In 2000, David Owen profiled George Meyer, one of the chief comedic visionaries behind “The Simpsons”: the sitcom “is not only the funniest but also the most literate show on TV,” Owen wrote. NewYorkerArchive
ran an effusive review of the television show “The Simpsons.” The review’s author, Ken Tucker, singled out a particular episode as “a masterpiece of tiny, throwaway details that accumulate into a worldview.” That episode was written by Jon Vitti, who at the time was one of the show’s most talented and prolific writers. “The article quoted five jokes from the show,” Vitti told me afterward. “It was extremely flattering—except that I hadn’t written any of those jokes.
Such care creates a textual density that makes each episode seem to last far longer than half an hour. It also gives rise to innumerable small touches that reward attentive viewing, among them a local beauty parlor called the Perm Bank; the word “yoink,” a coinage of Meyer’s, which characters sometimes utter in the act of snatching something; and a greeting posted outside the Springfield Community Church following a hurricane—“God Welcomes His Victims.
In a group of a dozen or more very funny and competitive people, Vitti said, it would be unusual for any writer to come up with two jokes in a row which made their way into a final script. He recalled a “Simpsons” rewrite session, however, during which Meyer at one point had supplied six consecutive jokes—a notable feat even for him. When the staff turned its attention to the next troublesome line, one of the other writers began to speak.
Meyer is also unassuming about his talents, and about the high points of his career. Maria Semple, a television writer who lived with him from the early nineties until last year, when they broke up, told me, “On our first date, George took me to the state fair. It was his birthday, which he didn’t tell me, and he was up for an Emmy that night, which he also didn’t tell me.
Parked in the driveway outside Meyer’s house is a Honda Civic, which he ordered without an air-conditioner, because he believes that air-conditioning is an environmentally irresponsible excess. The car is too cramped to comfortably contain two grown men, so when I visit him in Los Angeles—as I have done several times in the past few years—we usually take my rental car when we go anywhere.
Life in large families is filled with logistical challenges. People who grow up with many siblings tend to want either large families of their own or no families at all; Meyer and his siblings, the youngest of whom is now thirty-one, have thus far produced three marriages and just two children. Meyer once told a friend that he didn’t believe in marriage, and that he would never have children because he felt he had already helped to raise seven of them.
Meyer also liked “The Wild, Wild West,” “Get Smart,” and other shows with lots of gadgets. “I believed that all those things existed,” he said, “and that the adults had just locked them away somewhere. I thought it was only a matter of time until I would have my own shoe phone, and I couldn’t understand why people owned station wagons when there were perfectly good Batmobiles out there just waiting to be driven.
“I don’t think most people like to laugh as much as I do,” he says today. “Most people, sure, they like to laugh, but it’s down on their list, like No. 8. At the, though, people took humor very seriously. There was nothing more important on earth than laughing and making other people laugh. That changed my life. Thewas the only voice of anarchy in the whole school, except for maybe the Spartacist Youth League.” He was elected president of the, Meyer was mostly miserable at Harvard.
By that point, Meyer was fed up with television and with New York. He moved to Boulder, Colorado, more or less on a whim, and rented a condominium. While living there, he wrote a movie script for Letterman. That project was dropped by Letterman and the studio when Letterman’s television show took off, but Meyer’s script is still considered a masterpiece by the small group of people who’ve seen it.
“On most shows nowadays,” he said, “almost all the characters are stereotypes, or they embody one basic trait and very little else. And you have shows where all seven characters talk exactly like comedy writers. All the characters seem to be constantly cracking jokes—and, specifically, jokes meant to injure other people.
One reason “The Simpsons” has been able to maintain a high level of sophistication in its humor while still appealing to a mass audience may be that the form of the show is one that viewers accept as inherently funny: it’s a cartoon. The animation is disarming. “You could never have had Homer as a live-action character, because his actions would seem too horrifying, and too many people would protest,” Meyer says.
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