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I Wish I Could Hate You
After Meyer left
Saturday Night Live
in 1987, he hightailed it out of New York City and moved to
Boulder, Colorado, to work on the Letterman movie script alone. Just like Frank Lloyd Wright, Meyer
had isolated himself from his collaborators. But in stark contrast to Wright, Meyer recognized that he
needed other people to succeed. He knew his performance was interdependent, not independent: his
ability to make people laugh was due in part to collaborating with fellow comedy writers. So he
reached out to people who had worked with him at the
Lampoon
and on his past shows, inviting them
to contribute to
Army Man
. “I believe that collaboration is such a beautiful thing, especially in
comedy,” Meyer told me. “In a community of funny people, you can get that rare synergy, jokes you
never could have come up with on your own.” Four colleagues ended up helping Meyer with the
inaugural issue. One of those colleagues was Jack Handey, who contributed an early installment of
“Deep Thoughts,” which went on to become a wildly popular series of jokes. Meyer published “Deep
Thoughts” three years before they became famous on
Saturday Night Live
, and they contributed to the
success of
Army Man
.
The juxtaposition of George Meyer with Frank Lloyd Wright reveals how givers and takers think
differently about success. Wright thought he could take his architectural genius from Chicago, where
he worked with a team of experts, to a remote part of Wisconsin, where he was largely alone.
Wright’s family motto was “truth against the world,” and it’s a familiar theme in Western culture. We
tend to privilege the lone genius who generates ideas that enthrall us, or change our world. According
to research by a trio of Stanford psychologists, Americans see independence as a symbol of strength,
viewing
interdependence as a sign of weakness
. This is particularly true of takers, who tend to see
themselves as superior to and separate from others. If they depend too much on others, takers believe,
they’ll be vulnerable to being outdone. Like Wright, the star analysts who left their investment banks
without their successful teams—or without considering the quality of the new teams they were joining
—fell into this trap.
Givers reject the notion that interdependence is weak. Givers are more likely to see
interdependence as a source of strength, a way to harness the skills of multiple people for a greater
good. This appreciation of interdependence heavily influenced the way that Meyer collaborated. He
recognized that if he could contribute effectively to the group, everyone would be better off, so he
went out of his way to support his colleagues. When Meyer wrote for
Saturday Night Live
in the mid-
1980s as a virtual unknown, he was almost always in the office, making himself available to give
feedback. He ended up helping famous comedians like Jon Lovitz, Phil Hartman, and Randy Quaid
with their writing and delivery.
Behind the scenes on
Saturday Night Live
, many writers were competing to get their sketches on
the show. “There was a Darwinian element,” Meyer admits. “There might be ten sketches per show,
and we would have thirty-five or forty sketches on the table. There was a bit of a battle, and I just
tried to be a good collaborator.” When big stars like Madonna were slated to appear on the show, his
colleagues flocked to submit sketches. Meyer submitted material for those shows, but he also put in
extra effort on sketches for less electric guests, who tended to attract fewer sketches. Meyer took it
upon himself to develop compelling sketches for less glamorous guests like Jimmy Breslin because
that was where the show needed him most. “I just wanted to be a good soldier,” Meyer says. “When
people weren’t as excited, that’s when I felt I had to step up my game.” He rose to the occasion,
cowriting a hilarious sketch for Breslin that had James Bond villains on a talk show. Breslin played
Goldfinger, offering tips on designing fortresses and griping about having his schemes thwarted by
Bond. The sketch predated the hit
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