A joke in a Simpsons script came with its own little alarm bell. Buzz Aldrin was supposed to say, "second comes after first," a line funny only because everyone knew the bruise it pressed. The staff worried that asking the second man on the moon to say it aloud might be asking too much.
When Buzz Aldrin guest starred in The Simpsons episode "Deep Space Homer," writers offered him a gentler alternative to "second comes after first," namely "first to take a soil sample." Aldrin preferred the original joke, and the sharper line stayed in the episode.
"Deep Space Homer" aired on Fox on February 24, 1994, as the fifteenth episode of the show's fifth season.[1] Its premise sends Homer Simpson into orbit after NASA tries to renew public interest in space launches by putting an ordinary person on a shuttle.[1] The ordinary person, naturally, is Homer, which means spaceflight becomes less a triumphal machine than a place for potato chips, panic, and avoidable trouble.
David Mirkin wrote the episode, Carlos Baeza directed it, and the guest list paired Aldrin with James Taylor, both appearing as themselves.[1] That is already a very Simpsons arrangement, an Apollo 11 astronaut and a soft-rock singer sharing a cartoon version of NASA with a nuclear plant safety inspector. The episode also parodies Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, folding a grand space-cinema reference into a story about Homer mishandling the most serious workplace assignment imaginable.[1]
The Line Worked Because Aldrin Let It Work
Aldrin's place in public memory has always had an odd shape. Walking on the moon is almost impossible to diminish, but the Apollo 11 story is often compressed into sequence. Neil Armstrong was first. Aldrin followed. A difference of minutes became a permanent label, the kind that can turn an achievement into a ranking.
That is what made the writers hesitate. "Second comes after first" is a blunt little sentence, and bluntness depends on the person receiving it. The substitute line, "first to take a soil sample," gave Aldrin a tidier victory. It still reached for moon history, but it moved away from the obvious joke about coming after Armstrong.
Aldrin chose the sharper version. In a celebrity cameo, that matters more than the wording itself. A safer line would have protected the guest from the audience's knowledge. The line that stayed trusted the audience to know the history, then let Aldrin show that he could stand inside the joke without shrinking from it.
The episode developed a larger afterlife for another reason. In one scene, Kent Brockman sees an ant floating near the camera and mistakes it for evidence of giant space ants. His declaration, "And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords," later became an internet meme.[1] For many viewers, that line became the durable scrap of "Deep Space Homer," the phrase that escaped the episode and wandered around online for years.
Aldrin's moment is quieter. No meme machinery is required. The writers offered him a heroic escape hatch, one that would have let the astronaut be first at something. He gave it back, and let the cartoon keep the line about second place.
