If you were watching The Simpsons recently, you may have heard Luanne Van Houten bragging about her husband, Kirk, buying part of a familiar-sounding hockey team on a recent episode.

“He just became a minority owner of the Calgary Flames.” Marge Simpson replied back, “They haven’t been good for years.”

A few years back, you may have also noticed that Bart Simpson’s e-sports team competed against the “Calgary Lames” in Season 30’s “E My Sports.”

While creating The Simpsons is a collaborative process, these cheeky references to our local sports team are due in no small part to the influence of Calgary-born writer Joel H. Cohen, a Simpsons staffer since 2000 and a Flames fan since birth. FlamesNation caught up with Cohen by phone last week.

“Long, you know, winding road,” said Cohen, who grew up in southwest Calgary and attended Henry Wise Wood High School. “I went to U of A, moved to Toronto. I worked in the film business on the business side in Toronto for seven years. I got a job working for Turner Broadcasting in L.A. So I moved to L.A. in 1997, and I worked in broadcasting, and I knew I wanted to be a writer. I worked probably in ad sales, and I knew I wanted to be a writer. And my brother [Robert] was, at the time, a bit of an up-and-coming writer himself, and he helped me a little bit. So I just started hustling, and I got on this horrible, horrible show called Suddenly Susan, which started Brooke Shields. And then my boss, one of my bosses there, this amazing woman named Maria Semple, recommended me to The Simpsons, because her, at the time, boyfriend worked here. And I got hired in 2000, and I’ve, you know, been here ever since.”

Cohen’s been residing in Los Angeles for decades, but his Flames fandom runs deep. He grew up attending games at the Stampede Corral and Saddledome during the team’s 1980s glory period, and even was in the building during the 1986 Stanley Cup Final when the Montreal Canadiens hoisted the Cup.

“You grew up in Calgary, if you liked sports, how are you not a Flames fan, right?” said Cohen. “it was sort of the heyday when I was growing up, back in the Battle of Alberta, obviously. You know, I was there to watch them lose the Cup, I was at the game when they lost to Montreal in ’86, and then I was in university and missed them winning live, but made the point of watching the game, I was in London, so I went to this Canadian pub in London to watch them win. And then I went to University of Alberta, so I suffered with all my dumb-ass Edmonton friends and through the whole Oilers dynasty, and then I moved to Toronto because I wanted to live where there was a much worse hockey team. And, you know, then just once I moved to L.A., still a fan, I catch the Flames when they come here, but sort of a long distance fan these days.”

And in case you’re thinking that too much time spent away from Calgary has dulled Cohen’s local instincts, he recalled Wayne Gretzky’s appearance on the show – he voiced himself in Season 28’s “The Nightmare After Krustmas” – where he got into a joking back-and-forth with The Great One during production of the episode.

“We had Gretzky on the show a while ago, and he was great, of course,” said Cohen. “But I just went in and just said, ‘hey, Wayne, it’s nice to meet you, [I’m] from Calgary.’ And as soon as we hit Calgary, he just started ripping into me, and then I just had to kind of rip back into him. And I remember all my colleagues were like, ‘you’re insulting Wayne Gretzky?’ And I’m like, ‘well, he started it.’ And it was just fun. It was talking about, like, in 87, when he scored this famous goal, you might remember, over Vernon’s shoulder, and all of this stuff. So, it was just, it was in my blood.”

Cohen has been credited writer on around 39 episodes of The Simpsons, and he’s contributed to countless others as part of the show’s staff. His job and his fandom collided in a big way in Season 34’s “Top Goon,” where school bully Nelson Muntz is sent to a hockey camp run by legendary goons Stu Grimson, Dave Schultz and Tiger Williams to learn how to protect Bart on their youth hockey team, coached by Moe the bartender.

One of three Canadians on the show’s writing staff – Jeff Westbrook is also from Calgary and Tim Long is from Ontario – Cohen admits that if there’s a hockey reference or a snarky Flames reference on the show, it probably comes from him.

“It’s just me,” joked Cohen. “Like, I think that’s the only way they’re going to learn is, like, this tough love administered through a cartoon show from 5,000 miles away. But, yeah, I’m here for them when things turn around. Trust me. I try to dump on the Oilers as much as I can, but it’s a little bit harder to dump on when you get a chance. So, yeah, any hockey references come from one of us and most often me.”

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