New York Comic Con 2024: Matt Groening and Hank Azaria talk about The Simpsons

At the 2024 New York Comic Con, The Simpsons made its first appearance ever at the pop culture juggernaut! I got the chance to sit down with Creator Matt Groening, producer Tim Long, and actor Hank Azaria to ask them a few questions about the longevity of the show.

With such a long history of the show, do you ever, when you’re breaking episodes, come up with plotlines or jokes and then go, “Oh, we did that 20 years ago?”

MATT GROENING: Every single day. We’ve sometimes had like the exact same joke that we will later see, oh my God, we did that exactly. There was an example of that in Tim’s joke that you guys saw the clips of, Paddy and Selma reading erotic Sudoku. And then in Carolyn’s episode, there was a sexy Sudoku. But like there are definitely a lot of episodes in the mush, the big mush where like a B-story or something we forgot.

TIM LONG: And the thing that makes that the hardest would be to look at the big book of everything we’ve done. Like if you look at the list of what we done, creating new stuff is really hard, that’s what magic about the show, the Groundhog Day type reality that like, okay, you’re resetting every time, we’re starting over. I love to say this thing that makes no sense, which is that every episode of The Simpsons should be the pilot and the finale. It isn’t true and doesn’t make sense. [Laughs]

Mike Spring with Matt Groening

Hank, of all the vast variety of characters you voiced, who are the ones that you see the script and go, oh yeah, this is gonna be a fun day and who are the more challenging ones?

HANK AZARIA: I always like when a character gets more fleshed out, that always gets me excited. The first time Chalmers or Duff Man or Frink got their own episode or a significant storyline, that makes me happy. One character that is the most fun for me to do is Frank, because it’s just silly and something about my nervous system likes that noise. and it’s easy to do vocally. Duff Man, I can do about five minutes of it before I can’t my voice is destroyed. We have to save Duff Man for the end of records usually. And I love doing Moe, that’s probably closest to my heart. I’m not even totally sure why. But mostly when characters go new places, that’s what I I love.

There’s always some stupid vocal thing I am usually entertaining myself with on any given day. My wife doesn’t really know who she’s going to wake up to. My wife will say, “why do I have to deal with that?” [Laughs] Yeah, so I can’t not do voices all the time.

Hank Azaria and Matt Spring