Middle Eastern people are both the most hospitable and most paranoid people I’ve ever come across. It’s a wonderful cultural irony. Go visit. The people you meet on the street will genuinely invite you to dinner, but the minute you take a single photograph or write yourself a simple reminder, they will question if you’re a foreign spy of some sort.Conspiracy theories about politics and the US are as much a cultural staple in the Middle East as hummus and pita.
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Tim Long: I’ve been making a lot of jokes about how I totally knew and that was the secret reason I wrote it. I don’t want to make that joke in print, because people take these things very seriously. I will say to you that I did not know that.
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It so wasn’t, and the whole thing is so headachey, because the thing about being a comedy writer is that you’re a coward and you’re not willing to take stand on anything, much less a conflict that I don’t even begin to understand. It’s hilarious. The ironic thing about this [episode] is that it’s about subliminal messages. The idea is the Bart and his friends are recruited to join a boy band, but it turns out that the guy who recruited them is using it as a recruitment tool for the US Navy. There are all sorts of backward sentences in the song; it’s not a small episode in terms of its scope. Crazy things happened, but we did not take into account that it would somehow fuel the Syrian uprising.What did you think when you first heard about the conspiracy?
I thought, Well, this is kooky. You take it seriously in a certain sense. As a comedy writer, sometimes you feel a little powerless because you’re just writing jokes; you’re not changing the world. If someone said, “Yeah, those guys are changing world history,” your first reaction is, “Fuck, yeah! I’m great.” But your second reaction is, “No. I was making dumb jokes about the Backstreet Boys.”I’ve worked on the show for 16 years, so there are shows that I don’t remember working on, so your first thought is, Wait. What? I thought it was funny, because the conspiracy theory—like a lot of conspiracy theories—has a lot of holes in it. How could we have done this and why would we have done this? I feel like it walks a fine line between we have predicted this, and I’m some sort of comedy psychic, and we caused this. It seems that certain people in the Middle East believe that these uprisings were the result of Western influences. But even so, I wish I could talk to those people. How could we have known about it? How could we have used a flag that didn’t show up again for another 13 years?
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I actually talked to the animation director of the show, Steven Moore—and this was all before the show became digital—and the flag in question existed in some form in the 1930s, but it was altered. I think he just used a reference book. Of course thousands of decisions like that get made at every stage of an episode. I’m sure I didn’t even sign off on it.The lyrics of “Drop da Bomb” mention Saddam. Were you alluding to Iraq, or was it just an unspecified Middle Eastern country?
The only shock to hear that we did not have a consistent idea to what we were doing. There was not a geopolitical or military plot. We figured out at one point that “Saddam” rhymes with “bomb.” That’s the complexity of the plot. I didn’t read a lot of text books about this. I just thought, Well, those things rhyme. The crazy thing about this was that it was pre-9/11, but Saddam was still proving to be kind of an irritant in the region ever since the first Gulf War, so he was an easy reference. If I love anything as a comedy writer, it’s an easy reference.This isn’t the first time a Simpsons plot is used to back some conspiracy theory. The “City of New York vs. Homer Simpson," for example, is said to have predicted 9/11. Tell me, what’s the future like?
[Laughs] There is an easy way to tell what the future is, and that is to tune in every Sunday at 8 PM and watch all-new episodes of The Simpsons. I also know that somebody thought that The Simpsons predicted the Super Bowl this year. There was an episode eight years ago in which the TV was showing Seattle versus Denver, but we didn’t get the score right. It's 552 shows, which is 226 hours of television. We’re gonna just mistakenly predict everything, really.
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We’ve all met some guy on an airplane who spits on you while he talks and claims 9/11 is an inside job, but I’ve never actually met a serious Simpsons conspiracy theorist. I would like to actually meet them, because I’d like to know how they think. How do they think we did that? What are the mechanics of their theory?Well, there is the general plot that the US somehow orchestrated the uprising, and then there is this, which is looked at as another bit of evidence to prove the US actually did it.
It makes you wonder, if they think that the US could cause an uprising that way, would the US invade Iraq? Why didn’t they just put some messages in The Flinstones? It seems like it works just as well.Seriously, though. Is Fox in cahoots with the US government to destabilize the Middle East?
You know, Fox—like all networks—is in conspiracy with the US government and all other elements of a military complex to maintain the status quo. We all know that. But seriously, the thing about conspiracies is that they require a tremendous amount of coordination amongst dozens and dozens of people who actually play their parts perfectly, then actually keep them a secret, where my experience is, you’re lucky if you get your lunch order right and no one has kept a secret ever. It’s a little hard to say that this was in any way a coordinated effort.Follow Angelina Fanous on Twitter.