George Meyer, complicated human being

As you may know, George Meyer is a television comedy writer here in Los Angeles. He is considered by many to be "first among equals" in that awesome team-effort called The Simpsons. Several years ago, Meyer's college buddy David Owen wrote a glowing profile about him in The New Yorker.

In this profile, Meyer was shown to be somewhat of a free spirit, as well as somebody who had more going on in his head than a running total of his residuals. Along with yoga, much was made of Meyer's despising of advertising. It struck me immediately how strange it was to loathe advertising, while spending your entire career creating things that exist primarily to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. That's a basic fracture, like loving animals but working in a slaughterhouse. Yes, the pay is really good; yes, you're REALLY good at it; but you have this big ol' contradiction you have to square every morning as you shave. I'm not judging, just genuinely puzzled. I don't see how he does it; the idea alone makes my stomach hurt. And when you add in the fact that, to do what he's done, Meyer's got to be 1) really freakin' intelligent, and 2) have a naturally (self-)critical turn of mind...I just don't get it.

Ed Page over at Danger Blog sent me this link, where the gentleman who did an interview with Meyer for The Believer has posted a segment cut out of that interview which deals with just this conundrum. It's interesting, and gave me one thought: Meyer's belief is that The Simpsons does good in the world by exposing its viewers to positive concepts like vegetarianism. (Meyer is a vegetarian and believes that such a diet is superior--I happen to agree with him, though I have a spate of food allergies that makes vegetarianism utterly impossible for me). However: in comedy, the amount which your audience pays attention to your beliefs is function of how much rectitude and wisdom they think you possess. If Lenny Bruce's drug habit had been widely known, only a very few people would've had their minds changed by his words. I think a similar thing is at work here; how much can you change people's minds about consumption with something so thoroughly embedded in our consumption culture? Not much.

Still, it's a nice thought, and nearly everybody in the comedy biz (myself included) indulges in such rationalizations. I'd love to see George Meyer quit "working for Pharaoh" as he puts it; that would be a powerful message to the people coming up now, and a step towards a better comedy than we have today.