Well, I loved variety in television, I loved sketch comedy. At 'Saturday Night Live,' I stayed almost seven years.
I was doing comedy in laundry mats in 1992, literally where I would bring a little gorilla amp and a lapel mike and just start performing.
I've always read books and loved human behavior since I was ten or twelve years old. Maybe even that's why I wanted to do comedy.
I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.
Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it's painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it's extremely painful.
As for the world of fashion and celebrity, I have the usual interest in the human comedy, but the problems of depiction absorb me more.
When my comedy get's someone to react... anger, laughing, crying, whatever... I know I did my job
Stand-up comedy is tough right now. Anybody can come to a concert, tape you, and put you up on the Internet. You either fight it or embrace it.
Comedy is much more challenging, because you have to have the same level of belief but you have to make people laugh, and that's definitely a challenge.
I studied theater in college, and I really wanted to be an actress and play a lot of different roles. Then I made landing on a television comedy my main focus.
I remember before I did 'Boston Public,' I couldn't get seen for drama. Once I'd done 'Boston Public,' I couldn't get seen for a comedy.
I think it's natural if you're doing a lot of comedy to do a lot of drama, because you have to figure out the real version of the joke.
A lot of our favorite comedies in general are usually directed by writers, whether or not they wrote the original script themselves.
What's fun about comedy is you're pushing things a little further than you would in a drama; you're pushing reality a little bit more.
I'm really not feeling one way or the other with comedy or drama, I'm just sort of doing projects that I've been finding really fun to be a part of.
My mother was an actress in comedies. My father wrote scenarios. They were not opposed to my being an actor. I really didn't know what it meant, but I wanted to be one anyway.
I've turned arrogance into an artform, where it's so absurd that it becomes comedy. But I've never done anything to hurt anybody or steal from anyone.
Steve Martin said that philosophy is good for comedy because it screws up your thinking just enough, and I agree with that. Being forced to see life's metadata is good training for looking for interesting angles on a topic.
At the time of 'Words, Words, Words,' I'm a 19-year-old getting up feeling like he's entitled to do comedy and tell you what he thinks of the world, so that's inherently a little bit ridiculous.
American television constantly tries to co-op British comedy and create their own version of it. Most of the time it doesn't work; obviously, in the case of 'The Office,' it did. But a lot of times, it doesn't really work.
I've been a huge fan of the cable network FX for a very, very long time. I think their brand of comedy is incredible. For me, as an audience member, that's a go-to channel.
