John Mulaney Quotes

To me, a multi-cam is just like the feeling you get from the audience.

I did a lot of multi-cam shows when I first started coming out to L.A.

A sitcom, you rehearse for four days of the week and then you shoot it all in one night in front of a studio audience. It's like a play every week, you just shoot it over a seven or eight-day period with a single camera. I enjoy this format of show much more. I'm a feature guy. I like making movies. So the four camera thing I didn't love it that much. I found myself slightly out of my element.

I created 'Dinner: Impossible' with a guy named Bryan O'Reilly and I shot the pilot as a 30 minute show and we sold it.

You know, it's nice on a sitcom to have an audience there, but there's still a wall of cameras between you and them.

I can't do a one-camera show. I don't know how to do that kind of show where you count in your head and then you do the next line.

If someone at VH1, the powers that be, said, 'Shaunie, we want you to completely do your family show,' would I do cartwheels on over to it? Absolutely, because that is probably the most fun I've ever had shooting anything ever so I would totally be fine with that and just do my EP but, yeah.

I like anything with a live audience. I love sitcom work. I hope it comes back in fashion because I really love it. I love single-camera work, too, but in a different way than that live-audience thing, which is really exciting.

There are some times where being on the shows are great. Sometimes it's hard, when it's just like, 'the show must go on,' and there's a TV show that's being done.

Sitting around with funny people, banging out jokes and creating a television show. I have no hobbies, no outside interests. I'm fine with spending 14 hours a day putting a show together with tape and string.

I do like the process of producing. Later in my career, like when I had the TV show, I was a producer and I've been on a few things.

You know, we certainly have a great budget on the show, but the expansions to world of the show really arise because, and this is kind of the idea of the premise of the show, where is each week you're kind of meeting . . . It's random access.

You don't really have time to do other than what's written. It's very rigid. Shows have a certain rhythm that nobody wants disturbed. So a lot of that doesn't take place on television, at least the television I was doing at the time when I first started.

A successful current affairs television show seems to be more and more a cross between a music hall turn and a scene in a torture chamber.

I was a born club comic. Radio and TV and stage were fine, but I found my real home in cabaret.

My whole experience into the sitcom world, it was, like, "This is like theater, this is like film... This is a hybrid of everything I love to do. A live audience and rehearsals and... more food!"

I liked doing live things, and with the Circus we had a live audience.

When people look at the ratings and they're bad, I think people can get an idea of "Why would they even make the show?" And to a certain extent, original programming for any network is a loss leader to try to get you to keep the channel on your cable package.

One of the things I've learned - before I would go on a show, I was like, "Oh God, I hate that show" or "That show is gonna get canceled." But now after being full-time on a show, you see how difficult it is and how much work goes into it and how so many decisions are based on finances or people's schedules or talent or location issues. It's a miracle that anything gets made.

Local television shows do not, in general, supply make-up artists. The exception to this is Los Angeles, an unusually generous city in this regard, since they also provide this service for radio appearances.

The director of the [Grimm] pilot called me in. I had worked on a pilot called Love Bites with him, and the producers I worked on with on Hot In Cleveland, so they knew me from comedic worlds, and they wanted someone who could be light too. Because it is pretty heavy.

Television is a runaway train that you have to get on for nine months of the year. But at the same time, it has a wonderful immediacy.

I work with people and we come up with ideas for movies, television and things like that. It's fun and I love doing it.

Television is my home. It's a special breed of person that can do nine months on and three months off, with 22 episodes of one-hour shows. It's very hard work. It can be a grind. It's not a grind for me. I relish in that.

Basically, I just want to make movies and maybe even produce TV later down the line, do some writing, maybe a tour with my music. And start a family! That's really important to me.