Joseph Stewart Burns (born December 4, 1969), better known as J. Stewart Burns or simply just Stewart Burns is a television writer and producer most notable for his work on The Simpsons, Futurama, and Unhappily Ever After.

Education

Burns attended Harvard University, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. Noted in the DVD commentaries of "The Deep South" and "Roswell That Ends Well", Burns has an M.A. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under John Rhodes. Burns is partly credited for The Simpsons' inclusion of a number of complex mathematical concepts and jokes within the series. Burns was famously referenced in a 1993 Newsweek article about his decision to jump from pursuing a graduate degree in mathematics to writing comedy: "You could read the entire story of American decline in that one career move."

Career

Burns got his start by writing for Beavis and Butthead. Since then, he has written for The Simpsons, Futurama, and Unhappily Ever After. Aside from writing on the original series, Burns also wrote the script for the Futurama video game as well as one of the Spyro games, Spyro: A Hero's Tail. Burns developed and has served as the game runner of The Simpsons: Tapped Out since its inception.

Awards

Burns has won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Animation Program four times — for Futurama in 2002, and for The Simpsons in 2006, 2008 and 2019.

Writing credits

The Simpsons episodes

Supervising producer credits

The Simpsons episodes

Co-executive producer credits

The Simpsons episodes

Futurama episodes

Unhappily Ever After episodes