So Harry Shearer and The Simpsons are finally parting company, after years (decades?) of public acrimony over money and the show’s declining quality. He broke the news on Twitter, of course, citing scheduling concerns as the real culprit ...
... which means that everyone from Mr. Burns to Smithers to Ned Flanders to Otto to Rainier Wolfcastle will now be voiced by some other clown. Shearer is a famously prickly dude when it comes to the show; if you are sad and angry and calling for the show’s immediate cancelation this morning, I heartily recommend his February appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF! podcast, which is (of course) long and loopy and discursive and stretches all the way back to his childhood, but there’s also a ton of Saturday Night Live trash talk, and general insight into what makes the guy so exacting, and some deep sighing about you-know-what. For example:
I have to say about this something that I learned from my six years of analysis, of psychoanalysis. Which is, one mark of adulthood is you can hold two conflicting emotions about the same thing at the same time. Two things can be true at the same time. So it is true that as an actor on an insanely successful TV series, I am by any standards of the human species obscenely overpaid. It is also true that as an actor on one of the most insanely successful television series of all time, I am getting royally screwed. BOTH THINGS ARE TRUE!
Neither thing is now true.