Many of us have watched the lives of ?The Simpsons? unfold on television over the years.

The loveable and dysfunctional family, which is headed by Homer and Marge, have made us appreciate our families all the more.

Bermuda can hear all about the show?s birth, ?Simpsons? family secrets, how the show was almost cancelled before it came on air and other interesting tidbits from its four-time Emmy Award winning producer Mike Reiss.

The event takes place at the Ruth Seaton James Centre for the Performing Arts on Saturday at 8 p.m. There will also be an opportunity for patrons to have paraphernalia from the programme signed by the producer.

Mr. Reiss? writing career began when he was very young and he gained invaluable experience as he penned jokes for his classmates.

After gaining a BA in English from Harvard University, he wrote for both The Harvard Lampoon and The National Lampoon magazines before a reader asked him to help write ?Airplane II?.

Since then he has written for ?The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson?, ?Alf?, ?Eddie Murphy?s The PJ?s?, and ?It?s Garry Shandling?s Show?, where he earned an ACE award for writing and producing.

He is also the co-creator of ?The Critic?, which although cancelled has a cult following and has been running on Comedy Central for five years.

Mr. Reiss also created ?Queer Duck?, the animated adventures of a gay duck. An Internet hit with rave reviews in the US and Europe, the series recently made the jump to the Showtime network. ?Queer Duck? is also being made into a feature film, which will be released this summer.

But the wacky animated series that features Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Marge and Homer, has kept everyone laughing for more than a decade.

During the 11 seasons with ?The Simpsons?, Mr. Reiss penned a dozen scripts and produced over 200 episodes.

In addition, he is a frequent contributor to Esquire and Games Magazine, and is an award-winning mystery writer. He has published several children?s books, including the surprise best seller ?How Murray Saved Christmas?, a Christmas story for Jewish kids. His latest work is ?Santa Claustrophobia?. He has lectured on comedy and animation at more than two dozen colleges, as well at the Smithsonian Institute.

His explanation of how he got the job writing for ?The Simpsons? is he says, ?no one else wanted it.?

He said the show sounded like the worst thing in the world, as it was a cartoon in primetime and there hadn?t been one since the ?Flintstones?.

It was also on the Fox Network, which was just starting up and nobody really thought that it had a chance.

?So, it really sounded like a fly-by-night job,? he said, ?And they had offered the job to two or three people that I knew and they had all turned it down.

?I finally took the job, but I didn?t tell anyone what I was doing.?

He thought that part of the show?s success was that they all took the attitude that it would only run for six episodes and would then be cancelled so they might as well enjoy themselves.

And trouble was at hand. The show was due to begin in September, but when they received the first tape from Korea, it lacked quality and they put off the start date until the eighth episode, which was the Christmas special in December.

?We were in trouble even before we hit the air,? he said.

But all was not lost and when they sent out the Christmas episode to be reviewed the reviews came back glowing.

?We were flabbergasted,? he said. ?We went on the air that night and immediately set a record for the highest rating on the Fox Network. The show was literally a hit from the first half hour and three weeks later, we were on the cover of Newsweek.?

The show reached acclaim, but it was not for everybody and was quite hated and controversial. ?We were condemned in schools, by the National Council of Churches and by the first President Bush and I think his wife Barbara Bush said, ?this is the stupidest thing I?ve ever seen?.

?That has been the evolution, as we went from being condemned to something that is taught in school and college courses. Ministers mangle our jokes and use them in their sermons and the Archbishop of Canterbury wants to be on our show.?

His path to writing for television is described as a ?lucky break?. While Mr. Reiss was working for the National Lampoon someone read an article I had written and he hired me and hired me to help him write ?Airplane II?, the movie.

?I was just the joke writer there,? he said.

?From there Al Jean, my writing partner, and I bounced around from job to job and our biggest before ?The Simpsons? was writing for Johnny Carson. We worked for him for a few years and we had a quota of 60 jokes a day. It was a really tough job and we weren?t funny at the end of the day. I would be on dates and I was the dullest man in the world ? I was completely joked out.?

He wants the audience to know that comedy writing is about all he does.

?I make jokes and I can string them together into funny stories,? he said, ?And if I wasn?t doing this I would just be in a mental hospital. I have no other service, I can?t even type.

?I was an English major and I use the language everyday, but the big thing is that at Harvard they have the humour magazine The Harvard Lampoon, which has spawned at least half the writers that we have had over the years at ?The Simpsons?.

?So, it is a lot of people squandering an extensive college education.?

He said writing room at ?The Simpsons? is home to many interesting people of varying backgrounds.

?We have a guy with a PhD in chemical engineering, scientists, mathematicians, we have a shocking number of math majors from Harvard and they have a little math club discuss cutting-edge math.?

Although the show started with only four writers, they now have a staff of 25.

?We initially did the show with eight people for about four years, but there was a tremendous burnout.

?Everybody is good and I am glad that it is not my job to have to fire one guy, because I couldn?t pick because everybody in that show is extremely impressive.?

Before the show hits the air it has been edited and re-written a minimum of eight times.

?As a group we will generate a story idea and then some poor guy has to go off and write the script and then it goes in front of ten people. ?We are very ruthless going through a line at a time, changing, changing and changing and asking, ?what can be funnier here??

?If a line gets into a show it?s because it made eight out of ten people laugh.

?The show goes through eight rewrites from top to bottom and so when the show finally comes on and if it says that it is written by John Smith, he might have written 20 percent of what is on screen, or he might have written nothing, but usually nothing remains of your original script. These are good writers, but this is the process. So, it is a fun job to sit around and laugh and make other people laugh all day.?

In the early years some of the writers including himself and his writing partner Mr. Jean left the show in search of greener pastures and it was during that time that they created ?The Critic?, but he said: ?We left and did our own thing, but everybody came back and would say, ?there is no better job than this?.

?Other people have been there 11 or 12 years, and that is ten lifetimes in TV.?

The character of Homer Simpson was based on the way many of the writers envisioned their fathers.

?All of our fathers were very distinguished men, my father was a doctor and a professor at Yale, Matt Groening?s father was named Homer and he was a documentarian and a concert violinist.

?Homer was how we all perceived our fathers, as big, scary, angry men and the fact that he has gotten kind of dumb and has become kind of a large baby is part of the evolution and a weird change.

?But, if you watch the early episodes Homer was not a stupid man and the first episode that I ever wrote was Homer feeling his family needed therapy and he sold the family TV. Now that is not what Homer would do today.?

As a man who has been there from the start it has been a little shocking for him to see Homer?s intelligence decline, he said: ?It is like having a loved one with Alzheimer?s, but the public just seems to love him the dumber and more infantile he gets.?

When asked about Marge?s blue tubular hair, he said, ?The hair, I don?t know.

?But Matt Groening famously tells the story that ?The Simpsons? characters were all designed in 15 minutes. He was going in for a meeting with ?The Tracy Ullman Show? to show his cartoons about rabbits. But right before the meeting someone said, ?if we use the rabbits, we will own them?.

?So, in literally 15 minutes he sketched out the five Simpsons characters, they are all named after his family members, which I think is the panic of working under the pressure. So, that is how he generated them, the hair and the pointy heads. And that?s the genesis of a world-wide institution.?

But of everything that he has written, his most favourite is about a gay duck.

?It is the one thing that I sort of did out of conscience because I just didn?t like the way gay people were treated in comedy.

?Even in the most sophisticated programmes and films, gay people were treated like punch lines, the way we used to treat black people in comedy and so I created this cartoon ?Queer Duck? to be empowering for gay people and I wanted them to really love it.

?It became a huge success on the Internet and nobody told me, but the BBC was showing it every week. So, that is the thing that brought me the most pride and for the last year.

He has also been working on ?Queer Duck? the film, which will be out on video later this summer.

?We are premiering it at a gay film festival in June, and then at an art house release.?

As a child, he was not the class clown. ?I wrote jokes for the class clown, I was always born to be a writer.

?I never wanted to be a performer. I was always a quiet kid who always wrote funny essays, always said funny things, and when I had to do a book report I would invent the book I was writing about.?

When asked for his advice for aspiring writers, he had a simple answer: ?I tell people who want to write to write something.

?You will see that that cuts out about 80 percent of the people who want to write. To break into TV writing everyone has to write a sample script of a show that is on TV like ?Two and a Half Men? or ?Everybody Loves Raymond?. ?That is all you have to do. Write a script.?

And when people say that they want to write a children?s book then they should just write it and mail it out.

?Don?t talk about it, just do it,? he said. ?You don?t have to tell writers that, because I did it for free when I was a kid because I just loved to write and make things up.

?Teachers say, ?how do I encourage my students to write?? But if you have to encourage them they will never be a writer. The born writers are the ones that you have to stop writing and make them learn maths and how to balance a chequebook.?

Tickets, $55, are available at www.boxoffice.bm and on the door for $65.