Harry Shearer is a comic personality who takes "hyphenate" to new levels. First and foremost an actor, he is also an author, director, satirist, musician, radio host, playwright, multi-media artist and record label owner. For nineteen years the Los Angeles native has enjoyed enormous success and planted the fruits of his talents in the heads of millions worldwide thanks to his voice work for The Simpsons and The Simpsons Movie. Shearer plays a stable of characters: most notably Mr. Burns, Smithers, Ned Flanders, Rev. Lovejoy and Scratchy .

Following 2007's Grammy-nominated CD, "Songs Pointed and Pointless", and last year's Grammy-nominated "Songs of the Bushmen", Shearer has just finished recording an album of songs about the economic mess, "Greed and Fear" (singles now available on iTunes/Amazon, whole record released early next year). And 2009's new Spinal Tap CD, "Back From the Dead", has also been nominated for a Grammy.

In spring 2009, Shearer and his partners in musical satire, Chris Guest and Michael McKean, toured 30 cities in the US with an acoustic concert of Spinal Tap and Folksmen songs. Since they weren't performing as the characters from the films but as themselves, the tour was called "Unwigged and Unplugged", and a concert DVD of the tour is now available. Strangely, it too is called "Unwigged and Unplugged".


In July, 2007, Shearer plunged into the on-line video universe when the Harry Shearer Channel became a cornerstone of My Damn Channel, an entertainment studio and new media platform specifically created to empower artists to co-produce, distribute and monetize original, episodic video content. Each week or so new political or pop culture satire written by, directed by and featuring Shearer is unveiled.

In October 2006, Shearer released his first novel, Not Enough Indians (Justin, Charles & Company). The book takes a darkly comic look at the proliferation of Native American gaming and what happens to the fictional town of Gammage, New York, when it transforms into the sovereign nation of the long lost Filaquonsett tribe. The critically acclaimed novel is also available in paperback and on audio.

A child of Hollywood, Shearer made guest appearances on a variety of A-list television series while still in his teens. Credits include The Jack Benny Program, General Electric Theatre and Alfred Hitchcock Presents

Shearer attended UCLA as a political science major, where he edited and wrote for the school humor magazine. He pursued graduate work at Harvard University and served a political internship in Sacramento before turning to freelance journalism, most notably covering the Watts riots for Newsweek.

In 1968, Shearer auditioned for a satirical news team at KRLA-AM called The Credibility Gap. The crew developed a fanatical following, engaging in guerilla comedy actions like alternative live running commentaries to the annual Rose Parade in Pasadena. The classic Gap lineup including Shearer, future bandmate Michael McKean, David Lander, and Richard Beebe began to play local clubs and eventually recorded a number of hilarious - and now scarce - albums, including A Great Gift Idea, The Bronze Age of Radio and Floats.

In the early 1980s, he and friends Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, along with director Rob Reiner, began to incubate an idea for a fake documentary about an aging heavy metal band. The resulting movie, This Is Spinal Tap, became the granddaddy of the mock-umentary genre and gave the world new insight into the concepts of spontaneously-combusting drummers andYour browser may not support display of this image. amps that go up to eleven. The band was reunited in July 2007, for a special performance at The Live Earth Concert at London’s Wembley Stadium.

Theatrically, Shearer has collaborated with writer Tom Leopold and composer Peter Matz to create the book and lyrics for an original musical about J. Edgar Hoover simply called J. Edgar!: The Musical. The play premiered to sold out houses and critical raves at The Aspen Comedy Festival and the radio production of the show has just been revived and rebroadcast by LA Theater Works.


In the world of fine art, the Fullerton Museum Center presented Shearer's installation Telesthesia in the early 1990s, featuring video clips of various media personalities saying nothing. The Museum Of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles presented Shearer's installation, Wall of Silence, that featured key figures from the O.J. Simpson Trial in their least soundbite-stealing moments. Most recently, "The Silent Echo Chamber" featuring recent Presidential and vice presidential candidates and the members of the mediocracy that covered them, has been on a multi-city museum tour, at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut, the Valencia Institute Institute of Modern Art in Spain, and the Contemporary Art Museum in Atlanta, among others.

And on radio, Shearer's one-hour satirical sandbox Le Show is heard weekly on stations worldwide.

Shearer's film credits include Real Life, The Right Stuff, Portrait of a White Marriage, The Fisher King, Godzilla, The Truman Show, Small Soldiers, Dick, and A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration. He has been a regular cast member on Saturday Night Live twice (dates) and, in 2002, wrote and directed his first feature film, Teddy Bears' Picnic.

He has won two Cable Ace Awards.

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