Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn.

My guest Mike Judge co-created the animated sitcom King of the Hill, a show that became

kind of famous for how much heart it had.

It's a quality the network bosses had trouble seeing in the early days.

I remember at one point one of the executives was just worrying that Hank was just too angry

and he's this right-wing angry guy and he's talking about like all the way he's talking

to his son here and right behind him was a poster of Homer Strangling Bart which was

feet off the ground.

And it's kind of pointed behind him and said well he's not going to strangle him at least.

It's Bullseye.

Coming up I'll talk to Mike Judge about his HBO comedy Silicon Valley and the parallels

between Hollywood and the tech industry.

Plus he'll tell me about his early days when he drew animations for his shorts like

Beavis and Bart had an office space by hand and listened to himself do the dialogue over

and over.

They say in comedy if you've rehearsed something or done it a bunch of times you start to lose

track of whether or not it's funny or not.

I listened to it about twice as many times as it were syllables and the whole thing.

So I was just convinced that I just made this horrible unfunny thing.

Yeah it was actually very funny.

Then later I'll talk to Sharon Horgan, co-writer and star of the Amazon show Katastrophate.

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