SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- Meehan was born in San Francisco’s Sunset District. As a kid he used to make lifelike dummies and throw them in front of the N-Judah to freak out Muni drivers. He spent six years in the Marine Corps Reserve and went to San Francisco State University. There, he found comic inspiration in a class he took on writing about science, turning in papers such as “A Brief and Pornographic Guide to the Copernican Model.”
He tried doing standup at an open mike show at the Other Cafe, a now-defunct comedy club in the Haight. “I went up one night and had a bunch of friends and people laughing. The second, with no friends, I bombed,” he says. It took him another year to get up the nerve to try again. “I said OK, if I fail 100 times, I’ll do something else. But I had some good success right off the bat.”