Comedian Lights Up Hillel

Jerking his thick eyebrows halfway up his forehead, Mike L. Reiss ’81 hastily waved off applause from a crowd at Harvard Hillel yesterday as he stood at the podium.

“This is weird,” said Reiss, a writer and producer of ‘The Simpsons.’

“This is not easy for me to come back to the alma mater and give a speech for free.”

Reiss roused his audience into laughter with his deadpan jokes, comic timing, and clips from ‘The Simpsons’ and his new show ‘Queer Duck.’

He also shared his views on the current president (“Oh, I hate that leaky diaper of a man. He’s Satan with a learning disorder.”) and explained how oxymorons work (“for those of you who are legacies”).

Reiss said that half of the Simpsons writers are Harvard graduates, an assertion that caused one man to guffaw.

“It is true,” reassured Reiss. “I love crowds that laugh at facts.”

Reiss said if comedy writing fell through, he would be a “funny lawyer—the lawyer who gets all the laughs in court and then his client goes to the gas chamber for jaywalking.”

Reiss said his show has “universal themes” that garner it a wide audience, though he noted that, despite its popularity, The Simpsons is not a hit in Japan because the characters have four fingers—the sign of the Japanese mafia.

But celebrities, said Reiss, love the show.

Even Paris Hilton, who was called a “moron” in one episode, sent the Simpsons crew a basket of cookies the next day—“proving, of course, that Paris Hilton is a moron.”

But Reiss said he has become jaded by the heavy presence of celebrities at the Simpsons office.

In fact, he joked that he has walked into the Emmy-winning show’s second-floor office to find wheelchair-bound theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking just sitting there­—even though the building has no elevators.

After the speech, Reiss was given a Hillel shirt, hat, and necktie.

“[The event] was sort of structured, like one of those Catskills comedy acts,” said Simpsons fan Hilary S. Jacqmin of the Harvard University Press, referring to Reiss’ ‘Borscht Belt’ humor.

The feelings of appreciation were mutual.

“I want to thank you all for being so smart,” Reiss said.

While at Harvard, Reiss was co-president of the Harvard Lampoon—a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that occasionally publishes a so-called humor magazine—along with fellow Simpsons writer Jonathan M. Vitti ’81.

—Staff Writer Esther I. Yi can be reached at estheryi@fas.harvard.edu.