“The world’s a better place because he’s not out there trying to heal people,” Johannessen says. “He’d be like the TV doctor—too inherently wacky.”

Instead of studying the healing arts, Meyer sought to find a community like the Lampoon—one where he was surrounded by others who had the same quasi-fanatical interest in humor. He continually sought out such an environment during the eighties—writing for such programs as NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night with David Letterman.”

These experiences were rewarding for Meyer in his search for others with a similar frame of mind. It was during his time at “Saturday Night Live,” in 1986, that Vitti says he first worked closely with Meyer.

But at none of these jobs did he find quite the same madcap fraternity which had made him so happy at the Lampoon. Meyer told Owen in 2000 that his job at “Saturday Night Live” had been “just a mismatch, although I didn’t realize it at the time.”

Not until he came to “The Simpsons,” shortly after its 1989 debut, would he find anything approaching that haven of humor—and even there, he has said in the past, he is not entirely satisfied.

“Writing for ‘The Simpsons’ is fun, but in some ways it’s too easy,” Meyer is quoted as saying in Owen’s profile.

Born a Gambling Man

But comedy wasn’t the only thing on Meyer’s mind at Harvard, friends say. He was also consumed by a love of gambling—especially betting on dog races.

Johannessen says Meyer brought the same intensity of emotion to his racing as he does to his jokes.

“He was very devoted to certain dogs,” he recalls. “Sometimes they broke his heart.”

Indeed, says Johannessen, Meyer was “broke” as often as he was “awash in cash” after his betting escapades.

But Crist stresses the systematic rationality with which Meyer approached the track.

When the two planned their adventures with chance, Crist says, Meyer’s approach was “to try to be very analytical, to figure things out with deductive reasoning.”

Meyer was looking for “the mathematical secrets of the universe,” Crist adds.

In particular, Crist remembers the summer of 1977, when 7 or 8 Lampoon writers—including himself, Meyer and Owen—stayed in Cambridge to work on The Harvard Lampoon Book of College Life, which Doubleday had commissioned.