George Meyer

For other people named George Meyer, see George Meyer (disambiguation).

George Meyer
Meyer in 1992.
Occupation	Television writer
Nationality	American
Period	1982 - Present
Genre	Humour

George A. Meyer (born 1957) is an American producer and Emmy Award-winning writer, best known for his work on the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons.

Meyer has been publicly credited with "thoroughly shap[ing]...the comedic sensibility" of The Simpsons; in 2000, Mike Scully, the show runner for the series at the time, called him "the best comedy writer in Hollywood" and "the main reason" why The Simpsons is still so good after all these years." Jon Vitti, another of the show's writer/producers (and also Meyer's brother-in-law), has said Meyer "exerts as much influence on the show as anyone can without being one of the creators."

Career

Meyer attended Harvard University, where he served as president of the Harvard Lampoon. In 1977, he and several other Lampoon staffers wrote The Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life (ISBN 0385134460), a volume commissioned by Doubleday.

He graduated in 1978 with a degree in biochemistry.

After college, Meyer abandoned plans to attend medical school, and until 1981, worked at a variety of jobs, including substitute teacher, laboratory research assistant, and salesman in a clothing store.

In 1981, he was offered a job by David Letterman to become a member of the writing staff at Letterman's new late night show. He got the nod by recommendations from two fellow Lampoon writers, Tom Gammill and Max Pross, who would later become one of the worst writing teams on Seinfeld. Two seasons later, Meyer left to write for The New Show; with that show's cancellation, he moved on to Not Necessarily the News, then Saturday Night Live.

Meyer's work wasn't well-regarded among the SNL writers and producers:

My stuff wasn't very popular at Saturday Night. It was regarded as really fringey, and a lot of times my sketches would get cut. Sometimes they would get cut after dress rehearsal, and I would have the horrible experience of looking out and seeing a painter carefully touching up my set and getting it all ready to be smashed to pieces and sent to a landfill in Brooklyn. It was just a mismatch, although I didn't realize it at the time.

In 1987, Meyer founded the legendary humor zine Army Man, which gained a cult following. Meyer suspended publication with the third issue, after offers to take the magazine national made him fear that it would lose its best qualities. One reader was Sam Simon, a producer on a new animated sitcom called The Simpsons. In 1989, Simon asked Meyer to join the writing staff. He has remained there, intermittently, ever since.

Environmental interests

In 2005, he cowrote the TBS special Earth To America. That same year, a newly discovered species of moss frogs from Sri Lanka was named Philautus poppiae after Meyer's daughter, Poppy, a tribute to Meyer's and Meyer's girlfriend's dedication to the Global Amphibian Assessment.

In 2006, he wrote a comic, cautionary opinion piece about the environment for BBC News. It begins:

Are you a hypocrite? Because I certainly am. I'm an animal lover who wears leather shoes; a vegetarian who can't resist smoked salmon. I badger my friends to see the Al Gore movie, but I also fly on fuel-gulping jets. Great clouds of hypocrisy swirl around me. But even a fraud has feelings. And this summer, I'm feeling uneasy; I'm starting to think that our culture's frenzied and mindless assault on the last shreds of nature may not be the wisest course.

Credits

• The Simpsons episodes:
  • "The Crepes of Wrath" (along with Sam Simon, John Swartzwelder and Jon Vitti)
  • "Bart vs. Thanksgiving"
  • "Blood Feud"
  • "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington"
  • "Treehouse of Horror II" (contributor)
  • "Separate Vocations"
  • "Homer the Heretic"
  • "Bart's Inner Child"
  • "Sunday, Cruddy Sunday" (along with Tom Martin, Brian Scully, and Brian's brother, Mike).
  • "Brother's Little Helper"
  • "Behind the Laughter" (along with Tim Long, Mike Scully, and Matt Selman)
  • "The Parent Rap" (along with Mike Scully)

See also List of writers of The Simpsons

• Earth To America (2005, cowriter)
• The Simpsons Movie (2007, cowriter)

• Cameo appearances:
  • I ♥ Huckabees, where he appears near the end as the annoyed tuxedoed man in an elevator with Jude Law and Jason Schwartzman.
  • Mr. Show episode 310, "It's A No Brainer": he is visible in the first few minutes of the show as the long-haired, bespectacled man sitting behind the "protestors."

Personal life

Born in Pennsylvania, Meyer grew up in Arizona, the eldest of eight children in a Roman Catholic family of mostly German descent. Meyer has made frequent jokes about his somewhat unhappy childhood, stating that one common argument in his household was "which family member ruined a holiday".

Meyer commented on his Roman Catholic upbringing in a 2000 New Yorker profile:

People talk about how horrible it is to be brought up Catholic, and it's all true. The main thing was that there was no sense of proportion. I would chew a piece of gum at school, and the nun would say, 'Jesus is very angry with you about that,' and on the wall behind her would be a dying, bleeding guy on a cross. That's a horrifying image to throw at a little kid. You really could almost think that your talking in line, say, was on a par with killing Jesus .

He attended Doolen Junior High and Amphitheater High School in Tucson, Arizona.

While working at the Simpsons, Meyer became an atheist, taking the advice of fellow Simpsons writer Mike Reiss.

Meyer dated and lived with the writer Maria Semple during the 1990s. His first child, named Poppy Valentina after Valentina Tereshkova, was born in the early 2000s.

External links

• Studio 360 episode "Cosmos, Spheres, Voyager" from January 12, 2002, featuring an original piece by Meyer on space collecting
• George Meyer at IMDb