Merrill Markoe is an author, a television writer and a sometime stand up comedian. She wrote for many television shows, among them "Laugh In" "Newhart" Sex in the City" and "Moonlighting" . But she won five Emmys for her work on Late Night with David Letterman. She was the show's original head writer, having done the same on Letterman's short lived live NBC morning show in 1980. She engineered most of the original concepts and architecture for the ground breaking late night talk show, along the way creating the segment "Stupid Pet Tricks." as well as "Stupid Human Tricks' and "Viewer Mail."Many of the ideas behind the remote segments outside the studio came from Markoe, who also won a Writer's Guild award for her writing/performing work on HBO's late 80's hit "Not Necessarily the News." She went on to do on camera writer work as a life style reporter in local news at Los Angeles' News 13, then for Michael Moore's short lived NBC show , as well as other magazine shows such as Lifetime magazine. In the early 90s she wrote an directed a number of HBO and Cinemax comedy specials. In 2005 she was a regular panelist on Animal Planet's Who Gets the Dog? She has had a number of columns and written for many periodicals including Rolling Stone, Time, New York Woman, New Woman, US News and World Report, US, People, Esquire,Glamour,The NY Times, The LA Times, LA weekly, Real Simple, etc. She appears in episode 2 of "Friends" as Marsha, the irritable museum curator and can be seen in the movie EDTV as a panelist, as well as in the cast of The Aristocrats. Her books include Merrill Markoe's Guide to Love, How To Be Hap-Hap-Happy Like Me, What the Dogs Have Taught Me, It's My F---ing Birthday, and The Psycho Ex Game (cowritten with Andy Prieboy). A new novel is due in summer 2006. Andy Prieboy replaced Stan Ridgway as the lead singer of Wall of Voodoo. ...

External links

www.thepsychoexgame.com

• Merrill Markoe at the Internet Movie Database