Conan O’Brien interviews Simpsons and Futurama creator Matt Groening, mixing show-history detail with writers’ room lore. O’Brien recalls leaving Saturday Night Live while “in a funk”, walking away with no job, and says being hired on The Simpsons days later “saved my life”. Groening describes early signs the short cartoons were landing — including audiences applauding when they ran before Fox films — and says Fox ultimately commissioned 13 episodes without a pilot after James L. Brooks insisted.
The pair swap specific memories about how jokes were pitched and policed in the room, including internal rules about what could be improbable versus physically impossible, and debates over whether Leonard Nimoy’s character could “beam out” for a punchline. Groening addresses the long-running controversy over Homer strangling Bart, saying the gag waned mainly because the writers tired of repeating it, while spanking was avoided because it felt “too real”.
Groening also recounts odd jobs before his breakthrough — including ghostwriting an elderly film director’s autobiography — and an early reporting gig around Walk of Fame ceremonies, where he says organisers asked him not to name the storefronts outside which stars were placed. In the episode’s closing segment, O’Brien, Sona Movsesian and Matt Gourley discuss a mistaken text exchange in which Movsesian forwarded a delivery update to O’Brien, briefly making it seem as if a car had been sent for him.
Conan O’Brien recalls leaving Saturday Night Live while feeling “in a funk” and without another job lined up. He says writers on The Simpsons asked to see his SNL material and hired him within about four days, which he describes as life-saving.
Read this moment →Matt Groening recalls Fox agreed to order 13 episodes of The Simpsons without a pilot after James L. Brooks rejected the network’s preference for a single show. He says the team wrote that initial batch before seeing the finished animation because production took months.
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