The Simpsons' Wildest Scripts Came From a Quiet Writer Who Rebuilt His Diner Booth at Home

In the days when you could still smoke in restaurants, John Swartzwelder would sit in a booth at Norms, the diner on Ventura Boulevard, to smoke and write Simpsons scripts. When smoking in diners was banned, he had an identical booth built inside his own house.

Matt Groening is the cartoonist behind The Simpsons. Conan O'Brien is a former Simpsons writer and late night host. Together, they recalled that Swartzwelder would turn in drafts that were so insane the staff only had to cut the craziest jokes. What was left, Groening said, was absolutely brilliant.

He stood out in a room full of writers in their 20s and early 30s. He was much older, with an incredible mustache. O'Brien said he looked like "the handsomest policeman you'd see in 1890."

O'Brien said Swartzwelder was "smoking cigarettes, and he's not saying much, but when he does say something, it's brilliant." The example O'Brien gave of that rare but telling remark came when O'Brien was offered an audition to replace David Letterman and was full of doubt.

He told the room he had no experience, that Letterman had invented a new form, and that taking the job was an insane idea. Swartzwelder took a long drag on his cigarette, exhaled, and said, "I'd watch your show." O'Brien said it was the first time anyone had endorsed the idea with conviction. O'Brien joked that Swartzwelder had never actually watched the show.

The rest of Swartzwelder's life seemed to belong to another decade. He bet everyone on the staff that, as Groening put it, "Clinton would be hanged while in office," and insisted that President George Bush would defeat Clinton for election. He drove a 1956 Cadillac that would not run in the rain, and was often left in the parking lot trying to start it after everyone else had gone home. He lived modestly, sharing a house with his brother. Asked about weekend plans, O'Brien recalled Swartzwelder saying he and his brother would "play catch with a softball in front of our house" for a couple of hours and then hit a diner.

He later became a novelist of self-published, hard-boiled detective stories that O'Brien called insane in the best way. One was titled The Robot Did It. Groening quoted his favorite exchange, when a detective wired to a lie detector is asked, "Does it hurt," answers, "Yes, a little," and is told, "You're lying." Another book, Groening said, opens with the line, "My story begins with me getting punched in the face."