Excerpt from the book Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed TV-and American-Forever (2025) :
"Swartzwelder's approach was slightly more...anarchic than Meyer's. Swartzwelder loved writing a joke that created so many logical problems that it was hard to pinpoint why the gag didn't make sense. The example Vitti used to explain this approach came in the third-season episode "Dog of Death", when the Simpsons are trying to win the lottery. Bart asks his father what he'd do if he hit the jackpot, and Homer starts daydreaming. Swartzwelder came up with the idea that Homer would imagine himself as a golden, jewel-encrusted giant. "I was like, "How would having money make him larger ?" Vitti says. And yet seeing a golden Homer towering over Springfield is funny. No matter how preposterous it was.
"It became an aspiration of everybody else to make something so stupid, it was kind of smart," Vitti adds. "You could create a moment that had five logical problems at once. But you just blow by it like it totally made sense."
Vitti also liked to ask Swartzwelder philosophical questions. No one in a writer's room full of sharp comedic minds thought about things quite like he did. His perspective was unique.
"Who do you write for ?" Vitti once asked him. "Who do you picture watching the show ?"
"I'm writing to what we like to think ourselves as having been," he replied. "I picture a smart kid."
Like usual, Swartzwelder was on to something. The Simpsons writers, consciously or not, were making a series that their cleverly impressionable younger shelves would've been obsessed with."
