By way of contrast, most episodes of The PJs were written by a team of those brine shrimp you order from the backs of comic books. Well, until they unionized.

On Tuesday, Simpsons writer Don Payne died of bone cancer at the age of 48. Upon hearing the news, Seth MacFarlane immediately made plans to contract bone cancer as well, then launched into a 12-minute Vaudeville routine that tickled and delighted positively everyone whose name rhymes with Beth MacFarlane.

“But James,” I can practically hear you wheezing between labored, open-mouthed breaths, “The Simpsons is a quality social satire, and I simply do not care for that. Did Mr. Payne ever write any crap?” Jesus, just look at you: Ill-fitting clothes, air whistling through where your front teeth used to be, lumbering through the world like an uneducated troglodyte with your “truckers do it in the hammer lane” cap and your gallon of Mountain Dew in a dirty 7-11 container. Why am I even trying to communicate with you? What are the odds that anything I’m writing can even be processed into cogent thoughts inside that bongwater-damaged DVR you call your mind anyway? Can you even conceive of how little you contribute to the world? How your very existence challenges all notions of forward evolution, suggesting, at best, a type of “devolution” that will probably result in you crawling back into the ocean within your lifetime to spawn and then die choking on a piece of coral reef your walnut-sized brain assumed was a fishstick? God. How do you even live with yourself? But yes, he wrote a bunch of crap:

Payne, a self-professed “comic book geek,” also was behind the scripts for My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), starring Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson, Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) and Columbia’s upcoming Maximum Ride, based on James Patterson’s young adult novel.

Payne also worked on a series of failed TV sitcoms in the ’90s: Hope & Gloria, Pride & Joy, Can’t Hurry Love, Men Behaving Badly, Veronica’s Closet and The Brian Benben Show.

Ugh. That is a spotty resume. It really makes the pilot I wrote for the show about the dog wedding planner look pretty great by comparison. People criticized it because I didn’t make it clear if the premise was that it was a dog who plans human weddings or a human who plans weddings for dogs, but in my defense after I came up with that killer “matrimony is going to the dogs!” tagline I kinda assumed the rest would just sorta… write itself. Heh. Dogs are funny.



Source: The Hollywood Reporter