Matt Groening
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50 free Matt Groening trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Matt Groening drew a one-eared rabbit for an alternative weekly, sold photocopies for two dollars at a record store, and ended up creating the longest-running American sitcom. The route ran through Life in Hell, a producer's birthday present and a hurried sketch in James L. Brooks's lobby of a family he named after his own parents and sisters. These 50 questions follow that route. Portland streets and a mother's maiden name behind the Springfield cast, the initials hidden in Homer's head, the nine spikes on Bart, the contentious partnership with Sam Simon and the Critic crossover he disowned. Then Futurama, developed with David X. Cohen, cancelled by Fox, revived by Comedy Central and again by Hulu, and Disenchantment for Netflix. There are questions on Bongo and Zongo Comics, Trout Mask Replica, the Rock Bottom Remainders and the Reuben Award too. Easy questions stick to the Tracey Ullman Show and the anagram in Bart's name; the expert tier asks about the Evergreen campus paper and the philosopher behind Life in Hell. Every answer is cited to a page we checked.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Matt Groening born?
Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon gave him a childhood he calls idyllic, though he says he was bored at school from the first day of first grade and kept getting into trouble for doodling.
Q 02Which college in Olympia, Washington did Matt Groening attend from 1972?
Evergreen State
Evergreen State had no grades and no required classes, which suited him. He graduated in 1977 and still recommends it to 'self-disciplined creative weirdoes'.
Q 03In the 1980s Matt Groening drew Life in Hell advertisements for which computer company?
Apple
Apple hired him while he was still an underground cartoonist: the Life in Hell ads ran before The Simpsons became a series and made him famous.
Q 04Which fellow cartoonist, a college friend, has Matt Groening named as his biggest inspiration?
Lynda Barry
Lynda Barry owes him her start as well: as a student he printed her earliest comic strip in the campus paper without telling her.
Q 05Which Broad City star voices Princess Bean in Matt Groening's Netflix fantasy series?
Abbi Jacobson
Abbi Jacobson plays the hard-drinking princess. Groening says the show began as sketchbooks full of imps, gnomes and trolls he could never use on The Simpsons.
Q 06Matt Groening sold his first cartoon in 1978 to Wet, a Los Angeles magazine devoted to what?
Bathing
Bathing: Wet styled itself 'the magazine of gourmet bathing'. Groening's strip for it, 'Forbidden Words', listed overused phrases he wanted banned.
Q 07At which Los Angeles record store did Matt Groening work and sell copies of his comic book?
Licorice Pizza
Licorice Pizza kept a punk corner of fanzines beside the records. Groening added his photocopied Life in Hell booklets, and to his surprise they sold.
Q 08In which alternative newspaper did Life in Hell begin running weekly in 1980?
Los Angeles Reader
Los Angeles Reader first hired him to deliver the paper. He worked his way up through typesetting and editing before his cartoons were given a slot.
Q 09Which future Simpsons voice actor was a fan of Matt Groening's made-up music column?
Harry Shearer
Harry Shearer met Groening by chance at a Hollywood newsstand in the mid-1980s, and the two traded compliments: Groening was a fan of Shearer's radio show.
Q 10Who published the first Life in Hell book, Love Is Hell, in 1984?
Deborah Caplan
Deborah Caplan sold advertising at the paper that ran the strip. Syndicating it across the country was her idea, and she later married him.
Q 11Which stressed, therapy-going rabbit is the star of Life in Hell?
Binky
Binky is a rabbit for a practical reason: nobody could tell what Groening's doodled creatures were supposed to be until he gave them long ears.
Q 12In Life in Hell, what physical feature distinguishes the young rabbit Bongo from his father?
One ear
One ear is a purely practical touch: readers kept mixing up father and son, so Groening took an ear off the boy to tell them apart.
Q 13Which identically drawn, fez-wearing duo ran businesses like the Tofu Hut in Life in Hell?
Akbar and Jeff
Akbar and Jeff look identical on purpose: with a couple nobody could tell apart, Groening could joke about relationships without seeming to take a side.
Q 21Which tame TV boy inspired Bart Simpson?
Dennis the Menace
Dennis the Menace never lived up to his name on television, Groening felt. So he later drew a boy who truly was a menace, naming him with an anagram of 'brat'.
Q 22After whom did Matt Groening name Homer and Marge Simpson?
His parents
His parents were Homer and Margaret, but the likeness ends there: the real Homer Groening was a decorated wartime bomber pilot, filmmaker and cartoonist.
Q 23Whom did Matt Groening name in 1995 as the real inspiration for Bart Simpson?
His older brother Mark
His older brother Mark was the model, something Groening said he had never admitted before. He had first meant to give the boy his own name, Matt.
Q 14Two fez-wearing Life in Hell regulars began as Matt Groening's failed attempts to draw which newspaper-strip star?
Charlie Brown
Charlie Brown's striped shirt survived the botched copies. Groening, who calls Peanuts one of the great works of its century, kept the stripes and added fezzes.
Q 15Fellow cartoonists marked the end of Life in Hell with what?
A poster
A poster of tribute cartoons by 22 of them was presented to him in autumn 2012, 23 years after he vowed he would never give up the strip he called his foundation.
Q 16In the mid-2000s Matt Groening began heading his Life in Hell strips with which sunnier title?
Life Is Swell
Life Is Swell kept the rhyme and flipped the mood, but the good cheer did not last: by June 2012 he had ended the strip altogether.
Q 17Which producer contacted Matt Groening in 1985, leading to animated shorts for a Fox variety show?
James L. Brooks
James L. Brooks knew the strip from a thank-you present: his production designer had bought him an original Life in Hell page, 'The Los Angeles Way of Death'.
Q 18The first Simpsons shorts aired as bumpers on which Fox variety programme?
The Tracey Ullman Show
The Tracey Ullman Show was never a big hit, but the crude little cartoons shown between its sketches were, and in 1989 they were spun off into a series of their own.
Q 19Why did Matt Groening refuse to adapt his Life in Hell characters for television?
He feared losing ownership rights
He feared losing ownership rights to the network, so he kept his rabbits for himself and came up with something new to pitch in their place.
Q 20Where was Matt Groening when he hurriedly drew the Simpson family for the first time?
In a producer's lobby
In a producer's lobby, kept waiting for over an hour, he dropped the idea he had come to pitch and dashed off a brand-new cast before he was called in.
Q 24What did Matt Groening hide in Homer Simpson's hairline and ear in his original design?
His own initials
His own initials: the zigzag hairline made an M and the ear a G. He rounded the ear off for the screen as too distracting, but kept the G in sketches drawn for fans.
Q 25Marge Simpson's towering beehive hairstyle was inspired partly by which film?
Bride of Frankenstein
Bride of Frankenstein was one model; the other was the way Groening's own mother wore her hair in the 1960s, though hers, she said, was never blue.
Q 26As a boy, Matt Groening assumed that the Springfield of which 1950s sitcom was the town next door?
Father Knows Best
Father Knows Best was set in a Springfield, and Groening later gave the name to the Simpsons' town, betting that viewers everywhere would take it for their own.
Q 27Chief Wiggum's surname on The Simpsons was borrowed from which part of Matt Groening's own life?
His mother's maiden name
His mother's maiden name was Wiggum. Groening has always stressed that the people whose names he borrowed are nothing like the characters who carry them.
Q 28Flanders, Lovejoy, Quimby and Kearney are all names of what in Matt Groening's home city?
Streets
Streets, mostly in the city's north-west, supplied the names. Groening has said he meant to name every character on the show that way, but dropped the idea because time was short.
Q 29Which honour did Matt Groening receive in 2012?
A Walk of Fame star
A Walk of Fame star came to him twelve years late, in a sense: his cartoon family had been given one of their own back in 2000.
Q 30When The Simpsons' writers named Homer's father 'Abraham', whose name did they match by pure coincidence?
Groening's own grandfather
Groening's own grandfather had that name. He had refused to use it for the character and left the choice to the writers, who picked it without knowing.