The great thing about a sitcom is that you're in front of a live audience, so you really get in touch with what audience reaction is, but also there are lots of elements of film that you're dealing with, and there's kind of a great boot camp or graduate school mentality to it, because you're going to suck.
People who I've worked with are always like, 'Why aren't you doing comedy? You're funny!' because they've only seen the one side. I did do the comedy 'Whatever Works,' with Woody Allen and Larry David.
When someone goes, 'Oh, this group is really pissed off at what you said,' there's not a piece of my body that goes, 'Sweet!' That means I did it wrong. I'm just trying to make people laugh.
People think "The Office" was improvised, but it's all on the page. We do that because what we found is that in the early days of "The Office," we went in with it sort of 80 percent scripted and we did some things and then we improv'd and we did - you know, and it gets a laugh on the floor because it's the first time they've heard it.
I want to try something on situational comedy.
Ten comics can say the same joke, and I'm the one who gets called a thief.
My most frequent collaborators at S.N.L. are the incredibly gifted writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider!
Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.
In television, a sitcom is probably the closest thing to what it's like working in the theater.
I'm not a comedian. I didn't study sketch comedy; my background isn't that.
What holds you back in comedy is fear.
Before you get to 'SNL,' you have your own sensibility. And when you get to 'SNL,' it's the show's sensibility.
TV is easier: it's all planned out for you and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over.
I was hired as an assistant at 'SNL' in 2002.
I always think of comedy as being spontaneous, and yet everything about filmmaking is not spontaneous.
If someone said, 'Sit down and write a 'Community' episode,' I would be panicked.
I have admiration for people who can do it well - the guys who wrote 'Cheers' and 'Frasier.' They created sort of a blissful comedic universe.
When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.
I was considered by my peers to be a good comedian. So that's all I ever strived to do was get some recognition from my peers.
When people write comedy from neutrality, it just gets kind of silly.
I've been doing comedy for 20 years now. I started when I was 13 and I think for the first 10 years I was impersonating other people.
The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don't know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time.
I really wanted to, but I just didn't understand how people became comedians. I kind of thought it was something you were born into. And so I wanted to be a veterinarian or an architect. I wanted to be in a band, and for some reason I could understand how you could be in a band because I had guitars and all my friends played music. Comedy was a secret want, but it wasn't anything I pursued.
I knew at an early age that I wanted to pursue comedy.
When I was in third grade I taught myself ventriloquism... What's hard is to learn to be an entertainer and make people laugh. I was a few years out of college before I felt I had enough material. Then in 1988 I moved to L.A. and started to do some shows at comedy clubs.
