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February 14, 2002
Mmm, doughnuts! The Simpsons are finally making a visit to Canada
Barrett Hooper National Post When it was announced the Simpsons would visit Canada in an upcoming episode, the question was not "Why Canada?" but "Why did it take so long?"
After all, with 280 episodes and a Rand McNally globeful of destinations -- from India to Morocco, Austria to Mexico and, well, even Rand McNally -- behind them, and in light of the fact that Canada has provided the punchline -- or at the very least, an obscure reference -- for countless jokes, this is a dubious honour that is long overdue.
We've seen Homer watching the Canadian Football League draft and claiming that Bachman-Turner Overdrive is "Canada's answer to Emerson, Lake and Palmer." A cartoon President Clinton (oh, the irony) has stated that "Quebec has got the Bomb." The baseball team in the Simpsons' hometown of Springfield has threatened with a move to Moosejaw. And don't forget the French-Canadian circus, Cirque de Pur�e, which the Simpsons have been known to watch from the comfort of their well-worn couch.
But when they arrive in Toronto on this Sunday's episode -- and yes, they do get here, despite Homer's previous insistence that "anyone can miss Canada, all tucked away down there" -- it's not for the national grammar rodeo or to find the missing geese from the time Bart and Lisa were TV news anchors (according to Bart, "some say the birds flew to Canada, others say Toronto").
No, the reason the most dysfunctional family since the Hapsburgs are here is because of one Schwarzenegger-like action hero, a spike-headed truant with a crush and two patriotic Canuck goofballs named Tim Long and Joel Cohen.
The episode, entitled "The Bart Wants What It Wants," has Rainier Wolfcastle, star of the Dirty Harry-inspired McBain series, in Toronto filming his next shoot-'em-up, Undercover Nerd. Bart, who is in love with Wolfcastle's daughter (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), drags his family to meet her.
Of course, if it weren't for Long and Cohen, two writers on the series who also happen to be from Exeter, Ont., and Calgary, respectively, Wolfcastle's film shoot would probably have been in Hollywood. But Long is quick to point out that "like any movie shot in Toronto, it's not set in Toronto."
Long and Cohen are both in Toronto for a special advance screening of the episode tonight. Of the two, Long is the Simpsons veteran, having been with the show for four years. A University of Toronto grad, he left for New York in the early 1990s "to put some distance between me and a couple of ex-girlfriends."
He earned a master's degree in English literature -- "for reasons that now escape me" -- from Columbia University and passed on the life of a "tweedy professor with patches on my elbows" in favour of a gig writing for the celebrity round-tabler Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. That led to a job as head writer on The Late Show with David Letterman, only leaving the gap-toothed talk-show smoothie for the doughnut-gobbling, beer-swilling, dunderheaded nuclear plant worker.
He has written several episodes, including the one in which Bart and his friends form a boy band and meet 'N Sync, and the one where the kids get trapped at school by a snowstorm and are rescued by Homer and his God-fearing hi-diddly-ho neighbour Ned Flanders when they crash into a tower of salt from a nearby cracker factory, which, says Long, "is sort of based on an experience of mine back in Canada."
"A surprising number of our stories come from Exeter," Cohen says. "All of Season 12, if I'm not mistaken."
For his part, Cohen has fewer writing credits, given that an episode can take as long as nine months (and hundreds of rewrites) to produce and he's only been with the show a couple of years. A former writer on the Brook Shields sitcom Suddenly Susan, he penned last October's annual Halloween special, "Treehouse of Horrors XII," as well as the one in which Homer and Ned's ex-wives from Vegas reappear (which will air on Global following the Toronto episode on Sunday).
But just because Long and Cohen are Canadian, don't give them all the credit -- "or the blame," says Cohen -- for all the Canada references that appear. They may have raised the show's awareness of Canada -- something to do with lots of wedgies, according to Long -- but there are as many as 14 writers working on each episode.
"It might not seem like it, but we do try to keep some sense of reality to the show," says Cohen. "Everything Homer does is based on real human emotion, which is as a father who loves his family."
As a result, the writers have to guard against Homer appearing like too much of an ogre or making him too stupid. "The guideline is that Homer can never be dumber than a dog and that Homer can never forget his own name," says Long.
"At one point we actually had to decide what breed of dog we were talking about," Cohen adds. "It was a wheaten, I think, we set as the standard."
But Long admits that it's an easy joke to make a character appear stupid. "For short-term gain you can make the character brain-damaged, because it's really funny if somebody does something really stupid," he says. "But in the long term it corrodes the integrity of the series."
Not surprisingly, when Long is asked what he finds funny, three words spring to mind: "Misfortune of others." But then he admits to coming from a long line of mirthless individuals.
The longest-running sitcom on TV, The Simpsons has ingrained itself into popular culture even as it parodies pop culture with its balance of satirical wit and low-brow antics.
"Anytime you go to a bar, there's going to be some drunken idiot who says, 'D'oh!' [Homer's expression for his perpetual frustration with life]," says Long. "But it's not clowns at the pie factory, the way people assume it is. It's pretty sober-minded, at least when we're working, which is no more than an hour and a half a day."
Like such classic shows as All in the Family, Taxi, M*A*S*H and Cheers, it's the characters that are the heart of The Simpsons, and it's hard to imagine a better ensemble cast. From Kwik-E-Mart clerk Apu and the megalomaniacal Monty Burns to Krusty the Clown and Barney the drunk, Springfield is populated with dozens of fully realized characters capable of carrying an entire episode.
While Homer is obviously the go-to guy in any episode -- Captain Whacky, as Long calls him, someone who can come in "and be really funny and juice the script a bit even if the story's not about him" -- characters like Lisa Simpson, who carries the burden of having to be both smart and funny, and Ralph Wiggum, the glue-eating son of the incompetent police chief, can be a lot more difficult to write for.
"There's a certain integrity to Lisa's character. You can't sell her out and make her a shoplifter," says Long.
"Whereas Ralph speaks in non sequiturs," adds Cohen, such as, "My cat's breath smells like cat food" and "Me fail English? That's unpossible."
But both agree the jokes are easy to come by compared with the difficulty of coming up with an idea strong enough to carry an entire episode.
"You can pitch a lot of jokes, but the real test of your mettle is to come up with whole stories," Long says. "It's really not considered cool to say, 'Homer becomes a racecar driver.' That's not a story. You have to ask yourself: How did that happen? What are the implications for the other characters? Where does it go from there?"
As for Long and Cohen, they have no intention of leaving The Simpsons, and it shows no signs of ending any time soon. "I have no other appreciable skills, so I hope it goes on forever," says Long.
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