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Four days to join The Simpsons
Leaving Saturday Night Live
Conan O'Brien loved the job at SNL and the people there, but he was in a bad place in his life and felt he needed to go. He left with no job. Two Simpsons writers heard that he might be available, and he submitted some of the sketches he'd written on SNL.
Lucky timing
The timing was luck. George Meyer, one of the show's legendary writers, had just decided to take some time off, which opened a spot. Conan was told he had a job and needed to be there in four days.
How the room works
At The Simpsons, one writer went off alone for a couple of weeks to write a script after the room pitched jokes and built an outline. Then the whole room went through the script page by page and made it better. When Meyer turned in a script such as Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington, the staff found nothing they would change.
Why did Simpsons hire so many Lampoon alumni?
Several early Simpsons writers came from the Harvard Lampoon, the Harvard humor magazine, including Al Jean, Mike Reiss, Jeff Martin, and Jon Vitti. O'Brien himself was president of the Lampoon and graduated from Harvard in 1985. The magazine's staff wrote parody pieces as a group and rewrote them line by line, a process that resembles a television writers' room. Lampoon alumni also worked on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s.
How does Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington echo Capra?
The title riffs on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a 1939 film directed by Frank Capra and starring James Stewart as an idealistic young senator. In the Simpsons episode, Lisa travels to Washington, D.C., for a patriotic essay contest and finds corruption there. Capra's film also sends a naive newcomer to the capital to face a corrupt political machine. It earned 11 Academy Award nominations.
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