“The Simpsons” has certainly never been shy about biting the corporate hand that feeds it — witness the recent opening credit sequence of that Fox animated comedy, produced by Banksy, that imagined 20th Century Fox as a nightmarish third-world sweatshop.
Lately, “The Simpsons” has been taking potshots at its corporate siblings at Fox News. An episode shown last week, called “The Fool Monty,” opened on a helicopter supposedly belonging to that cable news channel and bearing the slogan “Fox News: Not Racist, But #1 With Racists.”
In a “Simpsons” episode that ran on Sunday, the Fox News helicopter reappeared — this time in the show’s opening credits, and with a new slogan: “Unsuitable for Viewers Under 75.”
Yet, as Mediabistro’s WebNewser site reported, when that episode was posted on Web sites like Fox.com and Hulu.com, the Fox News joke had disappeared, replaced with a gag depicting Homer Simpson as King Kong.
So what happened to that latest Fox News joke? The answer, according to the veteran “Simpsons” executive producer Al Jean, will probably disappoint conspiracy theorists, but it does shed some light on the show’s mostly good-natured feud with Fox News.
Mr. Jean said the “Simpsons” producers — in particular, the creator of the series, Matt Groening — were pleased with how the first Fox News joke seemed to ruffle the feathers of Bill O’Reilly, the host of the Fox News program “The O’Reilly Factor.” (On his show last week, Mr. O’Reilly played the “Simpsons” satire of Fox News and, with a smile, said of the cartoon family: “Pinheads? I believe so.”)
The “Simpsons” producers could not let that remark stand, so they rushed their second Fox News joke into Sunday’s episode — so late in the production process that the gag could only be inserted into the version shown in North America, but not into versions shown in foreign markets or on the Internet.
“There’s a lot of masters that go out,” Mr. Jean said in a telephone interview, “so to save money we just put it in the one master that’s for the U.S. and Canada. More money that will then go to Fox News and undoubtedly to Bill O’Reilly.”
Mr. Jean emphasized that neither he nor his “Simpsons” colleagues have ever been told by their corporate Fox parents to stop making fun of Fox News.
“Both ends of it benefit the ultimate News Corp agenda,” Mr. Jean said. “We’re happy to have a little feud with Bill O’Reilly. That’s a very entertaining thing for us.”
Mr. Jean said that, in addition to garnering “The Simpsons” a little extra publicity, the tête-à-tête with Fox News was teaching the animated show how to better take advantage of the Web, and how to integrate topical jokes into a show that can take a year or more to produce a single episode.
“We’ve really entered this new era,” Mr. Jean said, “where even a show like us, that’s produced so far in advance, turns into a sort of a daily show, where you do something, you can throw something in that gets immediately around the Internet. It gets a response. It’s mostly just us trying to do our humor in the new way that humor is done.”
Mr. Jean said that next week’s episode will feature the trouble-making pop star Katy Perry, but will probably not have another Fox News joke.
“There won’t be a helicopter,” he said. “But that’s in response to nothing. It’s just because of how long the episode turned out. It’s so you can see more of Katy Perry’s cleavage.”
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