When you're as important as I am, getting your feelings hurt by me is almost an honor.
Today is the first day of the rest of your short, brutish existence as a sentient creature before being snuffed out into utter nothingness for all eternity.
But we all had an agreement to let each other get away with everything! That's Capitalism!
Ned, have you considered any of the other major religions? They're all pretty much the same.
Do my worst, eh? Smithers, release the robotic Richard Simmons." --Mr. Burns
My life changed when I was able to not only get seated in nice restaurants, I was given free appetizers. That was like, "Oh, my God, I've arrived".
People go into cartooning because they're shy and they're angry. That's when you're sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher.
The Simpsons and Futurama are such big projects, going on for years and working in different media, that everything involved with them, promotion and merchandise and online presence and all the rest, deserve to be scrutinized, so that's part of it. I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone at the core of a multimedia juggernaut, even if you might not care for the specific pop-culture invasion of your brain. The people who do it work really hard.
I have to say that The Simpsons comes from a huge number of great writers headed by Al Jean, the show-runner, and the work that they do is really fantastic. It's a blast just to sit around with them in the writers' room and listen to all the filthy jokes that will never get on the air.
I personally like the idea of newspapers. It's a good format. You can read it in whatever order you want. You can glance at it. There is something about a single screen and scrolling through pages that just doesn't have the same appeal.
Anxiety and hostility seem to be a great part of good and bad humor. Examining humor too closely does seem to destroy it.
You just have to keep in mind that the important relationship is the relationship with the audience. That's what I try to do. Everything else is secondary.
A lot of American shows don't last for as long as 12 episodes. They get cut after one. But certainly one of the great things about The Office in particular was that there was a beginning, a middle and an end.
I think in daily newspapers, the way comic strips are treated, it's as if newspaper publishers are going out of their way to kill the medium. They're printing the comics so small that most strips are just talking heads, and if you look back at the glory days of comic strips, you can see that they were showcases for some of the best pop art ever to come out.
