Nick Kroll Quotes

When I hit the scene, there was Billy Connolly and Max Boyce. It was all mother-in-law and Irish jokes, and we broke the mould. Now there are thousands of comedians out there, and I don't think I can be above it all.

I didn't want to write sketch comedy after 'Mr. Show.' I felt like, after 'Mr. Show', why would you want to go work at any of the other places that existed then?

What they call 'alt-comedy' now is basically what comedy was like in the '80s. People tried different things, and everybody went to the clubs; there was no other place. Then somehow, the clubs became infiltrated by Dice Clay and Carrot Top types.

Eddie Murphy did '48 Hrs.' because that was the only movie offered to him. And he killed it. Bill Cosby did 'I Spy' because that was the TV show he was offered. But now, there are networks dedicated to comedy, and the Internet... it's so easy for comedians to not do things that aren't true to them.

'Saturday Night Live' will always be this amazing, powerful behemoth, but it's also not the only thing happening in comedy anymore.

There are so few jobs for comedians on networks, that taxi TV and elevator TV and all this stuff are what I and every other comedian now are gunning for.

There's the exciting part about comedy - if you catch an act just before they go mainstream, that's the best. After they hit the mainstream, everything gets watered down a little bit.

I'm an HBO subscriber, and I watch a bunch of great shows on HBO.

There's so many ways to do stand up, and I think, for awhile, people weren't really maximizing the freedom of it. We were all kind of doing a similar kind of stand up, and I started to see some original voices come out of Boston.

Comedy clubs were something that came to pass in the '80s, but toward the end of that, in the early '90s, people started doing comedy again in alternative spaces.

We didn't used to be so precious about women in comedy back in the old days.

Adult Swim has cornered this really cool market, especially for comedy shows.

Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.

I'm pretty much in love with 'Adult Swim.'

The alternative comedy scene is actually pretty small, I guess.

Black people who want to do comedy go into standup, where our heroes opened a lot of doors. Improv doesn't have a ton of heroes that you can look to.

Summer is a great opportunity for all of cable. People love to find original episodes.

Cable TV? Stressful? Never.

Everybody is talking about cord cutting. It's not about the cord. It's the content.

It's funny - almost every comedian that I started out with moved to L.A., except for my two friends Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer. And my two friends that are doing the best in comedy, the most successful friends I have, are Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer.

Nick Kroll, A.D. Miles, Chelsea Peretti - those were the people I was always doing open mics with.

Not saying that we are realer than most people, but because Chi is so segregated, first of all, we have to be diverse comedians and be able to make a lot of different people laugh. And Chicago comics, we're OK with who we are in our truth. That stems from Bernie Mac and a lot of other greats who came before me.

I thought all those channels on cable TV were really cool.

I was lucky to develop in the U.K. because I find comedy - in addition to being caustic - it's quite literary over here, and alternative comedy isn't so alternative.

When I started on the London circuit in 1989, nationwide there were about 150 to 200 people that were what you could call alternative comedians - that weren't club comics. Now, last year when the Laughing Horse chain of clubs held a new acts competition, a thousand people entered. So, there are 800 people more.