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• #LATE NIGHT TALK SHOW HOST WRITER FOR SIMPSONS CRACKED#

Jackson did find himself treated very gently – the fact that the in-show ‘Michael Jackson’ was a white man had not yet become a joke in and of itself. Contractually, Jackson couldn’t even appear under his own name, and had to be credited as ‘John Jay Smith’, but everyone knew, not least because he played a character who called himself ‘Michael Jackson’. They’d had celebrity guests before, but reeling in the king of pop was a coup like no other. Maybe the biggest name they ever managed to get involved was Michael Jackson at the height of his popularity (and very definitely before the subsequent depths), in the third season’s ‘Stark Raving Dad’. But there are a few notable blots on their record, most often – as with Musk, years later – when the sheer gravity of the big name they’ve roped in ends up eclipsing all else. Some of the most memorable one-off characters were guesting celebs just playing a part, and cameos like James Woods working at the Kwik-E-Mart or Jasper Johns lurking around as a petty thief were and are comedy gold. The impetus to make light of them can be forgotten very quickly if you’re busy buttering them up to post-toast levels.īut whereas usually I draw a clear and bright dividing line – somewhere around 1998 – between the good parts of The Simpsons and the long tail of drek now put out under the same name, its tendency to flatter the celebrity guests who deigned to grace it was clear and present even in the golden years.ĭon’t get me wrong: in the glory days, very often they did get it right. The issue is that in being confronted by a bona fide celebrity, someone wealthy, powerful, and sometimes even genuinely skilled within their field, there is a tendency to go a little weak at the knees. The weakness in outings like ‘The Musk Who Fell To Earth’ is that here, the show – meant to be the jester poking fun at whatever the new fad might be – seems to be believing the hype.

#LATE NIGHT TALK SHOW HOST WRITER FOR SIMPSONS CRACKED#

But usually in The Simpsons, this week’s new trend wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, as trends seldom are.

In a way, this is simply the show putting a face to a fairly common plot thread – the (x) has come to town, everyone’s suddenly really into (x). A 20-minute showcase of an industrialist’s brand, here not even restricted by laws regarding truth in advertising, has drifted pretty far from this stated purpose. This needn’t even involve mocking or undercutting them, just being funny in some way. The Simpsons is at bottom a comedy show, which means that celebrity guest stars should be exploited for humour.

At least Musk was and is actually well-known enough they didn’t need to stop dead and introduce him by name, but it begs the question of what kind of backroom deal went down for this to happen – especially given that, since then, the show has given extensive product placement to Musk’s line of cars, and shown their controversial autodrive feature actually working.

Even after years of fawning over flavour-of-the-month celebrity guest stars, The Simpsons giving a guest spot to Elon Musk in 2015 seemed especially shameless.