John Swartzwelder Gender Born February 8, 1949 ( 1949-02-08 ) (age 71) Cast status Inactive First appearance Bart the General"

John Swartzwelder (born February 8, 1949) is a writer for the animated television series The Simpsons. He is credited with writing the largest number of Simpsons episodes. John was one of several writers recruited to The Simpsons from the pages of George Meyer's Army Man magazine.

Beginning with the show's sixth season, Swartzwelder no longer attended rewrites with the rest of the staff, having been given special dispensation to send in his drafts from home and let the other writers revise them.

According to his longtime collaborators on The Simpsons, Al Jean and Mike Reiss, Swartzwelder is a huge fan of Preston Sturges films and loves "anything old-timey American." This vaguely defined aesthetic presents itself in many of the episodes he's written, in the form of wandering hobos, Prohibition-era speakeasies, carnies, 19th-century baseball players, aging Western movie stars, and Sicilian gangsters.

According to the DVD commentaries, he used to write episodes while sitting at a booth in his favorite restaurant "drinking copious amounts of coffee and smoking endless cigarettes" (Matt Groening). When the state of California passed an anti-smoking law, Swartzwelder bought a diner booth and installed it in his house, allowing him to smoke and write in peace.

He is also noted as being a staunch Libertarian, as well as a gun rights advocate and a chain smoker.

In 2004, following a short break from writing scripts, he wrote his first novel, The Time Machine Did It (ISBN 0-9755799-0-8). It was followed by Double Wonderful (ISBN 0-9755799-2-4) in 2005.

The Simpsons' 16th season was the first in which no episodes were authored by Swartzwelder.

In the episode The Day the Violence Died, John Swartzwelder is one of the "surprise witnesses" called by Lionel Hutz. Others include Ralph Wiggum, a man with a dummy, and Santa Claus on crutches.

John has yet to feature in a Simpsons DVD commentary, and has refused to even acknowledge this fact on a commentary, even when offered to have a mic brought to him just to utter the word "No". On one audio commentary, one of the writers pretended to be him as a joke. Swartzwelder was rumored to be doing commentary on the Season 9 DVD box set episode "The Cartridge Family". However, the extent of his participation was that the actual commentators called him on the phone to verify for the fans that he exists. The only opinion he offered on the episode was that he recalled it was a good one,[1] but as far as is known, he won't be on any DVD commentaries.

Simpsons episodes

Here is a continuous listing of every episode he's written for the show so far:

Cameos John has been seen in:

Citations