Homer knows best

>> The Simpsons’ Dan Castellaneta on the
legendary show’s past, present and future

by CHRIS BARRY

Not only a first-rate writer and comic actor, Dan Castellaneta also happens to be the guy behind the voices of Homer Simpson, Barney Gumble and Krusty the Clown, to name but a few, from a television show you might have heard about called The Simpsons. A humble, modest and, one might assume, wealthy man, he nevertheless continues to regularly audition for TV and film roles and, thanks to the miracle of animation, manages to keep a relatively low profile. The Mirror caught up with Castellaneta last week.

Mirror: What inspired the idea to do The Simpsons in the Flesh?
Dan Castellaneta: It started when we were asked to do a live reading of the show at the Aspen Comedy Festival. I don’t know whose idea it was but it seemed to make sense. The Simpsons is such a unique thing. It’s funny, because a lot of the time you do a character and people don’t really know which actor does it. There’s applause anytime you introduce a new character to the set-when people see a character they love and recognize coming out of a different voice. It’s great. It’s almost like doing a rock show. It’s pretty big. I mean, it’s not tantamount to doing a Led Zeppelin concert but people are always shouting out requests. [starts laughing]

M: Was it weird when you first started realizing that some of your characters were becoming legitimate cultural icons?
DC: You know what’s weird? Being an actor and a writer I’ve done all sorts of different things that I’ve tried to get recognition for and, you know, The Simpsons was just this little side thing that I enjoyed doing which turned out to be huge. The interesting thing is that I’d given no second thought to any of this stuff. Like, “D’oh!” was created in one minute. In the script there was something in parenthesis written as “annoyed grunt,” so I asked Matt “What is this?” He said, “Whatever you want it to be,” and I remembered a character actor named Jim Findley from the old Laurel and Hardy movies who used to go “D’ooooooh!” when he was upset. So I did that, but it was too slow because of the animation. So we sped it up and it became the “D’oh!” that you recognize. Now I walk down the street and I hear people do it -and sometimes it’s because they might recognize me-but a lot of times they’re doing it just because it’s part of their vocabulary. I mean, I’ve even seen people do it on sitcoms now. Yes, it’s totally weird.

M: Outside of The Simpsons, what else are you involved in?
DC: Well, I do a lot of writing myself and sometimes I’ll write plays and put those on. I also have a friend who’s doing a low-budget film that he says I have a part in this summer. Otherwise, I’m just out there auditioning and doing my general voiceover work. And I have my comedy CD, I Am Not Homer, which came out in April and is comprised of sketches I wrote with my wife. On the ninth track though, I actually am Homer.

M: Can you use the Homer voice whenever you want, or is it a trademark which belongs to Fox?
DC: I had to get permission from Fox to do it. As long as the voice isn’t used to sell a product without their permission, it’s no skin off their nose to allow me to put it on my record. I suspect they see it as a way of promoting the show even more. Sometimes people will bring me on to do a voiceover on a commercial and then they’ll ask me to do a Homer, or a Grandpa voice-and they’re paying me the same as they would any other average actor-and I’m, like, “No, that’s a famous voice. You’ve got to pay some dough for that.” I don’t even have to be the bad guy. I just tell them that Fox won’t let me do it-which is true.

Fighting with Fox

M: How are things with Fox these days? What was that thing I’d read a few years back about how when you were re-negotiating your contracts with them they started threatening to fire the whole cast, saying they could find adequate replacements on pretty well any college campus in America?
DC: It was actually any high school in America. I don’t know who exactly said it over there but it was a very dumb thing to say. I don’t know what the purpose was other than to make us even more angry with them. It certainly didn’t scare us.

M: Changing the cast would have to be disastrous…
DC: Yeah, it just would have sounded weird. And on top of that, to replace the five or six of us who held out in negotiations they would have had to find voices for over a hundred characters. And I’m just talking regular voices-not all of the other voices and impressions we do. They would have had to hire twice as many voice people which would end up costing them just as much, if not more.

M: Of course, they didn’t seem to hesitate in killing off Maude Flanders when Maggie Roswell started asking for more money. That seemed a little petty, all things considered.
DC: Well, the rest of us had already done our deal and she was taking them on alone. So I guess they figured they would take it out on her. The whole contention with Maggie was because she lives in Colorado and she wanted them to pay for her ticket to fly in to Los Angeles to read her parts. And they didn’t want to do that or something. It was real nickel and dime stuff. The other thing to remember is that Fox was not really instrumental in the creation of the show. I’ve heard that if the studio is directly involved in a show’s creation the executives involved get bonuses, but with The Simpsons they don’t, so they don’t treat it with as much respect as perhaps some of the shows that they had been involved in developing.

Battling Brazil

M: I suppose Fox pretty well keeps their noses out of the creative side of The Simpsons.
DC: Yeah, they have to. That was the deal Jim Brooks made with them when they first agreed to do this thing. They regularly give notes on it anyway, saying it can’t be this, or it can’t be that, the characters are drawn too ugly, this sort of thing. Standards and Practices have given us notes saying what we can and cannot do and then we do it anyway and, not only do we not get in trouble for it, but people end up loving these bits. What’s really funny is the stuff that they don’t say anything about is usually the stuff that we end up getting in trouble for. Like that show we did about Brazil.

M: Oh yeah, that’s right. Who was upset with the show again? The government of Brazil?
DC: I don’t know, actually I think it was just some journalist and a few politicians with nothing better to do.

M: I heard that they’d started legal action against the show.
DC: Yeah, but I think they dropped it. God knows, the United States have done worse things to Brazil than simply make jokes about their country. They could certainly take the U.S. to the World Court for plenty of other things we’ve done that are much worse than insulting them. Hey, the Canadians loved the fact that we did an episode on them. They made it like a national day or something. And I don’t think the Australians cared when we made fun of them either. You know, we’re an equal opportunity offender. I remember somebody came up to me one time and was all offended after we had made some Catholic jokes and I said, “Oh, you’re offended by those but you’re not offended by the Hindu jokes, or the Jewish jokes that we’ve made? Those are okay?”

M: Do you think there could have been a Family Guy or a King of the Hill if not for The Simpsons?
DC: Most definitely not. In fact, I don’t think a lot of the Saturday morning cartoon shows would be around either. I don’t think there would have been an Animaniacs without The Simpsons. We kind of gave the people who write animation a license to be a little more hip. A little more out there.

M: What did you watch on television when you were growing up?
DC: The first really adult comedy I liked was the Dick Van Dyke Show. Any number of cartoons, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Yogi Bear and all those. Laugh-In, Get Smart. And then I became a huge Monty Python fan. I loved those shows that Jim Brooks did, you know, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and a lot of shows that were done by MTM. Bob Newhart, all those great comedies. I remember on Saturday nights all my favourite shows came on in a row: All in the Family, the Carol Burnett Show, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart. I never went out on Saturday night.

M: Do you think those shows affected your comic sensibilities much?
DC: Oh absolutely. And they do to this day. There are very few sitcoms on now that match that stuff.
Dumbing down

M: Homer himself has sort of grown from this ogre-type character to lovable dope to his current persona as unadulterated buffoon. Has that been your doing, the writers’ doing, or a combination of both?
DC: I was never really privy to any discussion about what Homer’s character was going to be like. When I first did it-early on when it was on The Tracey Ullman Show-he was just basically an ogre and Bart was just this rebellious little kid so you needed something to balance it out. Homer was the heavy. Later on, with the half-hour show, I kind of noticed that Homer was a bit dim as well. He would screw up all the time and things would never work out for him. But he was also a little stupid and it just kept going more and more in that direction. But it makes sense. I think Bart can only get away with most of what he does because of the fact that Homer Simpson, an idiot, is his father.

M: I’ve heard that when you first started doing Homer you were basing his voice around Walter Matthau. Walter Matthau?! How come?
DC: It was just something that immediately struck me when I first saw Homer. I saw this big mouth, kind of droopy and, for whatever reason, I thought of Walter Matthau. I had a repertoire of voices and that’s the only one that seemed to fit.

M: Will Homer continue to get more moronic?
DC: Well, there was a point where he was getting dumb to the point of absurdity. And Matt Groening started clamping down on that. Eventually the message got through to all the writers that they might want to calibrate Homer’s stupidity with a certain believability-or at least believable so far as the world of The Simpsons is concerned.

M: It struck me as being less imaginative-or even lazy- transforming him in to a complete fool.
DC: Yeah, there were times when it was pushed way too far. Like, I remember one time when Homer entered a scene with a branch in his mouth-just an absurd, dumb thing to do. There has, at least, to be some foundation to his stupidity. But the strength of the writers is that they push past their self-imposed boundaries. At first they set their standards for television and then they start to set them for themselves. And sometimes they just go way off the field.

Twilight of the Simpsons

M: In recent seasons it seems like the producers/writers are relying more on increasingly bizarre plots, arguably at the expense of the show’s subtle humour. Is there a reason for this?
DC: I think it’s kind of metamorphosed to that. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision but the show itself has become so established and television has changed so much since we first started. At the beginning the show was a reaction against what was on television then. But now television has gotten so weird and absurd it’s hard for The Simpsons to still differentiate itself. And remember, the show has always kind of been deconstructionist. At first, in terms of a family sitcom, they wanted the characters to be as real as they possibly could within a cartoon framework, while at the same time they didn’t want it to be a traditional family show-like a Father Knows Best or The Cosby Show. But once it got so established I think they started trying to deconstruct the show itself. You know, they have a rule where the show always starts in one direction and then takes a 180 degree turn and, [starts laughing] sometimes, they take themselves down a road where they don’t know how to get back.

M: Lately a lot of people have been accusing the show of having lost its direction, to be past its prime. To have finally “jumped the shark,” as the kids like to say.
DC: Yeah, well, I’ve gone back and watched episodes that I didn’t care that much for originally and finally started to enjoy them. As soon as I stopped holding the show up to these exceptionally high standards we all have for it I was actually able to laugh and enjoy them. And the shows we are doing now are just as funny as the shows we were doing in the first three or four seasons. Although personally I would like them to do a few episodes that are a little more realistic within the terms of the family-and I think they try somewhat. I think some people will start turning against any show that is on for a long time. Sometimes people get upset because they see it as their own thing and when it gets incredibly popular they decide they don’t like it anymore. And you know, I think at one point maybe the show did actually jump the shark-maybe somewhere around the fifth or sixth season-and then we got back on the shark. I honestly don’t think we’ve ever been able to match the first four seasons in terms of consistency but I still think the shows are really, really funny and entertaining.

M: Any theories as to why Homer Simpson seems to resonate with so many people?
DC: I think it’s because maybe Homer completely accepts himself-even with all his flaws. Somebody once commented that Homer is like a 12-year-old kid. An adult 12-year-old kid. I remember one of the writers saying to me that if you want to write Homer Simpson, think of him as a dog trapped inside a man’s body. You know, dogs do all sorts of terrible things but they think very well of themselves-and you’ve got to respect that. And they’re also very loyal and, ultimately, Homer is very loyal and loving and you know, even though people say that he’s a bad example as a father, he genuinely does a lot of things with his kids. I mean, he’s constantly involved with Bart, he brings Bart in on a lot of his schemes-and even when he ignores Lisa, he always comes around. :