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Benchley was wonderfully funny when he felt like it, and he didn’t seem to work at all. The New Yorker was the home of a lot of writers I liked when I was growing up, including my favorite: Robert Benchley. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. He patiently answered most of the questions I asked him about writing the best jokes in the best episodes of arguably the best comedy of the last century. Recently, in the course of a month and a half, I corresponded with Swartzwelder via e-mail. None of the books run more than a hundred and sixty pages all are packed, like a dense star, with more material than seems physically possible. After leaving the show, in 2003, Swartzwelder wrote and self-published the first of his thirteen novels, all but two of which feature one of the most wonderful creations in printed comedy: Frank Burly, incompetent private eye and occasional time traveller. Swartzwelder’s specialty on “The Simpsons” was conjuring dark characters from a strange, old America: banjo-playing hobos, cigarette-smoking ventriloquist dummies, nineteenth-century baseball players, rat-tailed carnival children, and pantsless, singing old-timers. He went on to write fifty-nine episodes, more than any other writer in the show’s history. He worked at “Saturday Night Live,” in 1985, for one particularly rocky season, before being hired four years later at “The Simpsons,” based partly on his contributions to a little-known comedy zine.

He applied for, but never got, a job at “Late Night,” and had an uncomfortable interview with its host, David Letterman.

He worked a few years as an advertising copywriter in Chicago. Swartzwelder was born in 1949 in Seattle. Ambushed by phone, while at home cooking a steak, he sounds pleasant and courteous but eager to finish up the encounter, which lasts all of a minute and twenty-four seconds.Ī few facts seem certain. His voice can be heard on only one “Simpsons” DVD writers’ commentary, for “The Cartridge Family” (Season 9, Episode 5). Few photos of him exist, although he did make some animated cameos as background “Simpsons” characters-once as a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Swartzwelder has been deemed “one of the greatest comedy minds of all time.” He is famously private and never grants interviews. The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” the Eighteenth Amendment,” when Homer stands atop a stack of barrels, outside a pawn shop, and delivers a toast to a gathered crowd: “To alcohol. Take the following joke, a favorite among “Simpsons” writers and fans, which appears in Season 8’s “Homer vs. A joke that sounds almost as if it were never written, as if it’s always existed. A joke that no one else could have written.

It’s been nearly twenty years since the reclusive, mysterious, almost mythical comedy writer John Swartzwelder left “The Simpsons,” and yet, to this day, one of the biggest compliments a “Simpsons” writer (or any comedy writer) can receive is to have a joke referred to as “Swartzweldian.” Meaning: A joke that comes out of nowhere.