Lee Harting got his first big break at age 22 on the longest running sitcom in American history, The Simpsons, and he’s been busy ever since, most recently with another animated series, Rick and Morty, for which he won the first ACE Eddie Award in the newly-created category of animation, non-theatrical.

The latter show has been described by Decider’s Kayla Cobb as “a never-ending fart joke wrapped around a studied look into nihilism.” The animated “science-fiction sitcom,” created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, follows the misadventures of cynical mad scientist Rick Sanchez and his grandson Morty Smith.

Harting grew up in and around Baltimore. In seventh grade, knowing his older sister Tracey’s high school class had an 8mm film program, he started imagining what movie he would make if the program still existed when he would enter ninth grade. The program maintained its existence, so Harting and a group of his classmates made a short film that made it through local and state film circuits and was eventually awarded third place in a national student film festival.

Out of college, the city’s local government cable station rewarded him with employment after his two consecutive summer internships. Despite the job title of producer/director, Harting fell in love with camera work. The local opportunities of a career as an ENG camera operator seemed stifling, so after a year of employment he considered packing up his car and moving to a bigger market with hopes of learning the medium of film.

Before that life-changing leap with a college buddy who had friends in Southern California, Harting mounted a scout[1]ing mission to the L.A. area. There he met “a guy who knew a guy” working as an editor on a then brand-new primetime animated show. “Wait, they edit cartoons?” was Harting’s initial reaction to learning ‘cartoons’ are in fact edited – and yes, he still calls them cartoons, but of course he’s earned that right. Soon after that fateful scouting mission,

Harting left for L.A., and happened to meet “the guy known by that guy” – Don Barrozo, who offered to help him out by giving him unpaid assistant time to prove he could do the job. Harting was asked back for pay after several days of volunteering and in 1990 officially became assistant film editor of The Simpsons early in the series’ second season. Many pilots and one-off series showed up for Harting until cartoon kismet struck again one night in a Glendale brewery parking lot: “I see a couple of guys I worked with on King of the Hill and The Simpsons and they’re like, ‘Hey man we need an editor for this pilot we’re doing,’ and I’m like, ‘No I’m too busy.’ I see the same dudes in another bar two months later and they’re like, ‘Hey you gotta see this pilot we made,’ and I went to the screening and it was Rick and Morty.”

Harting says it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen and he immediately apologized to his buddies for not helping them out and begged them to let him cut the series. “I knew after seeing just 5 minutes of the episode that the pilot would get picked up.”

Five months later he was offered the job and has been in comedy bliss ever since. Part of the finishing touches on an episode involve the addition or removal of just one frame in animation that can allow a scene to go into the viewer’s brain unimpeded by an almost imperceptible glitch.

“All of these things, thousands of edits and tweaks in an episode’s Avid timeline eliminate those ‘imperceptible’ glitches and make an episode feel and flow [smoothly]. The characters become real and believable allowing the comedy to shine and the emotional moments pull at you.”

“There’s still a stigma with animated shows,” Harting suggests. “What’s the difference between editing animation and single-camera live action? We are all using a medium to make people feel and laugh, and I would argue that animation affords an editor significantly more ability to augment and improve whatever shortcomings production encounters – bad performances, misdirection. “The fact that this show wouldn’t be considered for Best Comedy is beyond me.