Even after years of fawning over flavour-of-the-month celebrity guest stars, The Simpsons giving a guest spot to Elon Musk in 2015 seemed especially shameless. At least Musk was and is actually well-known enough they didn’t need to stop dead and introduce him by name, but it begs the question of what kind of backroom deal went down for this to happen – especially given that, since then, the show has given extensive product placement to Musk’s line of cars, and shown their controversial autodrive feature actually working.
The Simpsons is at bottom a comedy show, which means that celebrity guest stars should be exploited for humour. This needn’t even involve mocking or undercutting them, just being funny in some way. A 20-minute showcase of an industrialist’s brand, here not even restricted by laws regarding truth in advertising, has drifted pretty far from this stated purpose.
In a way, this is simply the show putting a face to a fairly common plot thread – the (x) has come to town, everyone’s suddenly really into (x). But usually in The Simpsons, this week’s new trend wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, as trends seldom are. The weakness in outings like ‘The Musk Who Fell To Earth’ is that here, the show – meant to be the jester poking fun at whatever the new fad might be – seems to be believing the hype.
The issue is that in being confronted by a bona fide celebrity, someone wealthy, powerful, and sometimes even genuinely skilled within their field, there is a tendency to go a little weak at the knees. The impetus to make light of them can be forgotten very quickly if you’re busy buttering them up to post-toast levels.
But whereas usually I draw a clear and bright dividing line – somewhere around 1998 – between the good parts of The Simpsons and the long tail of drek now put out under the same name, its tendency to flatter the celebrity guests who deigned to grace it was clear and present even in the golden years.
Don’t get me wrong: in the glory days, very often they did get it right. Some of the most memorable one-off characters were guesting celebs just playing a part, and cameos like James Woods working at the Kwik-E-Mart or Jasper Johns lurking around as a petty thief were and are comedy gold. But there are a few notable blots on their record, most often – as with Musk, years later – when the sheer gravity of the big name they’ve roped in ends up eclipsing all else.
Maybe the biggest name they ever managed to get involved was Michael Jackson at the height of his popularity (and very definitely before the subsequent depths), in the third season’s ‘Stark Raving Dad’. They’d had celebrity guests before, but reeling in the king of pop was a coup like no other. Contractually, Jackson couldn’t even appear under his own name, and had to be credited as ‘John Jay Smith’, but everyone knew, not least because he played a character who called himself ‘Michael Jackson’.
Jackson did find himself treated very gently – the fact that the in-show ‘Michael Jackson’ was a white man had not yet become a joke in and of itself. But then, unlike the now-standard approach of celebrity guest star appearing as themselves, Jackson was not strictly appearing as Michael Jackson, rather a surly New Jersey brickie with the real name Leon Kompowsky, who’d found himself with a whole new lease of life when he adopted Jacko’s lilting voice.
Kompowsky ends up as something like a visiting good fairy – he appears, makes the family’s life a little better, then leaves for parts unknown. This resulted in a fairly slushy latter half of the episode, dedicating a full minute of screentime to a sentimental song (which, again for contractual reasons, wasn’t actually sung by Jackson). But then, this was not a tendency the show was immune to even in those days – two episodes later, ‘When Flanders Failed’ ended on the Simpsons arm in arm with their reviled neighbours, singing ‘Put On A Happy Face’. So we cannot blame that entirely on a wish to appease Jackson’s various unhealthy desires.
By contrast, as late as season 10, by which time the rot was really starting to make itself known, the show could still mine Irish band U2 for comedy much better than they ever did Jackson. Bono, naturally, takes the first opportunity to go on a self-righteous spiel about environmentalism, and all the while the others complain and bully each other.
The brilliance here is that while it does fit with U2, it needs absolutely no foreknowledge of the band. Here is a bighead, here are some petty men-children, if you’ve never heard of U2 it still functions as a coherent work of comedy. This was very much in the mould of Spinal Tap’s earlier cameo in ‘The Otto Show’, where, again, nothing was predicated on you the viewer knowing anything about the band. They could have been handily swapped out for any similar hard-rock outfit – why, they might as well have been fictional!
Neither did the show go weak at the knees on contact with a celebrity and let the entire show distort around them. U2’s appearance was in an episode about Homer getting in a feud with the local garbagemen and then running for sanitation commissioner, the band are at little more than a cameo level. And, vitally, their presence is funny because it punctures the cushion of celebrity around them, they are depicted to be as flawed as any of us, muttering “wankers” at each other under their breath and knocking off work early for a pint.
But if that’s how to do it, it’s all too easy to pick an example of how not to do it. Probably the clearest example of what I’m talking about came as early as season 4 with ‘Krusty Gets Kancelled’, where a whole raft of contemporary celebrities are portrayed as near-superhuman.
Now, this does arguably fit the same metric as Bono and the Tap – in context, Krusty’s rounded them up for a schmaltzy comeback special, and one which does successfully re-cement him as a jobbing celebrity. So by the needs of the story, they would have to be A-listers who’d get bums in seats, and it wouldn’t really matter who exactly they were.
Still, it fawns over them shamelessly. Oh, they all do suitably wacky things, but it’s never in any danger of being remotely critical of them (and ‘them’ here includes probable rapist Hugh Hefner). Talk-show host Johnny Carson, in particular, is literally described as “the greatest entertainer ever”, and is able (then in his sixties, mind) to lift a fully loaded 1987 Buick Skylark sedan over his head. This was an alarming departure for a show which had always sent up authority figures, and especially the kind of pseudo-authority figures that celebrities are.
Most distressing of all, this was a result of Carson himself complaining about his original part – a much better-sounding subplot where he would have mooched off the Simpsons for the duration. And the writers, one would hope with the resignation appropriate to Johnny Carson having swung his dick around, duly wrote him a brown-nosing hagiography.
This should not be mistaken for me sneering at behind-the-scenes decisions from the safety of thirty years hence. Even during the episode’s production, voice actors Julie Kavner and Harry Shearer objected to the display of sycophancy that was ‘Krusty Gets Kancelled’, with Kavner actually boycotting the episode altogether. Just because Johnny Carson’s whipped his dick out, you needn’t stay around to treat it to a soapy handjob.
On the subject of could-have-beens, the writers had also approached the four then-living ex-Presidents to appear as guest voices, any of whom would have been a very big get for both the comeback special and the show itself – about the only way they could possibly have topped Michael Jackson. The writers describe the lines they’d prepared for the old Presidents as “very respectful, but cute”, which…makes sense when one is actually approaching former heads of state, but doesn’t bode well for how funny it was likely to be.
(Former leading man and actors’ union kingpin Ronald Reagan sent them a polite ‘thanks, but no thanks’.)
Even without appearing in person, no President ever really got it in the neck that bad from The Simpsons during its golden years – most, in fact, were depicted fairly positively. Bush the elder’s feud with Homer didn’t really tarnish the man himself. Clinton’s merry admittance that he’d “done it with pigs – real no-foolin’ pigs” was…well, ‘absurd’ is the wrong word when it comes to Big Bill, but more silly than truly venomous. Meanwhile Bush the younger attracted almost no commentary at all other than one offhand reference to his “stupid monkey face” which didn’t even cite him by name.
Come season 15’s travel episode ‘The Regina Monologues’, the show actually did manage to feature a head of state, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who meets the family at the airport and spiels off a list of UK tourist attractions – which was of course Blair’s tersely negotiated asking price for doing the gig – before leaving promptly. Blair would go on to cameo in a few other TV shows, but none of those appearances were anything like as mercenary.
Here we must admit that the ‘get’ of the big-name guest star had definitely overtaken the art. Head writer Al Jean – often unfairly blamed for presiding over the show’s decline – gave a rather gushing interview about meeting Blair, which sums it up nicely. Most notably, like Carson before him, Blair explicitly asked for, and got, a joke that didn’t even really make him look bad to be removed – he and his henchman Alistair Campbell reckoned that presenting the Simpsons with a complimentary corgi flew too close to depicting Britain as ‘America’s poodle’, a common charge at the time due to certain wars.
As Jean points out, Blair did okay the mildly pointed joke that follows his appearance, where Homer concludes “wow – I can’t believe we met Mr. Bean!”, though this is nowhere near as cutting as any sort of objective description of Blair’s life and times. It is likely media-savvy spinmaster Blair was well aware that his shameless shilling for the UK tourist board needed to be leavened with at least one joke, and if it’s one that cites another of Britain’s moneymaking cultural exports, well, who’s to complain?
(And all too aptly, the same interview cites one of Jean’s favourite episodes as the similarly fawning ‘Stark Raving Dad’.)
‘Krusty Gets Kancelled’ as smorgasbord of then-celebs was following in the mould of the previous season’s ‘Homer At The Bat’, which had featured a team’s worth of baseball all-stars. But despite these guests actually having a skill other than being a media personality, the show didn’t treat them with kid gloves.
Most, in fact, were depicted as actively contemptuous of the Major Leagues, and when turned loose in Springfield wound up lost, crippled, or insane. Even when right fielder Darryl Strawberry did edge into the superhuman out on the field, he was being subtly prickish about it, since he had eclipsed Homer’s spot on the team.
(Which is why Bart and Lisa don’t come off as unnecessarily prickish when they later taunt the man to the point of tears.)
Curiously, designated hitter Jose Canseco had also pulled a Carson, demanding his part be changed – which Al Jean acquiesced to, because he found Canseco intimidating. Canseco’s cartoon self became an unabashed hero, but one where he remains the butt of the joke, bravely volunteering to save a baby from a burning building, only for the mother to send him back in for her cat, and then her lounge set, and her washer-dryer combo.
Becoming the butt of the joke is, of course, the perennial risk when you anger a comedian. But at least the writers could do their job in the face of Canseco’s displeasure, unlike with Carson. The worst thing that’s likely to happen there is that he would physically hit you – and one can’t imagine the beefy baseballier would have much difficulty in reducing the average Simpsons writer to dust – but Carson was a media mainstay, and, if he really tried, could probably get you blacklisted, McCarthy-style.
Like ‘Krusty Gets Kancelled’, season 6’s ‘A Star Is Burns’ again saw members of the production object to the over-complimentary treatment of its celebrity guest – in this case, creator Matt Groening himself had his name taken off the credits. This wasn’t quite the stand on principle that Kavner had once taken, though, given that the celebrity guest in question was fictional film critic Jay Sherman, of the short-lived cartoon The Critic.
The episode does, it must be said, treat Jay Sherman with too much of the kid glove, occasionally making him the butt of a joke but far more often simply making him conspicuously superior to Homer (as if that’s even much of a challenge). So I can see why it would put Groening’s back up in the same way as Carson’s deification left a sour taste in my mouth.
However, The Critic was itself a creation of two mainstays of The Simpsons’ writer’s room, Al Jean and Mike Reiss. Doing a crossover was a kind of extended-family affair, like the Flintstones meeting the Jetsons, not as if Fox had abruptly asked The Simpsons to team up with Family Guy (that would come years later).
If anything, it was closer to Bart making an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s talk show not long after O’Brien had left the writing staff to strike out on his own. Though it must be said the writers used their former colleague as comic character (“Sit perfectly still! Only I may dance”) much more briefly and effectively than they managed with Jay Sherman.
O’Brien also popped his head into The Simpsons’ sci-fi cousin Futurama, where, again, it was doing the opposite of bigging him up. Here he has, 1000 years into the future, fallen from the giddy heights of national television to doing stand-up in a rather tacky borscht-belt resort, and ends up trading insults with Bender in response to the robot’s heckling.
It isn’t hard to imagine the why of this – O’Brien, in all likelihood, would remember celebrities insisting their part soft-soap their image, and would not have wanted to be that guy, particularly in front of his old writer’s room pals. Crucially, as an actual comedian he would understand intimately that even if any of it was intended as a slight against him, that’s all part of the job. He would have known, first-hand, that the nicer they treated him, the less funny it was likely to be.
But this isn’t a hard and fast rule. The more recent American animation Archer did manage to deify a celebrity and make it funny. They had, admittedly, laid an effective groundwork for it, with Archer’s boyish love of all things Burt Reynolds finally climaxing with an appearance from Burt Reynolds as Burt Reynolds.
And like Johnny Carson, Reynolds was here made superhumanly competent, a tall order for any celebrity to live up to. But unlike Carson, this wasn’t something Reynolds had demanded – in fact, by all accounts Reynolds made many edits to the script, all of which were to make the role more self-deprecating. Which came across loud and clear onscreen, especially when Archer gets loud and enthusiastic about Reynolds’s 1965 film Operation CIA, the work that inspired Archer to become a spy in the first place, only for Reynolds to quietly state “that film was god-awful”.
But even when he is being hypercompetent, he’s humble about it, and it doesn’t hurt that it all goes to show up his vainglorious fanboy Archer, a man in perennial need of some serious showing-up. Can we quite buy that Reynolds is as good at hand-to-hand combat and bootlegger turns as his on-screen characters? Yes, surprisingly, we can, the slipway greased by his jolly little chuckle that only seems ever-so-slightly insane.
(This period seemed to be Reynolds’s last summer – at about the same time, he showed up, again as himself, in GTAalike Saints Row 3 as the mayor. The player character, an unrepentant hardcore gangster not given to any kind of sentiment, is completely bowled over.)
The takeaway, then, is this: if you’re going to deify your celebrity guest star, you need to be pretty sure they deserve it. Evergreen, reliable, universally liked Burt Reynolds: yes. Professional sleazeball Hugh Hefner: no. And frankly, most people could have told you that back in the ‘90s.
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