John Joseph Swartzwelder Jr. (born February 8, 1949) is an American comedy writer and novelist, best known for his work on the animated television series The Simpsons. Born in Seattle, Washington, Swartzwelder began his career working in advertising. He was later hired to work on comedy series Saturday Night Live in the mid-1980s as a writer. He later contributed to fellow writer George Meyer's short-lived Army Man magazine, which led him to join the original writing team of The Simpsons, beginning in 1989.
He worked on The Simpsons as a writer and producer until 2003, and later contributed to The Simpsons Movie. He wrote the largest number of Simpsons episodes (59 full episodes, with contributions to several others) by a large margin. After his retirement from the show, he began a career as a writer of self-published absurdist novels. He has written more than a dozen novels, the most recent of which, The Spy with No Pants, was published in December 2020.
Swartzwelder is revered among comedy fans; his colleagues have called him among the best comedy writers. He is known for his reclusiveness, and gave his first-ever media interview in 2021, 18 years after his final Simpsons episode.
Early life
Swartzwelder was born in Seattle, Washington in 1949, the son of Gloria Mae (Matthews) and John Joseph Swartzwelder, Sr. He attended high school in Renton, Washington.
Career
Saturday Night Live
In 1983, Swartzwelder sent a joke submission to the writers of Late Night with David Letterman, in which he signed but left no address. Writer Jim Downey traced Swartzwelder based on the Chicago postmark on the card via phone books at the New York Public Library. After he contacted Swartzwelder's mother in Seattle, she redirected him to her son, who was then working at an advertising agency in Chicago. Downey described Swartzwelder's interview as "one of the most spectacularly awful in history"; it consisted of him entering David Letterman's office without permission, and discussing the state of television (that it was "all shit") while smoking and drinking. He was not hired for Letterman, but Downey hired him for Saturday Night Live (SNL) beginning in 1985.
At SNL, Swartzwelder shared an office with Robert Smigel, and met George Meyer, who later proved instrumental in hiring him for The Simpsons. During his time on SNL, Swartzwelder became known for writing odder material. He was fired in mid-1986, which Smigel attributed to the network's pressure on show creator Lorne Michaels to make personnel changes. Meyer quit SNL and created the magazine Army Man, recruiting Swartzwelder to help write it. Meyer said of Army Man:
1988—2004: The Simpsons
In 1988, Sam Simon, a reader of Army Man, recruited Swartzwelder and Meyer to write for the animated sitcom The Simpsons. By 1994, with the show's sixth season, Swartzwelder was granted a special dispensation and allowed not to attend rewrite sessions with the rest of the staff, instead being allowed to send drafts of his scripts in from home so other writers could revise them as they saw fit. This was reportedly a result of Swartzwelder's heavy smoking coming into conflict with a newly implemented policy banning smoking in the writers' room. Swartzwelder's scripts typically needed less rewriting than those of other writers, with about 50% being used.
According to Simpsons creator Matt Groening, Swartzwelder wrote Simpsons episodes sitting in a booth at a coffee shop "drinking copious amounts of coffee and smoking endless cigarettes". When California passed an anti-smoking law, Swartzwelder bought the booth and installed it in his house, allowing him to continue his process in peace. In his only interview, given to The New Yorker in 2021, Swartzwelder said he had negotiated his contract to allow him to work from home, but that this had nothing to do with smoking; he also said he bought a new booth, rather than one from the diner.
In 1996, Swartzwelder created and produced his own pilot presentation for Fox, Pistol Pete, a spoof of western films. Starring Stephen Kearney, Mark Derwin, Lisa Robin Kelly, and Brian Doyle Murray, the pilot was shot using crew from the television series Gunsmoke at Swartzwelder's insistence. John Rich, veteran television director known for The Dick Van Dyke Show, All in the Family, and Gunsmoke, directed the pilot, which was shot at Veluzat Motion Picture Ranch. Fox passed on the pilot. It eventually surfaced online in 2014.