Меррилл Марко: Американдық жазушы және тележұлдыздың өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American writer

Merrill Markoe (born August 13, 1948) is an American author, television writer, and occasional standup comedian.

Markoe was born in New York City. Her family moved several times including stays in Miami and San Francisco. She attended UC Berkeley, receiving a B. A. in art in 1970 and an M. A. in 1972. Her first job after leaving the university was teaching art at the University of Southern California. She engineered most of the original concepts and architecture for the ground breaking late night talk show and created 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 Writers Guild award for her writing/performing work on HBO's Not Necessarily the News. She appeared on camera as a lifestyle reporter at KCOP TV in Los Angeles, then for Michael Moore's NBC show TV Nation, and worked on other magazine shows such as Lifetime Magazine. In the early 1990s she wrote and directed a number of HBO and Cinemax comedy specials. She appeared in two episodes of Space Ghost Coast to Coast from 1997 to 1998 as the unwilling subject of the eponymous late night talk show host's affections. In 2005, Markoe 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, U. S. News & World Report, Us, People, Esquire, The Huffington Post, Glamour, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Real Simple, etc. She appears in episode 2 of Friends as irritable museum curator Marsha and can be seen in the movie EDtv as a panelist, as well as in the cast of The Aristocrats. In 2020, she was awarded the Laurel Award for TV Writing Achievement by the Writers Guild of America.

She and David Letterman were involved romantically from 1978 to 1988, after which Markoe moved to California to continue her writing career. She wrote about the relationship several years later in essays in the book Cool, Calm, and Contentious, giving him the pseudonym "Bobby". Markoe lives in Malibu with musician Andy Prieboy and four dogs.