David Mirkin (born 1956 or 1957) is an American feature film and television director, writer and producer. Mirkin grew up in Philadelphia and intended to become an electrical engineer, but abandoned this career path in favor of studying film at Loyola Marymount University. After graduating, he became a stand-up comedian, and then moved into television writing. He wrote for the sitcoms Three's Company, It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show and served as showrunner on the series Newhart. After an unsuccessful attempt to remake the British series The Young Ones, Mirkin created Get a Life in 1990. The series starred comedian Chris Elliott and ran for two seasons, despite a lack of support from many Fox network executives, who disliked the show's dark and surreal humor. He moved on to create the sketch show The Edge starring his then-partner, actress Julie Brown.

Mirkin left The Edge during its run and became the executive producer and showrunner of The Simpsons for its fifth and sixth seasons. Mirkin has been cited as introducing a more surreal element to the show's humor, as shown by his first writing credit for the show, "Deep Space Homer", which sees Homer Simpson go to space as part of a NASA program to restore interest in space exploration. He won four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for his work on The Simpsons. Mirkin stood down as showrunner after season six, but produced several subsequent episodes, co-wrote The Simpsons Movie (2007) and from 2013 onwards has remained on the show as a consultant. Mirkin has also moved into feature film direction: he directed the films Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997) and Heartbreakers (2001).

Mirkin was born and raised in Philadelphia, the son of Saul Mirkin (born Saul Capan) and Jennie Belkin. He graduated from Northeast High School in 1975. He is Jewish. His father was a computer engineer who was working at the Naval Aviation Supply Department at the time of his death from a heart attack in 1960, aged 49. Mirkin's older brother, Gary, worked as a television engineer for the Philadelphia NBC affiliate, KYW-TV, now a CBS owned-and-operated station. Throughout his childhood, Mirkin had an interest in film, and explored both writing and filming. Mirkin has described himself as a "nerd" and was often in trouble as a child because he was "in another world". At high school, he felt the teaching was "too slow" and was allowed by his teachers to "skip class two to three days a week".

Mirkin intended to pursue a career in electrical engineering, which he saw as a more stable employment opportunity than writing or film making. He took a course at Philadelphia's Drexel University which offered six months of teaching followed by a six-month internship at the National Aeronautics Federal Experimental Center. Mirkin found the experience to be monotonous and unenjoyable and chose to abandon this career path. He decided that "making no money doing something I loved was going to be better than making a good living doing something I didn't", so took "an enormous chance on show business" and moved to Los Angeles. He attended film school at Loyola Marymount University, and graduated in 1978.

Mirkin lists Woody Allen and James L. Brooks as his writing inspirations and Stanley Kubrick and the work of the comedy group Monty Python as developing his "dark sense of humor". He considers Mike Nichols's film The Graduate to be what inspired him to enter directing.

Mirkin started out as a stand-up comedian in 1982 and performed across the United States, including at The Comedy Store, where he became a regular, and at The Improv. The first joke he used in his routine was, "Is it just me or has everybody been coughing up blood lately?" Mirkin considers the joke to be "an insight into the way [he writes]". Stand-up comedy was the most profitable and easily accessible route Mirkin found into the comedy industry, but "it wasn't a lifestyle that [he] particularly coveted," especially due to the traveling required.

He got his first job writing for television on the sitcom Three's Company in 1983. Through his cousin, Mirkin met writer George Tricker who became his mentor. Tricker wrote for the Three's Company spin-off The Ropers so Mirkin wrote a spec script for an episode of The Ropers. Although rejected by the producers of The Ropers, Three's Company creator Bernie West was impressed by the script and Mirkin began pitching ideas for that series instead. Mirkin pitched to the series' story editors for several years without success because they had very limited script buying power. He was eventually able to pitch to the show's producers, who bought a script from him, and then hired him as a staff writer. Mirkin was apprehensive about the job because he was aiming to work on Cheers, a show more focused on character-driven humor which Mirkin preferred writing, but felt he could not turn the opportunity down. Mirkin considered Three's Company to have "a classic French farce structure", as "the characters were so stupid they could never say anything clever." This meant Mirkin had to adapt his preference for character-driven comedy to fit the show; it "forced you to put all the cleverness into the plot, a much more difficult thing to do. The plot had to get all the laughs". Mirkin felt the experience "taught [him] a lot about structure" which greatly aided his later work on character-focused shows.

"I realized that I had kind of 'done' the multi-camera sitcom. I had done every aspect of the multi-camera sitcom and I was chafing at its limitations. I'd always been a big film freak, into cool camera movement, special effects and different styles of storytelling, different genres, so I very sadly came to the realization that I couldn't do a normal sitcom for the rest of my life where your characters simply congregate around an office desk or living room sofa. Here I had my dream, dream, dream dream job, which was kind of a Mary Tyler Moore Show with Bob Newhart, and I realized, to my horror, that I could only do that for four years."