Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.
Open mics are a great way to rework your material to see what punchlines land best.
There are quite detailed rules with sitcom. When people can leave scenes, act structure, joke rhythm. You can't not have a straight man.
There's only a handful of people who are just purely, inherently funny, and I'm not one of them. I need content and a situation. I don't just walk on the screen, and people go, 'Ha ha ha!' There are people like that, and they can do almost anything. It's the Christopher Walken Rule.
I like the rhythm of comedy in dramas, if that makes sense. In other words, I don't want to write setup, punch, setup, punch, where the joke dictates the scene; I want to find comedy in which the drama is actually driving the moment in the scene.
You really have to keep people interested, at all times, until the punch comes. You can do that with a film that lasts 90 to 100 minutes. That's very difficult to do at 160 minutes.
Sometimes if you do a multi-camera comedy, often there's rules, like, 'We've got to have three main laughs per page.'
Every comedian feels out an audience. As you're telling jokes, if they're not laughing at this, you change the subject.
If I get a hard audience they are not going to get away until they laugh. Those seven laughs a minute - I've got to have them.
If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room, you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything.
I wouldn't say I have comedy chops. I guess you get lucky with good writing because I don't think I'm a comedian by any stretch of the imagination.
I'd been writing sketches since high school, but 'Friends of the People' really taught me about structure - how to wait out a joke, how to stick with it for a while. It also made me more confident onstage as a performer.
