David Javerbaum is a 12-time Emmy-winning American comedy writer.
Javerbaum was hired as a staff writer at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 1999. He was promoted to head writer in 2002 and became an executive producer at the end of 2006. His work for the program won 11 Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, two Peabody Awards and Television Critics Association Awards for both Best Comedy and Best News Show. He was also one of the three principal authors of the show's textbook parody America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, which sold 2.6 million copies and won the 2005 Thurber Prize for American Humor. He became a consulting producer at the start of 2009 and spent the next 18 months spearheading the writing of that book's sequel, Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race, which was released in September 2010; his co-production of its audiobook earned the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Spoken-Word Album. He left the show in July 2010.
He is the author of The Last Testament: A Memoir by God, which was released on November 1, 2011 and is affiliated with the Twitter account @TheTweetOfGod. It is his second book as sole author; the first was the pregnancy satire What to Expect When You're Expected: A Fetus's Guide to the First Three Trimesters, which was released in October 2009.
Javerbaum is also a musical-theater lyricist and librettist who won the $100,000 Ed Kleban Award for Outstanding Lyrics in 2005. Along with Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, he wrote the opening to the 65th Tony Awards, "Broadway: It's Not Just for Gays Anymore," which earned him his twelfth Emmy (and first apart from The Daily Show ) in 2012 for Outstanding Music and Lyrics. The pair also wrote the opening to the 2011 Emmy Awards, "TV Is a Vast Wonderland"; the opening ("What If Life Were More Like Theater?") and closing ("If I Had Time") songs for the 66th Tony Awards; the score of the adaptation of John Waters' Cry-Baby, which opened on Broadway on April 24, 2008 and was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for Best Original Score; and eight original Christmas songs for Stephen Colbert's 2008 television special, A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!, which won him his first Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.
Along with composer/co-librettist Robert S. Cohen, he wrote Suburb, which was nominated for Outer Critics' Circle and Drama League awards for Best Off-Broadway Musical in 2001.
Javerbaum's other work includes serving as head writer and supervising producer of The 2012 Secret Policeman's Ball, held in Radio City Music Hall on March 4, 2012, and fulfilling the same duties for the first-ever Comedy Awards, an annual awards show for achievement in comedy that aired in April 2011. He wrote for the Late Show with David Letterman from 1998-9. He wrote three episodes for the 2011 relaunch of Beavis and Butthead.
"A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney," his humorous essay written for The New York Times, appeared in April 2012.
Javerbaum is an alumnus of the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He graduated from Harvard University where he wrote for the humor magazine The Harvard Lampoon and served as lyricist and co-bookwriter for two productions of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals. Later he spent three years contributing headlines to The Onion, and is credited as one of the writers for Our Dumb Century.
He was a finalist on Jeopardy!'s 1988 Teen Tournament and its 1998 Teen Reunion Tournament. Jon Stewart also called him as his phone-a-friend when Jon was on Celebrity Millionaire.
Javerbaum grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, where he attended Columbia High School.
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“In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)