Winnipegger scoring big with YouTube videos inspired by Simpsons meme

A screenshot from Tyrone Deise’s video “Steamed Hams but it’s a Critically Acclaimed Featured Film,” starring Reegan Bourgeois (right) and Terrence Ferguson, is pictured. (YouTube / @TyroneDeise)

A Winnipeg man’s variations on a decades-old segment on The Simpsons has resulted in fans from around the world, including a longtime writer from the show.

Tyrone Deise, a YouTube creator, has created a dozen videos on his channel that are variations of the infamous “Steamed Hams” scene from The Simpsons.

“I threw a lot of things at (the channel), nothing was really working, and then it was Steamed Hams that actually gained traction,” Deise said in a recent interview.

First airing in the Season 7 episode “22 Short Films About Springfield,” Steamed Hams refers to an unforgettable luncheon between Principal Skinner and his boss, Superintendent Chalmers. In three minutes, Skinner attempts to pass off fast food as his own home cooking after his roast burns, serving Chalmers hamburgers he calls “steamed hams.” (“Delightfully devilish, Seymour,” the principal says to himself when he comes up with the plan).

Throughout the segment, Skinner lies every time Chalmers presses him about the food, culminating in him claiming a fire in his kitchen from the burning roast is aurora borealis.

Around 2014, the segment became a viral meme online, remixed in multiple animation styles, such as Anime, Lego, or even a scene from the video game Metal Gear Solid.

Deise made his first “Steamed Hams” video in 2020 for the Winnipeg WNDX Festival of Moving Image, staging the scene in the style of a German Expressionist film.

“I got my film scan back, put it on my YouTube channel, and it sat there for a year, and then out of nowhere, it kind of blew up,” he said.

The video has been viewed over 1 million times, and Deise has made other Steamed Hams videos in different styles, ranging from a banned USSR cartoon to a Netflix true crime series opening, to a Dr. Seuss-style book, to an homage to the 1950s animated show Clutch Cargo.

Deise said it takes quite a bit of work to produce each of his videos.

“Most of them take me between one and three months to do, and that’s anywhere from 40 to 120 hours of work,” he said, noting he also posts making-of videos explaining his techniques.

His most recent video, released on Sept. 20, is a 43-minute short film titled, “Steamed Hams, but it’s a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film,” a live-action version of the segment inspired by Louis Malle’s classic conversation-driven film “My Dinner With Andre.”

“It’s definitely the most ambitious and complicated one I’ve done,” he said.

He said the reason he liked doing variations of the scene is because it’s a classic bit (man cooks dinner for his boss, nothing goes right) that dates to The Vaudeville Era.

“Because of that, it is endlessly remixable,” Deise said.

Former Simpsons showrunner among fans

Among the millions of people who have watched his videos, Deise has found a fan in Bill Oakley, the former Simpsons writer and showrunner who wrote the original Steamed Hams scene.

“A lot of people have done incredibly great work remixing Steamed Hams, but the work of Tyrone has elevated this to an artform,” Oakley said during a recent interview with CTV News. “It is the amount of care and the amount of painstaking work that goes into them that is astonishing.”

Oakley said seeing the thousands of remixes of something he wrote in 1996 is incredible.

“It’s become one of those comedy sketches that has two or three words that people know, like Who’s on First or Dead Parrot,” he said. “When you hear Dead Parrot, you know exactly that it’s Monty Python; when you hear Who’s on First, you know that it is Abbott and Costello. And I believe that Steamed Hams has maybe fallen into that category now.”

Deise said it’s “pretty cool” to hear that Oakley is a fan of his work.

He said his most recent video is likely his last Steamed Hams video for a while, but if he has a good idea, another video could be made.