The Untold Truth Of Homer Simpson

He's a family man, but not a family guy. He's the son of not just Abe and Mona, but Matt and Dan. He lives in a town with a gorge, a chasm, and a mountain range, and he's fallen down them all. He never graduated high school but yelled his way into a job as a nuclear technician. He once fought a president in the sewer and maimed a college dean. His consequence-free life once literally annoyed a coworker to death. He's a Grammy-winning recording artist and Johnny Cash is his spirit animal. He is none of us, he is all of us. He is Homer Simpson.

Homer has anchored the iconic Fox animated sitcom "The Simpsons" since 1990 and has been a loving if negligent husband to Marge and father to Bart, Lisa, and Maggie for even longer, going back to the late 1980s variety series "The Tracey Ullman Show." Many of the show's millennial and Gen Z fans have never lived in a world in which Homer and the rest of the citizens of Springfield haven't provided a funhouse mirror to our foibles and weaknesses. They've even predicted the future a few times. 

Still, nothing comes from nowhere, and even a cultural institution like Homer Jay Simpson has a beginning, and perhaps a few things you didn't know about this former minor league baseball mascot turned beer baron turned — well, we'll get to that. Here is the untold truth of Homer Simpson.

Groening may have been from Oregon, and many of Springfield's notable names are references to the Portland area, but Homer Simpson was born in Chicago — or rather, actor Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer for over 30 years, was. When Groening's earliest "The Simpsons" shorts were produced for "The Tracey Ullman Show" in 1987, the characters' voices were provided by cast members of Ullman's ensemble. Actors delivering those early lines included Castellaneta as lazy dad Homer, Julie Kavner as fretful mom Marge, Yeardley Smith as brainy sister Lisa, and Nancy Cartwright as prankish brother Bart.

Born at Roseland Community Hospital on Chicago's south side and raised in nearby suburb Oak Park, Castellaneta studied art at Northern Illinois University. He eventually enrolled in improv classes at the famed Second City theater, the sketch comedy incubator that has produced such megastars as John Belushi, Stephen Colbert, and Tina Fey. He performed as part of the theater's mainstage cast from 1983 to 1987 alongside comedic actor Richard Kind and writer Deb Lacusta (who would later become his wife). 

Anyone who has watched any of "The Simpsons" knows that Castellaneta can be amazingly funny, but it was actually his pathos that won him a role in Tracey Ullman's ensemble. "He made me cry, actually, rather than laugh," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1999, recalling his audition for the show. "There were flashier performers that night. But I don't like that, really."

The early "Simpsons" craze focused on Bart and his various catchphrases like "Don't have a cow, man!" and "Eat my shorts." However, it was Homer's own inimitable slogan that has passed on to not just wide usage in pop culture, but even the Oxford English Dictionary: "D'oh!" Castellaneta uttered his version of the famous exclamation on one of the later "The Tracey Ullman Show" shorts. It was written in the script as "annoyed grunt," and over the years that has remained its official spelling in "The Simpsons" scripts, as seen in show titles like Season 11's "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)." 

So if Castellaneta just had "annoyed grunt" to work with from the script, where did "D'oh!" come from? The exclamation is actually an homage to Scottish comic actor James Finlayson, who appeared in dozens of short films featuring the legendary duo Laurel and Hardy throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Finlayson's version of the catchphrase was more of a double-take followed by a longer, more exasperated "D'oooooh!" used as a self-censoring form of the word "damn." 

Performing it as Finlayson did would have taken too long in animation, however, so Castellaneta and Groening settled on a faster, more angry variation. The catchphrase became instantly recognizable, even within the world of the show, as when Mr. Burns stages a fake Simpsons family in the Season 5 episode "Burns' Heir."

"The Simpsons" has been on the air for over 30 years, existing in a kind of floating timeline, an eternal present in which Bart and Lisa are always ages 10 and 8, respectively. However, "The Simpsons" is also, despite its trips to space and musical numbers, a grounded family story at heart and a satire that aims at our current moment. That means that when the show premiered in 1990, Homer was established to be 34 years old and born in 1956. 

Over the decades, Homer has remained in general a baby boomer, with a father who fought in World War II, a childhood in the 1960s, and coming of age and falling in love with Marge as a high schooler in the 1970s. Every so often an episode like "That '90s Show" will attempt to recalibrate Homer and Marge's backstory for a new era, but for the most part, making sense of the show's history requires an elastic view of the late 20th century.

Though most of the characters have stayed the same age since 1990, Homer's age has crept up ever so slightly. The 1992 episode "Lisa the Beauty Queen" establishes in dialogue that he is 36, while the 1995 episode "A Star is Burns" has Homer's best friend and high school classmate Barney Gumble mention that he is 40. As the series has gone on, Homer has mostly stayed at a perpetual age of 38 or 39 – though if it were real life, Homer Simpson would have turned 65 years old in 2021.

A 2016 Vox article estimated the number of jobs Homer Simpson has held at around 191, a number that has certainly grown in the years since. 

The earliest episodes had Homer working as a technician at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, and Episode 2, "Homer's Odyssey," sees him get fired from the plant, lead a public protest against the plant's hazardous conditions, and get rehired by the evil Mr. Burns as the plant's safety inspector. That has remained Homer's main job ever since, but as the series became more Homer-focused, and in many ways remade itself in his image, he began to chase his muse wherever he saw fit. This has led Homer to abandon that job at a moment's notice to become a blackjack dealer, monorail conductor, celebrity paparazzo, prank monkey, and dozens upon dozens of other occupations.

The article plotted out 100 of those jobs compared to the American median salary, adjusted for inflation, in the years that "The Simpsons" has been on the air and came to an interesting conclusion. Other than a few forays into the upper echelons and the lower depths, most of Homer's jobs (including his main one) have kept him solidly middle class, with as little economic growth in the last three decades as the real-life American middle class. Perhaps that is one key to Homer's eternal popularity — he remains an upper-lower-middle class type to the end.

Merchandising was a major part of "The Simpsons" brand from the very beginning; Etsy and eBay are filled to the brim with vintage clothing, toys, and other collectibles bearing the faces of Homer, Marge, and the rest of the family. There were nine different video games, as well as one influential cabinet arcade game, released featuring the Simpsons in 1991 and 1992. They released a novelty blues album in 1990 featuring the show's cast, a product that the show itself would parody later on. They have an entire world at Universal Studios, though perhaps not for long. The fact that there is a "The Simpsons" movie isn't as surprising as the fact that it didn't come out until 2007, and that there is to date only one of them.

The Simpsons are not just in the business of self-promotion. They have been spokescharacters for dozens of companies over the years, most notably a decades-long partnership with Butterfinger. While most of the Butterfinger ads centered around Bart and the catchphrase "Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfinger," Homer has had plenty of commercials of his own, hawking Mastercard, "American Idol," and Burger King in a campaign that lasted nearly as long as Butterfinger. Homer has even outlived some of the products he's pitched, such as MCI's collect call service 1-800-COLLECT, which is technically still in operation, but nearly obsolete in a wireless world. In 2009, Homer also lent his voice to the European GPS service TomTom.

He's beloved the world over, despite a litany of terrible traits and wicked acts perpetrated over the years. So what is Homer Simpson's secret? Why is he so loved more than 30 years after being crudely drawn by an indie comic strip artist and brought to life by a midwestern comedian with a Walter Matthau voice? It's a question the show itself has posed over the years, most notably in the controversial Season 8 episode "Homer's Enemy," in which a new employee at the plant, Frank Grimes (Hank Azaria), is driven to madness by Homer's life of unlimited privilege and zero consequences — a rage that results in his accidental death.

Perhaps the key to Homer's popularity is his lack of malice — never mind what happened to poor Grimey. He's a glutton and an alcoholic, often bigoted and untrustworthy, but for being a blue-collar slob, he commits to his desires and rarely regrets them. "Homer Simpson does not feel guilt, and I think that's incredibly endearing," as Groening put it to ABC News in 2007. Homer tries his best and means well. In the moral calculus of the show, that allows him as many second chances as he ever needs. 

Legendary yet reclusive "The Simpsons" writer John Swartzwelder has compared him to "a big talking dog" in an interview with The New Yorker. Meanwhile, The Times has likened him to Cervantes' Sancho Panza and Shakespeare's Falstaff, boisterous gluttons who reflect the audience's desires as much as they repel them. Homer wants what we want without reservation — whether that's the love of way-out-of-his-league Marge Bouvier or a "trambapoline." And there's a beauty in that.