Comedy: Learning Through Laughter

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Hello, welcome to Thought Club. I'm your host, Elisabeth Gray, here on the show where we try to get to the bottom of the problems in education today and how we could creatively solve them. My guest today is a pretty exceptional human. I've got Mike Reiss here. He's the Emmy-winning writer of The Simpsons, the author of 21 children's books, and these days he's a full-time traveler running a pretty fantastic Substack recounting his adventures. Mike, thanks for joining me.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Been everywhere else. The basement in Brooklyn.

You made it to the ends of the earth. Mike, you've had this incredibly crazy, wonderful career that doesn't really seem to have many edges or boundaries. How did you land here? What's the story?

I just floated around a very Forrest Gump-y existence, where I always wanted to write humor. I never thought I'd be a comedy writer, because I never met a comedy writer. I went to Harvard just because they had a humor magazine, and I joined the Harvard Lampoon. Back in the 80s, National Lampoon was the biggest outlet for adult humor in America. If you wanted to write satire, you wrote it for National Lampoon. Someone saw my work and brought me to Hollywood. There was never a plan. I have two very good friends, Max Pross and Tom Gammill, who were always turning down great jobs and recommending me, including The Simpsons. I got that job because they didn't want to do it, and I spent the next 36 years there.

You came from a world where there was no such thing as comedy writing. What world did you come from?

I come from small-town Connecticut. It was a factory town, a blue-collar place. And I was the Jewish population of the city. It was just us.

Were you a good student?

I was a very good student, and the bar was very low, too. I went to what's often called the best college in America, and I come from some of the worst public schools in Connecticut, very famously underfunded. But I have a lot more regard for the bad public schools than the good college I went to. I learned things there.

What was your family?

I'm from five kids, the largest Jewish family on earth, and four of them are teachers. My one brother is a math and SAT tutor. My sister's one of the top English teachers in California. There's a speech therapist in there, and then there's me, the shame of the family.

This brings me to my next question: what do you think comedy can teach us about education?

I don't know. I'll tell you a Simpsons story. When the show was just starting out, Sam Simon, one of the creators, said, we're going to get in a lot of hot water for this show. The one thing we can do is, if we ever state a fact on the show, make sure it's true. We'd go to many obscure and arcane subjects, and we always made sure it was correct. Our writers' room was full of reference books, just to make sure that if you learned something on the show, it was true. And those things stick. One of the most influential comedians, to me, is Woody Allen, because he'd make jokes he knew people wouldn't get, about Kierkegaard or some obscure Ingmar Bergman movie, and he knew people would get the joke even if they didn't understand it. Conan O'Brien had a quote about S.J. Perelman, who was sort of the Woody Allen of his day: Perelman showed it's okay to be smart. You can be funny and smart. You don't have to debase yourself, you don't have to be a clown to get a laugh.

Shakespeare is known for being highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow all at the same time. And the Simpsons writers' room was peppered with really smart people.

It's a very bright group. It's always been about half Harvard Lampoon graduates, people who had the attitude of, I don't really like this school, but I like to write funny stuff. It was a real Harvard mafia. We just had a change of regime, a guy from Penn came up, and now it's a Penn mafia. And they're funny, too. Funny and smart.

Homer Simpson, for most Americans, is probably their entry point to a lot of literary allusions. Is it possible to really see The Simpsons as a portal to education?

Absolutely. There are statistics that found younger people got all their news from The Daily Show. They were getting it from comedy. Certainly the John Oliver show, I love it, I learn so much from it, but it happens to be funny, and it's a great way to take the medicine.

There's a George Bernard Shaw quote: get them laughing, and then shove the truth in.

That's great. It works. When we were starting The Simpsons, we thought nobody was going to watch it. Almost every writer who created that world had never written a script before. It was everybody's first job, because other writers were turning it down. So we said, all right, this is our shot, nobody's going to watch, let's put in the jokes only we get. I remember someone pitched, "Lisa, what are you doing this summer?" and she says, "Oh, I'm going to read Herman Melville's twin classics, Omoo and Typee." Those titles had never turned up in a cartoon before. Millions of kids heard it, it sounds funny, but someday they'll be in the library, and Omoo and Typee, it really is a real thing.

And now you're still involved with the Simpsons?

I just left them, after 36 years, because I like this cruise ship lecturing much better. It's a little more fun. I give six to 10 different lectures on every cruise ship that'll have me. They're basically standup. I have a topic, but they're really standup, and then I put three minutes right in the middle of actual information, how to write comedy, structure, that kind of thing. And sure enough, later in the cruise, people say, oh, I really liked that, and I remembered that. They remember the informative stuff even though it's swimming in all this shtick I throw at them.

Is there the possibility that framing important information with comedy could be an effective way to improve retention?

Absolutely. I used to love a show, Rocky and Bullwinkle, when I was a kid. That show was full of Cold War satire. The villain is named Boris Badenov, a parody of Boris Godunov. I know kids weren't getting that joke, but I loved watching it knowing something was going on that I wasn't getting, and I wanted to know what it was.

The classroom is failing. The new form of gathering information is via social media and entertainment. Do you think there's a burden on entertainers now to educate?

I think the burden is on instructors, that now they know they've got to be interesting, they've got to be entertaining. I have a friend who's a professor of Japanese studies for years, and one day they told him, it's got to have PowerPoint, wall-to-wall PowerPoint, to go with these lectures you've been giving for 30 years without it. My lectures on a cruise ship all have to have constant PowerPoint, and it's fun for me. I work in a visual medium anyhow, so I love finding the good visuals, but mostly I make it about me and I stand in front of the screen. It's really standup.

If you were a parent today, uh, well, you've written 21 kids' books.

21 kids' books, no kids. I much prefer that to producing no kids' books and 21 children. Better outcome for the world. I don't want to be Elon Musk.

21 kids' books, all of which I'm sure teach kids something. I've read your books. I learned things.

There's always something there. And it kills me, the ones I really like that are a little didactic don't get published.

And your current gig is this Substack based on all your travels, which is also quite educational.

That really is the most educational thing I've ever done. I know people would be happy with just funny travel stories, but I love digging in and looking up. I just wrote a piece about the World's Fair. People don't even know there are World Expos anymore. Every two years there's another one, and you see all kinds of great technology, and I take them through the history. But it's got to be funny first. These are travel stories that are funny and candid. I'm the guy who will tell you the northern lights suck. They're hugely disappointing. But everybody's taken a huge trip to Iceland or Alaska and they pretend, oh, it was great. It's not great. It photographs well. Tahiti's a dump. That's another one.

See, I'm laughing, I'm learning.

And you're learning. I'm really grateful to you for joining us, because in everything you write, you're on to something: if we can build that frame of joy and laughter, it's quite possible to get people to pay attention. I frankly believe the burden is on entertainers now. Educators have lost the power, entertainers hold it. So we somehow have to educate entertainers to the degree that they're able to transmit.

And they should know, too. It's what I learned doing the Substack thing: you've got to have something real. Take something people don't know, and then make it funny, make it entertaining. It beats just talking about nothing.

It sure does. Mike, thanks for joining me.

Perfect joy. Complete joy. Nice to be here.

And thank you all for joining us. Check us out, follow us, like us, all those great things happening in the social media space. I'm Elisabeth Gray for Thought Club, trying to figure out these questions of education and how we can become better thinkers. See you next time.