Getty Image / Lisa O’Connor/Variety
The Simpsons is notorious for constantly predicting real-world events. So much so that it happens every couple of months and makes headlines but Matt Groening’s writers have predicted so many real-world events at this point that nobody is really surprised at all anymore when it happens.
Matt Groening spoke about this phenomenon during the ‘D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event’ over the weekend with some of the biggest names from Disney in attendance and he explained how The Simpsons constantly nails it.
The long and short of it is that writers on The Simpsons try and predict the most outrageous possible outcomes with their storylines and we somehow happen to be living in a timeline where the most outrageous possible outcomes keep on happening. Here’s Matt Groening’s explanation:
For those who prefer reading over watching, Matt Groening started off by joking “the coming lottery numbers are….” He then went on to say “you know, we’ve done so many jokes over the many seasons that we’ve been on the air that eventually we’re going to get something right. We always write jokes on the things that are supposed to be the most absurd possibility and it turns out that that’s the way the world is these days. So everything seems to come true.”
The Simpsons creator went on to say “it’s not intentional” and asked the people in the audience to stop writing mean stuff about him on the Internet with regard to the nonstop predictions from his show. That got a pretty solid laugh from the crowd.
Side note: it is truly wild how successful The Simpsons has been for Matt Groening. His estimated net worth is constantly among the highest in television and somewhere in the $600M range.