Danny DeVito Confirmed to Appear As Unky Herb in ‘Simpsons’ Season Premiere

Hide your discarded pizza boxes — Unky Herb is coming back to Springfield.

Back in February 1991, Danny DeVito showed up to The Simpsons, and, as he loves to do, delivered arguably the show’s greatest all-time guest performance. In “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” DeVito played Homer’s wealthy and magnanimous automobile magnate half-brother Herb Powell who was mercifully unencumbered by the stupefying “Simpsons gene” — that is, until he let his “everyman” brother design a car that destroyed Herb’s career and his fortune faster than you could honk “La Cucaracha.”

Late last month, The Simpsons producers announced that the upcoming premiere of Season 36, which will air on Fox this September 29th, will feature a star-studded list of celebrity guests that includes former superstar Simpsons writer Conan O’Brien, national Dad Tom Hanks and DeVito, who has lent his voice acting talents to the role of Herb in three Simpsons episodes in the last 33 years. And while the announcement didn’t specify what parts the A-lister would play in the premiere episode “Bart’s Birthday,” earlier this week, Simpsons writer and producer Michael Price appeared on the Simpsons fandom podcast Four Finger Discount and revealed that DeVito will play “a character that he has previously played on the show.” 

Considering the fact that Unky Herb is the only character DeVito has ever played on The Simpsons, this is about as formal an announcement as we’ll get concerning the reappearance of a character who finds the title of “Uncle” to be too traditional.

“I can’t tell you much more about it,” Price admitted of “Bart’s Birthday” after indirectly confirming the return of Unky Herb. Price vaguely teased, “It’s kind of a big, big, crazy swing of an episode. It does involve Bart’s Birthday, but that’s just a small part of it, I would say, and these other characters show up for various reasons that we’re going to keep under wraps until the premiere.”

Price acknowledged the serious, A-list star power at work in the Simpsons Season 36 premiere while adding another name to the list that wasn’t included in the initial celebrity casting announcement. Said Price, “I don’t think they’ve mentioned it, but Joel McHale is in the episode as well (plus) some baseball players.” 

As one of the current co-showrunners on The Simpsons, Price said that “Bart’s Birthday” is one of the episodes that he is personally responsible for supervising, saying, “I’m very excited about it.” In his esteemed position, Price was at liberty to tease some other celebrity guests that will appear later in Season 36, saying, “Andy Serkis is going to be returning to the show, he was on the show a couple years ago doing Gollum.” According to Price, Serkis will appear as a new character in a parody/pastiche of author Ray Bradbury’s work, an episode titled “Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes.”

But, ultimately, the biggest returning star of the new season will undoubtedly be DeVito and his avuncular inventor Herb, who, canonically, is, once again, impoverished, according to a brief voicemail message he recorded for the Season 13 episode “Changing of the Guardian.” Let’s hope that Bart’s birthday bash will have ample sources of inexpensive cheese.