This week’s episode of The Simpsons will feature a special celebrity guest: Albert Brooks. The Defending Your Life star has obviously voiced a number of important four-fingered cartoon characters over the years, from Globex Corporation president Hank Scorpio, to The Simpsons Movie villain Russ Cargill, to Jacques, the overly horny French bowling instructor.
While some celebrities might just stick to the script, Brooks is famous for improvising during Simpsons recording sessions. “The great thing about doing stuff for The Simpsons is that if you can ‘riff on it,’ they love it,” Brooks told The Film Pie in 2012. “They’ll leave a tape machine on for five hours.”
Brooks was burnt out
After recording Hank Scorpio’s lines for “You Only Movie Twice,” Brooks admitted that he didn’t have “another comedy thought in my head for a month. I said every funny thing I had as Hank Scorpio.”
But for all of his Simpsons roles, the beloved comedian has been credited as simply “A. Brooks.” Even in the newest episode, the “Albert” portion of his name seemingly isn’t included in the credits.
This all stems from Brooks’ very first cameo on the show, way back in the Season One episode “The Call of the Simpsons” in which Brooks voiced Cowboy Bob, the underhanded RV dealer.
On the episode’s DVD commentary, Simpsons writer and producer Mike Reiss recalled that the show’s earliest guest stars, Brooks and Penny Marshall, only agreed to participate because they were “close friends” with Simpsons producer and co-developer James L. Brooks. Even William Shatner refused, thus becoming the “first celebrity to turn down the show.”
Reiss said that Brooks was credited as “A. Brooks” in the episode because “he wasn’t sure, as a lot of the early celebrity voices weren’t, whether they wanted to be identified with a cartoon show or not.”
On a recent episode of Nancy Cartwright’s podcast Simpsons Declassified, writer Jon Vitti noted that Brooks’ role paved the way for future A-listers to guest star, even if he didn’t want audiences to know his first name. Brooks “asked for the A. Brooks” because he didn’t want to publicly admit that he had been a voice on The Simpsons,” Vitti said, adding that “his great performance, it showed other people that you could be on a cartoon show and not be embarrassed.”
For a guy as smart as Brooks clearly is, he didn’t exactly come up with the most hard-to-crack alias.