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They don’t hand out awards for when you lose your mother, but if they did, Homer Simpsons’ trophy case would be full.
As Homer’s many experiences reconnecting with Mona before another untimely departure can attest, there aren’t many things in this world that are less funny than losing your mom. No matter what age you are when you experience this unique grief, it’s extremely hard to see how any joy can come out of such a loss, which is exactly why comedy savants like legendary Simpsons writer, showrunner and producer Mike Reiss get paid the big bucks: Nobody can do what they do quite as well as they do it.
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Reiss sadly lost his mother recently, and, to celebrate her memory, he made an incredible joke that he thinks would have killed with his mom:
Reiss won the 1990 Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming One Hour Or Less) as a co-producer for The Simpsons, and he would go on to win four more awards in the same category during his storied career as one of the founding members of the Simpsons staff — then, he had a fifth win this weekend in a category that he created.
Beyond being one of the first writers Matt Groening ever hired to create the OG Simpsons team, Reiss is also credited as one of the screenwriters of The Simpsons Movie in 2007, and he co-created the short-lived but cult-beloved animated sitcom The Critic with fellow Simpsons veteran Al Jean. Hilariously, Reiss also rode in the doomed OceanGate Titanic submersible that imploded in June 2023 (not while Reiss was on it, obviously) and described the ill-fated sub as “basically a car that you drunkenly drove into the ocean.”
Hopefully that’s not how his mom went — and hopefully she would have liked that joke, too.