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John Swartzwelder
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John Swartzwelder (born November 16, 1950) is an American comedy writer and novelist, best known for his work on the animated television series The Simpsons, as well as a number of novels. He is credited with writing the largest number of The Simpsons episodes (55 full episodes, with contributions to four others) by a large margin. Swartzwelder was one of several writers recruited to The Simpsons from the pages of George Meyer's Army Man magazine.
re working on The Simpsons, Swartzwelder had a long career in advertising, after which he began writing for Saturday Night Live, where he met George Meyer.
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Encyclopedia
John Swartzwelder (born November 16, 1950) is an American comedy writer and novelist, best known for his work on the animated television series The Simpsons, as well as a number of novels. He is credited with writing the largest number of The Simpsons episodes (55 full episodes, with contributions to four others) by a large margin. Swartzwelder was one of several writers recruited to The Simpsons from the pages of George Meyer's Army Man magazine.
Career
Before working on The Simpsons, Swartzwelder had a long career in advertising, after which he began writing for Saturday Night Live, where he met George Meyer. After Meyer quit, he created Army Man and recruited Swartzwelder to help him write the magazine. Along with Meyer, he was recruited to write for The Simpsons because one of their readers, Sam Simon, was one of the show's original executive producers.
In 1994, with the show's sixth season, Swartzwelder was granted a special dispensation and allowed to no longer attend rewrite sessions with the rest of the staff, instead being allowed to send his drafts in from home so other writers could revise them. This was a direct result of Swartzwelder's avid smoking coming into conflict with a newly implemented policy banning smoking in the writers' room.
His longtime collaborators on The Simpsons, Al Jean and Mike Reiss, describe Swartzwelder as a huge fan of Preston Sturges films and loves "anything old timey American." This vaguely defined aesthetic presents itself in many of the episodes he has written in the form of wandering hobos, Prohibition-era speakeasies, carnies, 19th-century baseball players, aging Western movie stars, and Sicilian gangsters.
According to The Simpsons DVD commentaries, which at times contain apocryphal or even fictional comments, he used to write episodes while sitting in a booth at a coffee shop "drinking copious amounts of coffee and smoking endless cigarettes". When California passed an anti-smoking law, Swartzwelder bought the diner booth and installed it in his house, allowing him to continue his process in peace. He is also reported to be a staunch libertarian as well as a gun rights advocate, and despite having written many of the environmentally driven episodes, he has been described as an "anti-environmentalist". David X. Cohen once related a story of Swartzwelder going on an extended diatribe about how there is more rain forest on Earth now than there was a hundred years ago.
Swartzwelder has been absent from writing episodes of The Simpsons since the fifteenth season (2003-04), with his last airing episode ("The Regina Monologues") actually being a "holdover" written for the fourteenth (2002-03) season. Since he's stopped writing The Simpsons scripts he has taken up writing absurdist novels, beginning with the 2004 publication of The Time Machine Did It starring Private investigator Frank Burly. The next year he published Double Wonderful then returned to the Burly character for How I Conquered Your Planet in 2006, The Exploding Detective in 2007, and Dead Men Scare Me Stupid in 2008. He did, however, return to The Simpsons in 2007 for The Simpsons Movie.
Reclusiveness
Swartzwelder is a notorious recluse and rarely, if ever, makes public appearances. At one point fans of The Simpsons on the internet debated his existence, combining his reclusiveness with the amount of episodes credited to him, and theorizing that "John Swartzwelder" was actually a pseudonym for writers either not taking credit for episodes written or else ones penned by several writers.
He did not participate in any of the audio commentaries on the first eleven The Simpsons DVD sets, despite being asked multiple times. The Simpsons creator Matt Groening offered to pre-record him saying "No" to be inserted into a commentary as an answer that he didn't want to participate, but he refused. During the recording for the ninth season (released December 2006) episode "The Cartridge Family"'s commentary show runner Mike Scully called Swartzwelder on the phone. After speaking for a few minutes Swartzwelder ended the call by saying, "It's too bad this really isn't John Swartzwelder".
The Simpsons episodes by Swartzwelder
- - with George Meyer, Sam Simon and Jon Vitti
- - "Bad Dream House" segment
- - with Sam Simon
- - contributor
- - "Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores" segment
- - teleplay, story by Bob Kushell
Books by Swartzwelder
The Time Machine Did It (2004) - ISBN 0-9755799-0-8Double Wonderful (2005) - ISBN 0-9755799-2-4How I Conquered Your Planet (2006) - ISBN 0-9755799-4-0The Exploding Detective (2007) - ISBN 0-9755799-6-7Dead Men Scare Me Stupid (2008) - ISBN 0-9755799-8-3
External links
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