But songs! “While any joke on The Simpsons might be rewritten five or six times,” reveals Reiss, “songs rarely change and almost never get cut.” That makes sense -- jokes are just words on paper, but once a song’s lyrics are married to melodies that must be scored and recorded, the opportunities for reworking jokes are greatly diminished.
There’s one exception to the “rarely cut” rule that Reiss remembers. There was yet another song in the Shary Bobbins episode called “We Love To Smoke,” a Selma and Patty parody of the Poppins song “I Love to Laugh.”
You can listen to the song here, one that never made it to air. Why did it get the rare ax? “Hearing Patty and Selma rasp and cough out a song was pretty grating.”