After Team USA wins, Principal Skinner's mother gloats to the Swedish curling team, “Tell me how my ice tastes.” THE SIMPSONS ™ & © 20TH TELEVISION
The 16th-century seer Nostradamus made 942 predictions. To date, there have been some 800 episodes of The Simpsons. How does it feel to be a showrunner turned soothsayer? What’s it like when the world combs your jokes for prophecies and thinks you knew about 9/11 four years before it happened?
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology.
Al Jean has worked on The Simpsons on and off since 1989; he is the cartoon’s longest-serving showrunner. Here, he reflects on the conspiracy theories that have sprung from these apparent prophecies.
When did you first start hearing rumblings about The Simpsons having predicted the future?
It definitely got huge when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 after we “predicted” it in an episode from 2000. The original pitch for the line was Johnny Depp and that was in for a while, but it was decided that it wasn’t as funny as Trump.
What people don’t remember is that in the year 2000, it wasn’t such a crazy name to pick, because Trump was talking about running as a Reform Party candidate. So, like a lot of our “predictions,” it’s an educated guess. I won’t comment on whether it’s a good thing that it happened, but I will say that it’s not the most illogical person you could have picked for that joke. And we did say that following him was Lisa, and now that he’s been elected again, we could still have Lisa next time—that’s my hope!
How did it make you feel that people thought you were a prophet?
Again, apart from the election’s impact on the free world, I would say that we were amused that we had said something that came true. Then we made a short video called “Trumptastic Voyage” in 2015 that predicted he would run in 2016, 2020, 2024, and 2028, so we’re three-quarters of the way through that arduous prediction.