Being a comedy writer gives you permission to be an outsider and poke fun at what people think about other people.
I loved watching classics such as 'Casablanca' and goofball comedies such as 'How To Murder Your Wife' on WGN-TV.
I like doing the mainstream, right-down-the-pike broad comedies as much as I like doing the kind of unorthodox different stuff.
There's probably been very few people in comedy that have a diversified background as I do.
A couple of friends and I started a sketch comedy group when we were teenagers, just for fun and to start creating stuff. It was a blast.
I started selling out comedy clubs before I got to town with no advertising. I was selling out theaters just on the rumor that I was going to be there.
'Monty Python' and 'The Simpsons' have ruined comedy for writers for the rest of our lives.
When I look at it now, the whole punk thing is sort of comedy in a weird way.
I always feel so pretentious talking about comedy and deconstructing it. It always feels somehow self-centred to talk about any sort of process.
In college, my teachers were usually after me for going after comedy too much, leaning too much in that direction.
We were the only ones interested in comedy. Everybody else wanted to be Martin Scorsese.
Doug Motel makes 'conscious comedy'. He makes me laugh, and he makes me think.
I got written out of 'G.I. Joe' and was like, 'Welp, I'm going to go back to what I do: writing and producing comedy.'
One of my favorite comedy performances of all time is Charles Grodin in 'Midnight Run,' and in a lot of things he's done. I think he's hilarious as the straight man, playing it real.
My favorite work is The Full Monty because I got an Oscar for it. But it was really hard work at the time. Sometimes comedy is not a bundle of laughs to actually do.
Molly Shannon, for example, is someone I've always really looked up to, because her comedy is so physical and wild and unembarrassed and brave.
It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.
Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.
It doesn't look great if you cancel the reigning Best Comedy Program, you know, you're gonna take a hit from a... from sort of a public relations standpoint.
My school was 90 percent white, but 90 percent of the kids I played with were black. So I got the best of both worlds. I think that is where my comedy developed.
Combining music, theater and comedy is a new and broader form of expression. In certain combinations you can make people laugh one moment, cry the next, and then be astounded by the beauty of the music.
