David Mamet gets bleeped on The Simpsons, and maybe Chuck Palahniuk is there too
(part of my ongoing Unexpected Literary References series)
More Unexpected Literary references from The Simpsons. Surprised? You shouldn’t be.
Okay, The Simpsons, time to step aside and let some other cartoon be the smarty-pants lit reference show. You’ve been the hipster long enough. Your gags are disproportionately literary-based, and for that The Simpsons, I would appreciate more fart jokes.
By now you are probably thinking, “wait, I thought you loved lit references in cartoons.” Good call you.
Playwright David Mamet makes an appearance as the dumped-on sitcom screenwriter for the fake 80s Growing Pains derivative Thicker Than Water. Mamet is perhaps most famous for his 1984 Pulitizer Prize winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross. What many might not know (but The Simpsons writers surely did) is that Mamet wrote a 1987 episode of the TV drama Hill Street Blues and is also an oft-writer of the television series The Unit. I hope his depiction as the shat-upon sitcom writer in The Simpsons didn’t bring up long buried painful memories.
Earlier in the episode, another reference may have slipped by the casual viewer. While watching an episode of Thicker Than Water Homer quips after the television announcer states “filmed before a live studio audience” that “everyone in that studio audience is dead now.” Is this a reference taken from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Lullaby?:
“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead” (pg 15).
If it were any other show, I’d say this is a coincidence. But because The Simpsons bogarts everything literary, I’m thinking they’ve read some Palahniuk.
I also wondered if Thicker (Than Water) was a play on words due to the Alan Thicke-ness of the ’80s: Thicke of the Night, et al.
The Mamet bit is great. As to the Palahniuk, I don’t know they were referncing him–it’s pretty much one of those common knowledge sort of things, often remarked about canned laughter–the sort of thing, in thinking about Palahniuk, that he tends to load up his writing with: Factoids, nothing pithy he invented or remarked first, you know, like the ‘What would Marilyn Monroe be doing if she were still alive?’ joke or the ‘Marhta Stewart is polishing the brass on the titanic’–recycled sayings, though he uses them to punchy effect. I think you should give yourself the props for making the association, though, your mind so linked into the stuff you read you find it everywhere– you’re like Neil Cassidy playing radio (or television) free association.