The Biggest Laugh Ever in ‘The Simpsons’ Writers’ Room Came from ‘Treehouse of Horror II’
All October long, Cracked is catching up with some of the greatest writers in Simpsons history to discuss the most beloved segments from the “Treehouse of Horror” series. From the cursed monkey’s paw to Krusto the Clown, we’re digging into the making of some real fan-favorites.
Al Jean and Mike Reiss are Simpsons legends — and stalwarts. In fact, they’re such stalwart legends that they were tasked with a feat even more difficult than writing the original “Treehouse of Horror”: writing “Treehouse of Horror II,” something that seemed impossible at the time given just how good (and beloved) the first one is/was.
And yet, they didn’t just outdo themselves; they kind of outdid the show, too, pulling off three segments that are considered classics in their own right. The first is about Homer wishing upon a cursed monkey’s paw. The second is a Twilight Zone parody in which Bart has omnipotent powers. And the third is a Frankenstein-like story where Mr. Burns puts Homer’s brain into a robot.
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Of course, they didn’t do it totally alone. As with all episodes of The Simpsons, the script was a group effort, with even the late Sam Simon, a co-developer of The Simpsons, lending a significant helping hand. Either way, the jokes they came up with have stood the test of time. Not to mention, one of them inspired the biggest laugh in the history of The Simpsons writers’ room — or at least in the 30-year-plus history that Jean and Reiss have with the show.
What was your involvement in the first “Treehouse of Horror”?
Jean: We had little to do with the first “Treehouse.” I remember Mike pitching the Bart Raven saying, “Eat my shorts,” but that was about it. My opinion of “Treehouse I” was that it was brilliant, so we were like, “How do we do ‘Treehouse II’?”
Reiss: We’ve been here for almost everything, but missed the whole genesis of “Treehouse of Horror.” We started in Season One, then we had to leave and go back to our other job, during which time they did the first few episodes of Season Two.
It was brilliant, obviously, but it was also really shocking and ballsy that, just 15 episodes into this hugely popular show, they would do something so violent, dark and off-canon. It was a real gamble, but people loved it.
Jean: To my knowledge, it was Matt Groening’s idea. Sam Simon wasn’t sure, so they went to Jim Brooks, and Jim said, “We have to have Marge issue a warning because the TV audience is going to be so terrified.”
After the first one was such a big success, did you know it would become an annual thing every Halloween?
Jean: No. In fact, after “Treehouse III,” I remember thinking, “Wow, we can’t keep doing these every year.” And now, of course, we’re doing two or three a year.
Reiss: They become harder and harder to do all the time because we’ve run through every archetypal horror story, and we’ve had to resort to inventing our own stories — even parodying The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which isn’t a horror film by any stretch. We’ve also done Dr. Seuss!
The thing I’ve said about the Halloween shows is, they’re hard to come up with the stories and we do them very early in the season. Everything’s got to be designed from scratch. It’s backbreaking labor for the animators on our third, and sometimes our first, episode for the season. So, we enter the year totally wiped out.
Heading into “Treehouse II,” was it daunting to compete with the first one?
Jean: It was really daunting, and we also wrote them way too long and they were really slow. One thing I definitely remember that I pitched was the funny name credits, which were based on Marvel comics credits, which were based on EC Comics credits, so it’s a theft of a theft.
Reiss: With that, it’s like anything with the Halloween shows, it gets harder all the time. My name also doesn’t lend itself well to any of these puns. I’ll spend hours on just the name. I’ve had to write 35 different names now — it’s too much.
Jean: I have mine for this year: Weird Al Jean.
How did the Monkey’s paw segment come together?
Reiss: One of the things I love is when Bart gets the monkey’s paw, and he says, “I wish the Simpsons were rich and famous!” and then we launch into a parody of Simpsons Mania. There’s that really funny line where somebody says, “At first I thought they were cute and entertaining, and now they’re just annoying.” It was just funny to me that, so early into the run of the show, we were parodying our own phenomenon and coming down hard on ourselves. We’ve been parodied now by Family Guy and South Park, but I thought nobody nailed us like we nailed us.
Jean: My favorite line in that segment — I can’t remember whose it was — was the joke about the board with the nail in it.
Reiss: Oh that’s me! The line I’m really proud of though, and it was my best line for at least a decade was, “Your superior minds are no match for our feeble weapons.”
What about Homer wishing for a turkey sandwich?
Reiss: I think that was Sam Simon.
Jean: It sounds like Sam. A lot of the stuff from that was Sam.
Reiss: He loved Halloween shows. He loved monkeying with the format. There was also something really satisfying about doing the Halloween show in the early days in that, anyone who works on a show, would love to kill the characters and torment them. You get a little tired of them, they’re your bosses, so it’s fun to kill them or have them go against type.
The other thing Sam wanted to do in the monkey’s paw was, the fingers would curl down every time a wish was made, and he wanted the last finger to be the middle finger. I nixed it though, because I knew it was something where we’d get all the way to animation, then Fox would freak out and it would be too late to fix it.
Jean: You could definitely do that now, but there’s no way they would have approved that then.
How about “The Bart Zone”?
Reiss: I remember we wrote this Rod Serling introduction, and we asked Harry Shearer to do Rod Serling and we got chills. It was an uncanny impression.
How about the final segment with robot Homer?
Reiss: We wrote that with Sam, but we had no ending for it. We were going to do a parody of Broadcast News at one point, but that didn’t work. In the end, we did a parody of The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant. But it still didn’t work, so we added another segment at the end — “Next week on The Simpsons…” — where Homer still had two heads. We had to build it out of existing animation and re-loop it. It looked terrible. Homer’s not in-sync, and the reading is really flat.
Jean: Two of the best lines for this episode were written by Jay Kogen: “I’m not nodding, it’s the air conditioning” in the second segment, and in the final one, there was, “Look at me I’m Davy Crockett!”
Reiss: “Look at me I’m Davy Crockett” is the biggest laugh I ever remember in 36 years in the writers’ room.
