Mike Reiss, producer and former head writer for the television cartoon show “The Simpsons,” treated a Gaston Hall crowd to an evening of behind-the-scenes insight and jokes that targeted celebrities from Joan Rivers to Oprah Winfrey Friday.
Reiss said he began his career in comedic writing at Harvard University, working for its humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon. After graduating, Reiss moved on to work for the National Lampoon and then to a job writing for his first motion picture, “Airplane II: The Sequel.”
Reiss also worked as a joke writer for “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, where he said he was required to write 60 jokes a day.
Reiss also offered reflections on his years working on the show. He said he was surprised by the growing acceptance the program has gained in recent years, citing a statement from the Archbishop of Canterbury in which he endorsed the show.
Reiss showed clips from “The Simpsons” and the cartoon “The Critic,” which he co-created, while discussing script processing, media censorship and political satire.
Reiss said his other creation, the Internet cartoon “Queer Duck,” has been turned into a motion picture and will be released this summer. The cartoon follows the gay fowl, Queer Duck, through numerous comic situations.
Reiss unveiled a never-before-seen clip from the movie during his speech, which featured a bear singing a musical number with a rallying cry of “Baseball is gay.”
Reiss said years of writing comedy have shown him that jokes that do not necessarily appear funny sometimes receive the largest laughs. He pointed to “The Tonight Show” where he wrote a joke for Johnny Carson about Joan Rivers and McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets.
Reiss said that to his surprise, the joke received one of the longest laughs in “Tonight Show” history. Reiss attributed the joke to a willingness to experiment and make mistakes. According to Reiss, sometimes even professional comedians don’t get laughs.
“Try everything,” he said.
Surprisingly, Reiss said after the speech that he was initially hesitant to write for “The Simpsons.”
“When I was first writing for `The Simpsons,’ I had five other jobs at once,” he said. “I had no clue. I thought I would just go into marketing.”
The speech was cosponsored by the Georgetown University Lecture Fund and the GU Program Board.
