Meyer is best known for his work on The Simpsons, where he served as a scriptwriter and gag writer (for which he is credited as a producer) and led the show's communal rewriting process for much of its earlier run.

Abandoning plans to attend medical school, Meyer attempted to make money through dog racing but failed after two months.

Tired of life in New York, Meyer moved to Boulder, Colorado where he wrote a screenplay for a film for Letterman to star in.

Due to its size, family activities were limited so Meyer watched lots of television and read Mad magazine.

I write jokes that are more by-the-numbers, but they tend to have a flat, pedestrian quality compared to the dizzying flights of silliness that we occasionally achieve.

After college, Meyer moved to Denver, Colorado, planning to "scientifically" win a fortune through dog racing.

He then worked in a variety of jobs including substitute teacher and salesman in a clothing store, and also won $2,000 on the game show Jeopardy!.

[2] At one point he worked in a research lab as an assistant, studying glycoproteins "in the hope that they would prove the key to cell-cell recognition.

[2] His ambitions for the show were grandiose; "I wanted to challenge the audience every night, stagger them with brilliance, blast them into a higher plane of existence," he later explained.

[11] Meyer left to write for The New Show in late 1983, a short-lived variety series from Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels.

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.

"[14] He founded the humor zine Army Man; he wrote the eight-page first issue almost wholly by himself, publishing just 200 copies which he gave to his friends.

Meyer had been disappointed by the decline of National Lampoon and felt that there was no longer a magazine which has the sole purpose of being funny.

Meyer suspended publication with the third issue, after offers to take the magazine national made him fear that it would lose its best qualities.

"[6] This was met with varying reactions from Meyer, who felt "embarrassed when people build it up as this monumental work of comedy.

Meyer turned down the job initially, but was offered a second chance to work as a creative consultant in the fall of 1989, which he accepted.

Promoted to a producer in the show's second season, Meyer, for much of the following decade, played an active role in the show's extensive group script rewriting sessions in the "rewrite room", a role he performed more than solo script work; indeed he has only been credited for writing or co-writing twelve episodes.

[2] By 1995, Meyer became tired of the show's lengthy writing schedule and decided to leave after the sixth season to work on a film or TV pilot script.

[2] Following the departure of showrunner Mike Scully in 2001, Meyer (beginning with season 13) assumed a reduced role on the series as a non-executive producer, but remained moderately involved in the rewrite process.

"[19] Meyer has been credited with "thoroughly shap[ing] ... the comedic sensibility" of The Simpsons;[2] in 2000, Mike Scully, the show runner for the series at the time, called him "the best comedy writer in Hollywood."

"[2] Bill Oakley noted Meyer has "been there since the beginning adding thousands of jokes and plot twists, etc., that everyone considers classic and brilliant.

[20] Meyer has a "deep suspicion of social institutions and tradition in general," which has affected the writing of his own episodes of The Simpsons such as "Homer the Heretic", "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington" and "Bart vs.

[21] In addition to his work on The Simpsons, Meyer wrote, directed, and starred in his own play, Up Your Giggy, which ran for two weeks at a West Hollywood theater in 2002.