Sarah Baker Quotes

Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd are really amazing, lovely people and really great comedic actors.

If you can jump up onstage and make people laugh, shouldn't you also be able to inhabit a character?

Joan Cusack is one of my favorite comedic actresses, and every part she plays is so different. She does the wackiest stuff and somehow it works. I like watching her a lot, and I think you can always go further and pull back. That's something I really have to work on.

One of my greatest inspirations for stand-up was Jonathan Winters. He was a genius. One thing about him, and also Lenny Bruce, is that they were in the tradition of the one-man show. That's why Richard Pryor was so great, and George Carlin, too. They prowled the stage, they used voices, they were really talents.

I just liked stand-up comedy so much. I used to memorize Bill Cosby albums and other people's albums, George Carlin, Flip Wilson.

Chris O'Dowd is a very special talent. He's one of those very, very rare actors who can be the clown, or he can be the straight man playing off the clown, in a scene.

Even when I was at 'SNL,' I didn't do impersonations. I always wanted to be the kind of person who could do them - I always thought they were the coolest thing on the show - but I didn't have any experience.

Thing is, I'm a funny actor, but I'm not good at being funny. I'm going to ramble for a second: I'm an actor who can make things funny in the moment, like in stakes or in circumstances or out of character.

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.

People like Bill Murray are incredible at what they do and are definitely my flavour. Although Will Ferrell, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais are also incredible actors. In their comedy, they make these stupid people feel so real. These guys are really setting the bar very high, and I learn as much from them about acting as I do about comedy.

Keegan-Michael Key and Lindsay Sloane are two of the best, literally, just dramatic actors.

I have a lot of respect for actors who do comedy. They do it naturally.

To me, if you are in the same building with Peter Sellers or John Cleese, or any of those guys and holding your own making other people laugh, that's a compliment.

Every time I wrote a sketch that was in my voice, Ferrell would just do it better.

I've never been trained as an actor. I'm no Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Johnny Depp.

I think being successful in comedy is being funny and making jokes - anything beyond that is the icing on the cake.

As an artist I just think comedic actors are really underrated.

When I worked with Chevy Chase, Michael Ritchie would say, "Just ad lib and try to break me up. Just insult me. Anything." When we were doing his close-up, or when my back was to the camera, I would come up with jokes or quips or anything, to get a real reaction out of him. He was smart enough to know that was gold. So it was great fun working with him and Michael, and getting to see how the two worked together. I think Fletch and Clark Griswold were Chevy's two best roles. He's so incredibly talented and still vastly underused.

People have said to me for a long time, "Man you're funny." I say, "Well, I'm quick," but being funny on purpose, take after take - that's why I said for me it was new territory, and so by improvising something might come out that might be good. And it's film, so they can cut it if it isn't.

I'm very lucky in that I've gotten to do a lot of things. But if you ever put a gun to my head and said, "You can only do one," I'd think it would be stand-up. I think it's the coolest job in the world.

I've never written jokes. I mean, I'll write things on a piece of paper and riff on them onstage.

I don’t like writing for comedians. I like writing for actors. The best comedians are the best actors.

I always felt that I was more of an actress than a - I can't tell a joke to save my soul, but that I was a comedic actress.

When you're doing comedy on stage, it's great because you have the audience there and they're like another actor in the scene. You feed off of them, laugh. But in film when everyone's quiet, it's all about timing. But the key to that is to be authentic. Be in the moment, and if you play the moment truthfully, the humor will be there.

I think both of those: the subject matter, pop culture... the talent, I don't think... there's no Jim Belushi in Saturday Night Live, for me. And probably, you know, possibly the material. They've done everything over the years.