JAMES PALEOLOGOPOULOS: It's been 30 years since America and the world learned a special expression that reportedly came from upstate New York.
If you're from Utica, you've probably never heard of "steamed hams:" it's more of an Albany expression.
To celebrate its legacy, former Simpsons showrunner Bill Oakley will be in town to mark the occasion. He'll be in the capital city on April 14 for a pair of special showings.
Mr. Oakley joins us now. Bill, how are you?
BILL OAKLEY: I'm great, thank you for asking.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: Thanks for being here. I want to preface this - I don't watch television and have never seen The Simpsons, but I watched some YouTube shorts, so I feel like I'm caught up.
OAKLEY: It has been on [the air] for like, 75 years, but that's fine.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: I get it. I need to begin at the beginning. Bill: could you take me back 30 years and tell me where steam hams first entered the picture? It's one of dozens of jokes that get crammed into a vignette, no less. It's about four minutes long? And yet it's taken on a life of its own.
OAKLEY: Yes, much to my amazement, as a matter of fact.
So, on April 14, 1996, The Simpsons, under the leadership of myself and Josh Weinstein, my partner, we broadcast an episode called “22 Short Films About Springfield,” which was entirely made up of little vignettes about the characters - other than the Simpson family - in the world of Springfield.
One of those happened to be a small three- or four-minute vignette about Principal Skinner and his boss, Superintendent Chalmers, coming over for dinner.
The dinner goes haywire in a weird way that kind of explores the dynamic between the two of them. They have a previously known dynamic, which was that Skinner would tell these very mild lies and Chalmers would call him out on them once or twice, but then drop it.
This time, [Chalmers] did not drop it, forcing Principal Skinner into a corner into which he had to concoct this thing called “steamed hams,” which is a regional expression from Albany, New York, meaning hamburgers.
I never heard anything about it again for about 20 years, until, starting at around 2014-15, it started to take on this crazy life of its own, beginning in Australia.
I won't go into all the details, but it began in Australia as a series of prank calls to a national grocery store chain, then it crossed the Pacific to America, where it became sort of an internet meme, culminating with it finally becoming “Internet Meme of the Year” in 2018… as people took the thing itself and remixed it thousands and thousands of times … on YouTube … as video and as audio and as photos.
And it is a shocker. I wrote that thing … one of the few things I wrote by myself at the Simpsons, and I was amazed at this bizarre occurrence.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: I know I've seen live-action interpretations, I’ve seen hand-drawn anthologies in which different animators tackle [several] seconds at a time. I know some of these interpretations have a looser understanding of copyright law than others, but any favorites that have come out?
OAKLEY: Oh, my God, I love them.
First of all, I'd be incredibly jealous if anybody else had written this segment and was getting all this … not that it provides any money for me whatsoever, although it might in Albany on April 14, by the way.
I love it, and I'm delighted that people are having this fun with it, and … I've seen thousands of these remixes… in fact, some of the best ones of all time are just coming out this year.
There's this guy who's been doing these incredibly complicated ones that are like … an Ottoman Empire shadow play, Soviet animation from the 1970s or … the opening of a Netflix murder mystery. And the most recent one, which is basically a live-action one that's 40-minutes long… it’s kind of an homage to “My Dinner With Andre.”
The remixing of it continues to this day.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: I’m just thinking about the My Dinner With Andre arcade cabinet from another episode. I've been meaning to get my hands on one of those, but it's very difficult.
During [the] vignette ... steamed hams originates from, there are a number of jokes and references coming at the viewer almost constantly - it does not stop - and that's typical of a number of Simpsons episodes.
I want to ask: there’s a dynamic, it seems, in that writer’s room where it's one reference or one joke or one setup after another, seemingly. I realize it was a crowded writer's room, and there's a lot of credit to be spread around, but can you just walk me through that logic? Because it's an onslaught, and it's hilarious.
OAKLEY: You know, I think that was developed around the third or fourth season, before I got there, because if you look at the first and some of the second season of the show, it's a little slower, the pace is a little more relaxed.
But then, by the third season, we get these episodes like the baseball episode and so forth, that are really packed with jokes and I think by season four, it became de rigueur, as one might say, to pack [in jokes].
You [could have] five or six jokes on the page, right? You could see the page and you know … there's a certain amount of dialogue, and every time, the question came from the showrunners - sometimes it was me saying – “Could this be funnier?” and the answer was always “yes,” because … if you don't have your six jokes per page, you know you really probably could have it, and you know that you're being lazy if you don't put another joke in there somewhere, and it became kind of a neurosis, I think, to make sure that there was a joke on [there] all the time.
Also, you’ve got to be careful. If there's too many jokes, people get confused, and this is why I had a rule in the writer’s room called “one joke per joke, please.” You can't have a joke in the first half of the sentence damaging the punchline in the second half of the sentence.
So… it takes a little bit of finesse to make sure that there's jokes in there, but the jokes don't overlap to the extent that they harm each other.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: Bill, we touched on the fan reaction, the legacy that steamed hams has to this day and carries on and will probably surpass both of us at the rate this is going… it’s one of many “memes” or just one-off jokes that just have a life of their own years after the fact.
The fan culture: I haven't ever seen anything like it. I know that there are other fan cultures that have emerged since then that kind of replicate it, but The Simpsons in particular… it's at a point where one of my favorite “meme” accounts is someone who's actually… I don't think they've run out of ideas, but they're taking other Simpsons gags and combining [them] and photoshopping [it with others]… I don't know if you've ever encountered this…
OAKLEY: Oh, yes: there's a whole … there’s at least a dozen of those accounts that have hundreds of thousands of followers on every service, and I love them because they're … remixing the things and combining them two or three different ways… obviously, steamed hams is just one of hundreds of Simpsons memes that they use. There's liver and onions, there's Kirk Van Houten, there's all sorts of other ones that are remixed in various ways and I find them to be somewhat remarkable and somewhat creepy at times.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: I'm casting a very wide net here, but I do want to ask, what do you make of that kind of devotion? Does it speak to the source material? Does it speak to the capacity of the fan? How does it feel to just see that kind of reaction carry on?
OAKLEY: It’s very enjoyable. It's particularly enjoyable in that I think that The Simpsons is one of the last things that come from the last remnants of our “shared monoculture,” … like, when I was a kid, everybody had seen every episode of “I Love Lucy,” everybody had seen every episode of “The Brady Bunch,” and everybody knew, “Oh, that's the Lucy in the candy factory” [scene] “Oh, that's Marsha gets her nose broken by the football” [scene] right? “Mom always said don’t play ball in the house.”
But then what happens is as cable TV, as streaming services [emerge] … the monoculture doesn’t happen. We still have Barbie, we have Oppenheimer, things like that from time to time, but with TV, we don't have that so much, except in the world of animation, I would say.
Because these characters don't age … it's not creepy to see Bart [at] age 38 still trying to act like a little kid. And I think you see this happening with other animated shows too, like Family Guy … South Park, same thing. I think… animation, especially adult animation… it doesn't age to the extent that live-action shows do.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: So, speaking of the show, of course… to preface this, a few years ago, the Times Union took a stab at compiling all of the upstate New York references that one way or another, have come out in The Simpsons.
I know a number of them have come out after your time with the show, but it was pretty New York-rich for those … seasons. I’ve got to ask, what makes New York … so ripe for so many of these references, because I'll get into them in a second, but they're very specific, and I feel like that adds.
OAKLEY: I don't know! As you said, this started before we got there and continued on long after we left there. But I think part of the thing is, there's a lot of cities in upstate New York that people have heard of, but know nothing about. They're blank slates.
Like, it wouldn't be so funny to say reference Cleveland or Sacramento or whatever... Albany, Utica: there's a number of cities in upstate New York that people have heard of that have sort of, maybe slight, unusual sounds that people don't know anything about, and they come to you as blank slates, so I think they just serve as kind of an Every Place, USA, template for some of these jokes.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: I know in season eight where Marge starts a pretzel business and Batavia, NY gets a shoutout.
OAKLEY: Yes! I was thinking of that one the other day… that one came in the first draft, and I don't know where that guy got that one.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: Abe Simpson being voted handsomest boy in Albany, NY, may have been a little bit after your time…
OAKLEY: I forgot that one, too!
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: I wanted to ask what goes into being the handsomest boy in Albany, but we won't get into the nitty gritty there.
I do want to ask, in terms of steamed hams - getting back to my original line of questioning - Bill, I know that we know that a steamed ham is really just a repackaged Krusty Burger, but is there any way to describe what a steamed ham in real life might resemble and, side question: have you ever been to Ted’s in Meriden, Connecticut, where they serve up quite a few steamed hamburgers.
OAKLEY: I’ve got to say steamed hams is a euphemism for hamburgers… it's made up by Principal Skinner. The hamburgers are not steamed: they're grilled: they’re just regular hamburgers that are grilled in the style of Burger King or any place that grills hamburgers.
The weird thing is that there's these strange crossovers into real life, which you just referenced. Ted’s in Meriden, Connecticut, is famous for making steamed hamburgers, which are not hams! They are steamed, and I haven't been there, but I've gotten a lot of reports from there, and I think there's a reason … more people don't steam ground beef.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: Bill … are you a frequent visitor to the Capital Region, and are there any particular …
OAKLEY: I've never been there!
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: AH!
OAKLEY: Just to make it clear for this, what happened is I realized about six months ago “Hey, this is the 30th anniversary of steamed hams! I should do something special!” And I was like “Maybe I should have an event in my hometown of Portland or whatever” … I should have some sort of burger special... and then I was like, “There's no place more appropriate to go for this anniversary than Albany, NY,” and it will be my first visit to anywhere in that area.
PALEOLOGOPLOULOS: Bill, where can people find you? In a matter of less than a week?
OAKLEY: At Druthers Brewing Company in Albany [on April 14].
I'm going to do a show… cover some of the material we talked about [here], I'm going to talk about the history of the show, tell all of the behind-the-scenes anecdotes I want to share… I'm going to do a funny slideshow about it.
And … there's a special hamburger, a “steamed hams” hamburger: Bill Oakley-brand steamed hams hamburger, which I, by the way, now own the trademark to … and this will be the first time we're selling them. Druthers is making them.
And then, there will also be a party afterwards, too, if you want to buy a ticket to that, to hang out and have beer in the brewery. So, it'll be fun… a stroll down memory lane, recounting all the 30 years of steamed hams and all the behind-the-scenes stuff that I want to share.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: Bill, thank you so much for your time!
OAKLEY: My pleasure! Thank you!
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A condensed version of this conversation aired on Thursday, April 9, 2026.
