if I had actually succeeded at college and gotten a degree in accounting or something, I might have given up too quickly on writing. Having no marketable job skills was a tremendous incentive to keep trying to succeed as a writer." He realized "there probably wasn't going to be a career in riding around with my friends listening to Foghat," so Scully decided he "definitely wanted to break into comedy" even though he "really had no reason to believe [he] could succeed." Regardless, he moved to Los Angeles, California in 1982. Career Early career In California, Scully worked in a tuxedo store. He also got a job writing jokes for comedian Yakov Smirnoff and developed his joke writing skills by performing himself at amateur stand-up comedy nights. He purchased scripts from a variety of half-hour comedy shows, including Taxi, to train himself to write them and had numerous speculative scripts rejected. He started "bouncing around Hollywood working on some of the lousiest sitcoms in history." He served on the writing staff of The Royal Family, Out of This World, Top of the Heap and What a Country!, where he did audience warm-up, a role he also performed on Grand. The Simpsons In 1993, David Mirkin hired Scully to write for The Simpsons, as a replacement for the departing Conan O'Brien, after reading some of his sample scripts. He began as a writer and producer for the show during its fifth season and wrote the episodes "Lisa's Rival", "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" and "Lisa on Ice" which aired in season six. "Lisa's Rival" was his first episode; he wrote the script, but the original concept had been conceived by O'Brien. Similarly, he wrote the script for "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", which was based on an idea by Al Jean and Mike Reiss. "Lisa on Ice" was inspired by Scully's love of ice hockey and featured many experiences from his childhood, as was "Marge Be Not Proud" (which he wrote for season seven) which was based "one of the most traumatic moments" of his life, when he was caught shoplifting at age 12. He jokingly told Variety that "It's great to be paid for reliving the horrors of your life." He also wrote "Team Homer" and "Lisa's Date with Density". Scully noted: "I wrote a lot of Lisa's shows. I have five daughters, so I like Lisa a lot. I