Photo: Courtesy of Fox Broadcasting

My First "D'oh!"
Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson

It started with the Simpsons shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show. Matt Groening directed those early sessions, and when I saw "annoyed grunt" in the script, I asked him, "What is that?" And he said, "Whatever you want it to be." Usually Matt has a very specific idea about how something should be read, but in that case he left it open. I remembered as a kid watching Laurel and Hardy movies, and there was a comedian by the name of Jim Finlayson who was their nemesis. Whenever Laurel and Hardy would frustrate him, he would go, "Doooh." And so I went, "Doooh." But because these pieces were only seconds long, Matt said, "Well, can you do it faster?" So I sped it up and went, "D'oh!" Back then we were sort of discovering these characters, and when something good popped up, Matt tried to put it in again to define the characters a little more. It's always been written as "annoyed grunt." To this day, it's never written in the script as "D'oh!" Now it's so well known that it's in the Oxford English Dictionary. Nobody called to ask me for a definition, though.