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When Mike Reiss and Al Jean were in college, they spent a lot of time in darkened corners, having clandestine meetings and speaking in what amounted to, in their particular universe, tongues.

“We had decided we wanted to write comedy,” said Reiss, who palled around with his eventual comedy-writing and -producing partner, Jean, when they attended Harvard University in the late 1970s.

“The Harvard Lampoon (the legendary campus literary magazine) was high art compared to what we were doing. We were thinking stand-up comedy and--gasp!--writing for television.”

In those years, network sitcoms were pretty lame. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” had died. “MASH” and “All in the Family” were on the fade. “Taxi” hadn’t hit its stride. The Nielsen Top 20 was filled by the likes of “Laverne & Shirley,” “Three’s Company,” “Welcome Back, Kotter” and “The Ropers.”

“It seemed like we had to meet in closets and not tell anyone what we were doing for fear of being labeled fools. Ivy Leaguers writing sitcoms?” said Reiss. “Things sure have changed.”

My, how they have. Over the last several years, folks from the Ivy League and other Eastern elitist colleges and universities have all but taken over sitcoms.

Reiss and Jean most recently were the executive producers of “The Critic,” an animated comedy on ABC. Prior to that, they were executive producers of “The Simpsons,” a veritable coven of Ivy League writing talent, the most prominent of whose alumni is Harvard grad Conan O’Brien, who has moved on-screen as host of NBC’s “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”

Highbrow, middle- and low-, people in their 20s and 30s who have graduated from schools such as Harvard and Yale, Columbia and Penn, Swarthmore and Brandeis write what America chuckles at. Ivied hands have penned scripts and, in many cases, executive produced for “Murphy Brown,” “Martin,” “Roseanne,” “Full House,” “The Wonder Years” and “Married . . . With Children.”

In the past, the image of the TV sitcom writer was either that of someone who had perfected timing by writing for or performing in the Borscht Belt/variety show circuit, or of someone who had been the class clown in UCLA’s or USC’s film programs and giggled through the course on “Auteurs of the Weimar Republic.”

As with all stereotypes, this was not completely accurate, but by and large the sitcom writers of a generation or more ago were either older or had been educated in life’s knocks rather than in high-level academia.

Most of the Ivy Leaguers writing comedy in Hollywood these days, though, are post-Baby Boomers, attracted to the sitcom life soon after or during college.

“We do it because we can. It’s a great racket,” said Jeff Martin, a 1982 Harvard grad who was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon in college and is an executive producer of “The Good Life,” an NBC sitcom that premiered in January. Before that, he worked on “Late Night With David Letterman” and “The Simpsons.” “The Lampoon was a great training ground. It can be inconsistent and sometimes sophomoric, but it is a place to get your chops learning to write comedy.”

“I do think it’s an interesting phenomenon,” said Martin’s producing partner, Kevin Curran, who preceded Martin by three years at Harvard and in the editorship of the Lampoon. “In the 1940s and ‘50s and ‘60s, Harvard grads didn’t think of doing this. They were lawyers or businessmen or who-knows-what else. But this is a job for well-educated people and, eventually, people from Harvard found their way to it.”

The attraction of the TV comedy-writing life came to the Ivy campuses with the advent of “Saturday Night Live” in the mid-1970s and was supplemented when “Late Night With David Letterman” began in 1982. Both shows survived on hip (sometimes hipper-than-thou) humor that could hardly be written by Borscht Belters. Irreverent wisecracks satirizing both the Baby Boomers and their antecedents, not formed jokes, became the order of the day.

The young and the hip who had the most ready training in this type of humor were the men--and at the time, the group was almost entirely male--who had practiced it at places like the Harvard Lampoon or the University of Pennsylvania’s Mask and Wig Club. They were elite institutions that mocked even themselves and, certainly, had no equivalent at most state universities.

“It’s not like we took courses in comedy writing in college,” Curran said. “We just found doing it interesting.”

Bob Myer, the executive producer of the now-benched ABC sitcom “Joe’s Life,” met his original writing partner, Bob Young, a producer on ABC’s “Dinosaurs,” while directing the undergraduate satirical revue at Penn’s Mask and Wig Club.

“We wrote, produced and directed the fall show there for three years and said, ‘Hey, we’re pretty good at this!’ ” said Myer, who has also written for “Roseanne,” among other shows. “We decided to work out our own act, got into clubs, on radio, doing anything we could to stay alive comically.

“Eventually, an agent who had come to see us perform said, ‘Hey, have you guys ever written anything for TV?’ It was nothing a Penn grad would have thought of,” Myer recalled. “That year (1982), the hot writing spec sample was ‘Taxi.’ Fortunately, it was an intelligent show. We did one, came out here, eventually got a job on ‘The Facts of Life’ and never looked back.

“Actually, I’m not surprised at the new wave of Ivy-type people writing out here,” he said. “It’s definitely a business. You have to look at what a TV writer makes money-wise, and how he makes it, and say, ‘I want to do that!’ Ivy people are over-achievers and that’s probably got a lot to do with it, too.”

The money that Myer talks about can become astronomical. According to Emmy magazine, staff writers for sitcoms make $2,291 per week, and that is the chicken-feed job. Producers make from $8,000 to $20,000 an episode. Executive producers, the head honchos of sitcoms, start at about $18,000 an episode and can sometimes get high five-figure checks per episode. And if you create and produce a successful sitcom, you become a multi-millionaire.

An article about Ivy League comedy writers in the magazine GQ about a year ago, titled “Smart People, Dumb TV,” angered a lot of the Ivy-bred sitcomers. They felt the article intimated that they were writing and producing drivel merely because they could get well-paying jobs doing it.

“The story seemed to lament that the only things our greatest institutions of higher learning were putting out were people who wrote for ‘Full House,’ ” complained Michael Saltzman, a “Murphy Brown” writer and supervising producer who graduated from Yale.

“That’s no one’s aspiration I know. We want to create great television, great shows, and there are only five or six in any given era. ‘Taxi,’ “Mary Tyler Moore,’ ‘Seinfeld’--the best of TV can be hysterically funny or can be as moving as anything you can read. You want to do the stuff you looked up to and admire as a viewer. That’s why people, why good Ivy League people, go into it.”

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There are Ivy League grads in sitcom writing who have a contrarian viewpoint, though.

Alan Kirschenbaum, a 33-year-old University of Pennsylvania grad who is co-executive producer of the ABC hit “Coach,” doesn’t think it’s such a good thing that sitcoms are going all-Ivy.

“By definition, Ivy League schools are not of the masses,” said Kirschenbaum, who before his “Coach” stint was executive producer of Fox’s “Down the Shore” for two years.

“A lot of kids now know they want to write TV comedy when they are 19 years old. Supposedly, the best sitcoms reflect some sort of life experience. If your life experience is studying to be a sitcom writer in high school and then going to an Ivy school and becoming a story editor on a sitcom at age 22, I don’t know that you can have a wealth of material for a good sitcom.”

Kirschenbaum’s father, Freddie Roman, quit a steady salesman’s job to become a stand-up comic, eventually getting to the Las Vegas and Atlantic City showrooms before creating the hit revue “Catskills on Broadway.” Kirschenbaum tried to become a harness-horse-trainer in New Jersey after graduating from Penn, and only turned to comedy writing when the business wasn’t going well after four years.

“At least I failed at something. At least I saw my father struggle at something,” Kirschenbaum said. “Sure, these people are smart and witty, but the best sitcoms have depth. In the end, this trend might be harmful for TV.”

Don Reo, the creator of “Blossom” and “The John Larroquette Show,” started his comedy writing career a generation ago right out of high school, going on the road as a straight man and gag writer for stand-up comic Slappy White.

“I think you write a little harder after you’ve been on stage, because you are there when the joke dies,” said Reo, who came to Hollywood to write for Jimmy Durante’s variety show and “Laugh-In” during the late 1960s. He sees a bit of what he calls “snideness” in many of the younger Ivy-educated writers, but quickly makes clear that “I don’t look at where someone went to school when I hire them.

“No amount of education is going to make you amusing,” Reo explained. “Now, to be sure, there are Harvard graduates who are successful, but that is not because of where they went to school. It’s because they are also funny human beings.”

Which is not to say that college can’t actually help someone become funnier, argue Martin and Curran, the Harvard team that created “The Good Life.”

“In high school,” Martin said, “I thought I had some creative talent, but when I came to Harvard and the Lampoon, I realized I had some work to do.”

Martin was awed by the first revue he saw at Harvard, produced by an upperclassman named Andy Borowitz. Borowitz eventually came West and wrote for “Family Ties” before creating “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” with his wife, Susan, also a Harvard grad.

“Andy’s stuff was so professional, I knew I had to pick up my game,” Martin said. “I was inspired. I studied comedy writing. I learned to adapt to changes. That’s what being around so many smart people in college can do for you.”

Curran concurred. “If I hadn’t gone to Harvard,” I never would have developed. I would have been a funny guy, but I never would have been challenged enough to be successful.”

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What inspired most of his Ivy sitcom compatriots, said Curran, was bad television itself.

“ ‘The Simpsons’ is the best at mocking this kind of stuff,” he said. “Our generation became so informed by TV that we learned its forms early. But the best TV now is the stuff that is absurdist, that twists the conventions around just a little bit. We’re making fun of our generation’s shared TV culture.”

“We grew up with a certain kind of humor and that’s what we write,” said David Rosenthal, a 1989 University of Pennsylvania grad who is co-executive producer (with Swarthmore College graduates Neal Marlens and Carol Black, who created “The Wonder Years”) of the new ABC sitcom “These Friends of Mine,” starring Ellen DeGeneres. “The past generation had something else and the next generation, no doubt, will be spoofing us with their brand of humor.”

“Look, we’re the group that’s able to translate humor to television at the moment, that’s all it is,” said Brandeis University grad Marta Kauffman, who, with her classmate and writing partner, David Crane, created the sex-romping HBO sitcom “Dream On” and this season’s now-defunct “Family Album” on CBS.

“By the time I’m 39, I could be out of a job. This year, it’s East Coast kids. Next year, it’s kids from the University of Illinois. In any case, it’s not all television, just a select part of television that Baby Boomers and their younger brothers and sisters seem to like right now.”

Last year, a “Simpsons” episode, “The Front,” mocked the show’s own cadre of Harvard-bred writers and producers. In the program, Bart and Lisa Simpson, upset at the lousy writing on their favorite cartoon show, “Itchy and Scratchy,” submit a script of their own to the series. To get it read, they sign it with the name of their half-senile grandfather, Abraham.

Before reading that script, the cigar-chomping head of “Itchy and Scratchy Int’l.” berates a young writer, “You call this writing? If I puked in a fountain pen and mailed it to the monkey house, I’d get better scripts.”

The young writer, in upper-crust tones, tries to speak up: “But, sir, at Harvard, they . . . .”

“Oh, at Harvard they taught you,” bellows the boss. “Hit the streets, Egghead. You should have majored in not getting fired.”

Later on, when the big boss pounces on the Simpsons’ script, he signs up Abraham and takes him into a room of button-down-shirted young guys.

“All right, leeches, I want you to see what a good writer looks like,” he says. “His name is Abraham Simpson and he’s got something you couldn’t get at your fancy schools: life experience.”

One writer pipes up, “Actually, you know, I wrote my thesis on life experience and . . . .”

“Quiet!” the boss screams at his quivering Ivy minions.

“Conan (O’Brien) wrote that,” said Reiss, who was a “Simpsons” executive producer at the time.

“He’d gotten weary of all the criticism of Harvard guys who wrote sitcoms without knowing life. We all laughed. That’s what this stuff is all about, right?”