet for every creative weirdo in the Pacific Northwest"--including cartoonist/humorist/writer Lynda J. Barry, who credits Groening as a major influence on her own work.

These days, Groening can be found at either Acme Features Syndicate or an unassuming rented house in Pacific Palisades, where the Groenings and their one-year-old son, Homer, are living until their new home is completed in the cartoonist's spiritual homeland of Venice, California. Neil Tesser found him at home. He was most impressed by the work space, "which strikes a precarious balance between high-tech wizardry--top-of-the-line Macintosh, copier, fax machine--and piles of comic books, obscure records, 'Simpsons' paraphernalia and just plain junk. It's like a garage, except it's inside the house. Matt calls it his Batcave, but I don't think there were quite enough bugs to actually support bats."

1.

[Q] Playboy: You've named the Simpson adults and their two daughters after your own parents and sisters. So after each episode, who calls you first? And what do they have to say?

[A] Groening: My parents call me Sunday night right after the show is over. They always love it and then their favorite lines of their corresponding characters come out of their mouths. But the Simpsons aren't really my family. They're only a fraction of my family's wild behavior. My family is not as stupid or as ugly as the Simpsons. They're very funny, but unlike the Simpsons, they intend to be funny and they're all witty. There are elements of my family in the cartoon, but I also have a brother and a sister I have not humiliated by naming cartoon characters after them. I don't know who in the family is more offended.

2.

[Q] Playboy: You've always spoken so well of your father. What does it mean to you to be his son--apart from blood type?

[A] Groening: My dad is a cartoonist, film maker and writer who has lived by his wits. By example, he showed that you could do whatever you wanted to do in life--that a certificate didn't matter and that you could do creative stuff. I know I must drive my father crazy, because I've gotten a lot of attention with my cartoons, which reflects on him, but I've given one of my doltish cartoon characters his first name, and that has to annoy him just a little bit. His friends call him Homer Simpson now. I didn't think it through, because I originally did The Simpsons as short cartoons for The Tracey Ullman Show, and although I hoped it would become a TV series, I didn't really think it would. If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn't have called this character Homer. It was just an inside joke for my family that has backfired in a very big way. That's why I had to name my son Homer, to make up for it.

3.

[Q] Playboy: Here's a brief history of prime-time television cartoons: The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Simpsons. Is this progression a sign of our times?

[A] Groening: I have a feeling that one of the reasons The Simpsons got on the air as a prime-time animated series is that the executives who were able to make that decision grew up on The Flintstones and The Jetsons and were aware that it's possible to have cartoons on at night--though I think there really isn't that much that we have in common with those old shows. I have to grant that there was a clarity of design in the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and the voices were pretty good. But the writing was atrocious.

4.

[Q] Playboy: What is Bart Simpson's destiny--grade school to retirement--in seventy-five words or less?

[A] Groening: It's very hard to picture Bart beyond the onset of acne. I think he's in for a very troubled adolescence and ultimately a pretty sad life. He's probably at the height of his joy and exuberance at this moment. There are few consequences to his actions right now--he paints graffiti and makes prank phone calls. But when he graduates to petty theft--no, it doesn't look good for Bart.

5.

[Q] Playboy: What was life like growing up in Oregon?

[A] Groening: I lived between the old Portland Zoo and the new Portland Zoo, in an arboretum. It was a giant park and the arboretum was on one end of it, with very peculiar trees in the middle of the woods. It was idyllic. The old zoo closed when I was about five years old and my friends and I used to play in the abandoned grizzly-bear grotto and swim in the pools and sneak into the caves on the side of the hill; it was great for a kid.

6.

[Q] Playboy: That all sounds so nature-oriented, so rooted--and so unlike Binky [in Life in Hell] or the Simpsons, or any of your other characters. What prompted your descent into urban and suburban madness?

[A] Groening: Life in Hell was inspired by my move to Los Angeles in 1977. I got here on a Friday night in August; it was about a hundred and two degrees; my car broke down in the fast lane of the Hollywood Freeway while I was listening to a drunken deejay who was giving his last program on a local rock station and bitterly denouncing the station's management. And then I had a series of lousy jobs here. I wanted to be a writer, so I answered an ad (continued on page 136)Matt Groening(continued from page 131) in the L.A. Times that read, "Help wanted: writer/chauffeur." I was the last in a long line of writer/chauffeurs for an eighty-eight-year-old retired movie director. I'd drive him around during the day and listen to his stories and in the evening work on ghostwriting his autobiography, which was already a foot high. It was just like out of the movie Sunset Boulevard. This was nobody you ever heard of. He had done some B Westerns and was very much on the periphery of Hollywood. The whole book was centered on his mother, with whom he lived until she died at the age of a hundred and two. A typical line in his autobiography was, "And that day, I met Cecil B. De Mille. I immediately ran home to tell Mother. 'Mother,' I said, 'I met Cecil B.De Mille today.'"

7.

[Q] Playboy: You had a succession of lousy jobs. What was the worst one of them all?

[A] Groening: It's a tossup. I wrote slogans for horror movies at some little advertising agency, but it never used any. For one of the Living Dead movies, I wrote, "First they want to meet you, then they want to eat you." You have to ask which is worse--working as a dishwasher in an old-folks' home or doing landscaping at a sewage-treatment plant. I mean, these were pretty bad jobs. But you know what? Those plants grow really well.

8.

[Q] Playboy: So in spite of the neuroses crawling out of your work, you actually had a fairly well-adjusted childhood?

[A] Groening: In some ways. I revolted against my school, my teachers and various administrators, because it was impossible to revolt against my perfect parents--who were very supportive; they thought the teachers were idiots, too. I got in trouble in school for drawing cartoons. Yeah, they used to get confiscated. In fact, one of the great thrills of my life is that I now get paid for doing what I used to get sent to the principal's office for. So, anyway, I spent many, many long hours in the principal's office staring at the ceiling and counting the little dots in the tiles. And at a very early age, I decided I had to somehow make this time that was being wasted pay off. And so I wrote about it. I kept a diary, and I eventually turned part of it into a series of comic strips, and then I wrote a book called School Is Hell. If I had known that I was really gonna do it--go off and be a cartoonist who got to write a book called School Is Hell--I would have been a much happier kid. In fact, to this day, I get a thrill when kids write to me and say they wore a School is Hell T-shirt to class and got kicked out. I say, "All right, I'm still annoying those teachers!"

9.

[Q] Playboy: Your wife, Deborah Caplan, is your business manager, and by all accounts, she's largely responsible for your success. What happens in the case of a really serious disagreement about career direction, in which the artist has to stand up and defend his instincts against the demands of business?

[A] Groening: I defer to her. In all cases. She handles the business, because I'm slow and naïve when it comes to that. My artist pals and I used to just hang around, scrape up change out of the seat cushions to go split a burger at Astro Burger, and we used to wonder whether, if we ever made it, we were going to live the exact same lives and just have thousands more comic books and records. And if it weren't for Deborah, that would indeed be the case. We've done very well by each other, going back to the days when I lived in an apartment in Hollywood that was so dangerous that she wouldn't visit me after dark. It was a neighborhood full of drug peddling, random fights, police helicopters and, worst of all, the guy below me and his irritating rock music all night. I had a war with this guy that lasted for months. The weapons were speakers. I put my speakers face down on the floor and played very loud, throbbing reggae and tried to vibrate him out of that apartment building, and that didn't work--until one day, I took a cinder block out of my book shelf and dropped it on the floor. All of a sudden, his music went off, and then I heard footsteps charging up the stairs, and he was pounding on my door, saying, "Did you just drop something?" And I said it was my boot or something, and he said, "My light fixture just fell out of the ceiling." I never had a problem with him after that.

10.

[Q] Playboy: We live in a time of declining literacy rates, when big-city kids aren't really learning to read, and it seems plausible that comics could attain a new significance as the shorthand literature of the future. Just how do you plan to handle this responsibility?

[A] Groening: My cartoons aren't really for the people who can barely read; they're more for the people who can read prose and get tired of all those long, straight, boring gray columns. There are other comics for the dumb kids.

11.

[Q] Playboy: Reflecting on your comic strip, one is forced to ask, Why rabbits? And were you always planning to make all the other characters different animals, or did that just sort of evolve?

[A] Groening: I used to draw many other kinds of animals in high school. I drew doglike bears and bearlike dogs. None of my friends could tell what they were, except for the rabbits. They saw the two big ears and they understood immediately. Also, there's an honorable history of rabbits in pop culture: Peter Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, Rabbit Redux--the John Updike stuff. Crusader Rabbit. And, of course, the Playboy Rabbit Head. I actually modeled Binky after the Playboy Rabbit Head caps--you know, those tractor caps that those guys wear who look like they've never seen Playboy in a million years. I wonder how Hef feels about those guys.

12.

[Q] Playboy: Let's have the complete low-down on Akbar and Jeff, those two clowns with the fezzes. How did you end up creating them? Why do they look like that? And by the way, they're now officially out of the closet, right?

[A] Groening: I don't know what you mean. Akbar and Jeff, as I have maintained from the beginning, are brothers or lovers or possibly both. Whatever outrages you the more, that's probably what they are. Actually, when I was a kid, my friends and I used to try to draw Charlie Brown; we couldn't do it very well, he's a very hard character to draw--second only to Popeye, I think, to get right. And most of what we'd draw would come out like these macrocephalic mutants. Eventually, we just turned them into these giant-nosed creatures, and we thought it was hilarious to have both eyes on the same side of the nose. They still have Charlie Brown's little striped shirt, and then later, I added a fez. It was just a sartorial touch. In fact, I keep hoping that fezzes will become popular--I keep looking in Playboy fashion spreads for young men wearing fezzes.

13.

[Q] Playboy: How many words of pop-culture trash would you estimate you read in a week?

Groening: Well, I skim a lot. I vowed from an early age not to let anything be beyond me; that is, nothing is too low or too high. So I love Chinese martial-arts movies and--let's see, what's on the low end?

14.

[Q] Playboy: Forgive us, but we were going to bring up the ugly specter of existentialism in your work. Did you perhaps read a lot of Sartre when you were young?

[A] Groening: When I was six, I warped myself by reading a book called The Child from Five to Ten, which delineates behavior of children month by month. I knew what I was supposed to be doing, and the sex questions I was supposed to be asking--they didn't provide the answers, they just said these are the questions. And of course I did none of that. My mother was mystified by me as a result. My parents read this book and they said, "Y' know, you never acted like the book said." That's because I read the book. Then, in college, I studied Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. You study that in the winter, in a rain forest in Olympia, Washington, and you get very moody.

15.

[Q] Playboy: Here's a scenario. It's 1996, you're forty-two years old, Life in Hell is a staple of every paper in America; Groening-land, the theme park, has spawned Groening World and Akbar Center down in Florida; and little Homer, your son, is about to enter the first grade. What advice do you give him about the hell that is school?

[A] Groening: Well, I'd take him up into the giant five-hundred-foot statue of Lynda Barry, where we'd eat in her revolving head--because I'm going to have giant statues of all my friends--and I'd hand him a copy of School Is Hell and say, "Read it and weep." I'll find the best school that I can for him, one where there's a minimum of busywork and an emphasis on learning and maintaining children's dignity. I don't think it's necessary for education to be miserable.

16.

[Q] Playboy: We know that a lot of your favorite cartoonists are women, and that you've given Homer and Bart Simpson essentially stupid, defensive and braggadocian personalities. One wonders, Do you, in fact, hate men? Is The Simpsons an antimale program?

[A] Groening: No! No! Though, now that you mention it, I try to take a stance with the people who have power, and men generally have power, or more power. But The Simpsons pokes fun at the entire human race, everybody in authority. Basically, the Simpsons are lovable but corrupt, as is everybody in their universe.

17.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you start doing the segments on The Tracey Ullman Show? Had you always wanted to turn your creations into animated characters?

[A] Groening: Yeah, I'd always wanted to do animated cartoons, because it just seemed, from watching Rocky and Bullwinkle and George of the Jungle when I was a kid, that there was room on TV for primitive animation that had great writing. And I had some theories about animation movement, stuff that is very hard to articulate, but when ya see it, ya see it. So I experimented with that on The Tracey Ullman Show, and it proved to be successful: You could do very funny visual humor with a minimal expenditure of energy. I love virtuoso animation--the great Disney cartoons and the great Warner Bros, cartoons--but the stuff that's near virtuoso I find merely tiresome. And given the nature of the time limitations and budget for The Simpsons, we can't do any of that stuff. Besides, as great as Disney animation is, that rubbery, blubbery, constant wishy-washy movement is not appropriate to The Simpsons.

18.

[Q] Playboy: Have you had any difficulties with the transition to animation?

[A] Groening: When James L. Brooks [an executive producer of The Tracey Ullman Show] gave me the opportunity to start in animation, I hooked up with some animators from a small company, Klasky-Csupo, in Hollywood. They had never done a TV series before, and we operated on the same wave length almost immediately. I didn't realize how lucky that was, because since then, I've come into contact with other animators, and a lot of them are so locked into their styles it's really hard to dislodge them. We had some very bad experiences early on with some animators involved with the show. The very first episode we worked on, the Simpsons were watching a show called The Happy Little Elves Meet the Curious Bear Cub, and one of the animators, in a flight of fancy, thought it would be funny if in the background of one scene, the curious bear on the little TV screen would rip the head off an elf and drink the blood out of its neck. And although we were trying for an oddball, offbeat cartoon show, I was surprised to see this. It never aired, and as far as I'm concerned, the negative has been burned. So animators are an unruly bunch and they're out of their minds. Anybody who would be willing to work on so many of the same drawings day after day....

19.

[Q] Playboy: We'll never see something as repulsively mercantile as, say, a Bart Simpson talking action figure, will we?

[A] Groening: Actually, there's one in the works. It says a number of things, though there are two things the toy company would not let the doll do. One is say, "I'm Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?" which I can't understand--it's one of his big catch phrases--and they wouldn't let him belch. They didn't think either was appropriate coming out of the mouth of a doll. But he does say, "Whoa, Momma!" " "¡Ay caramba!" and "Au contraire, mon frère"; it will be the only trilingual talking doll on the market.

20.

[Q] Playboy: Can we attach any significance to the prevalence of overbites in all of your characters?

[A] Groening: Well, it's part of my tragic view of life.

the simpsons' creator on the serious business of cartoons, the dignity of children and the corrupt but lovable nature of man

"One of the great thrills is I now get paid for doing what I used to get sent to the principal's office for."