tired of being laughed at, ditches Homer and enters with Bart as her new partner. Homer is outraged that he was abandoned for a ten-year-old boy, and tries to get revenge by entering the tournament with Lisa as his partner, despite Lisa's disapproval. The change in partners leads the Simpson family to begin arguing and aggressively competing against one another. The tournament takes place, and in the stands are leading tennis professionals Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Venus Williams, and Serena Williams. At the tournament, Homer ditches Lisa for Venus. In response, Marge replaces Bart with Serena as her partner. Ultimately, Serena and Venus replace Marge and Homer with Sampras and Agassi, respectively. This forces the family to go back to the bench and resume their normal places in the family. As they enjoy the exhibition of top-class tennis, they agree that it is better to watch things than to do things, and Homer offers to buy the family dinner with money that he took from Sampras' wallet. Production "Tennis the Menace" was written by Ian Maxtone-Graham and directed by Jen Kamerman as part of the twelfth season of The Simpsons (2000–2001). Maxtone-Graham considers himself to be a bad tennis player and he has always wanted to win against his mother in a tennis match. This served as the inspiration for the episode, as he thought "family dynamics around tennis would be a fun show." Maxtone-Graham did a lot a research for the scenes at the beginning of the episode where the Simpsons visit a funeral salesman at a cemetery. He read Jessica Mitford's book The American Way of Death Revisited, which discusses the funeral industry, and was able to take a tour with funeral salesmen at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. At the time, he did not reveal that this was for research, and instead pretended to have a dying relative. According to Maxtone-Graham, the tour helped him find out "all about urns versus coffins, and cremation. I asked sort of questions about, 'Well, do the bodies smell?' They were very nice and gave me all the answers. It was quite fascinating." The opening of "Tennis the Menace" is what Maxtone-Graham describes as a "screw you" beginning, as the viewer has "no idea that the twist is going to be tennis". The part of the story revolving around tennis does not begin until around eight minutes into