Michael Schur Quotes

A lot of comics aren't their on-screen personas; Chris Rock isn't always ranting and raving. What I do is make myself this over-the-top character that people either find endearing or they think is a joke. Then I can do anything I want.

What I say is stupid. Who takes a comedian seriously? I'm doing sophisticated knock-knock jokes.

My persona is most importantly just to communicate the material in a way that is most funny and meaningful in the moment. It's more like a character that's sculpted for whatever joke needs communicating at the moment.

I'm not a comedian. I don't do stand-up. I don't tell jokes. I'm a comedic actor, and approach my work that way. The comedy comes through the character.

I started doing comedy just as myself, because I thought, "This is what's expected, you're meant to tell stories and do observations." And then I started to realize that I wanted to mix it up a bit, so I started to doing songs, and I had a little keyboard onstage and would bring in little props. Then I thought about the idea of talking about a character and becoming the character onstage. So, it sort of morphed into being stand-up that was more character based, and I found that's the stuff I got the better reaction from and was more exciting for me.

Garry Shandling in particular - really had the concept. He really knew it, and it was done so lovingly. He would go beyond the joke, and sort of go into the character. His "funny" was very different, and I really appreciated it.

There was never a moment in George Carlin's career where he dipped below an A+. When he came out with the "Hippie Dippie Weatherman" on The Tonight Show, I mean, it seems so mundane now, but it was in black and white TV and the whole bit was that this guy smoked tons of grass and was a terrible weather man. "Forecast for tonight? Dark."

I'm all for whatever it takes to get wherever you need to get with a character, as long as you don't wipe it on me.

There have been times I thought that when I got a certain point in the story, a certain character was going to do a certain thing, only to get to that point and have the character make clear that he or she doesn't want to do that at all. That long phone conversation I thought the character was going to have? He hangs up the phone before the other person answers, and twenty pages of dialog I had half written in my head go out the window.

You can always find ways to make it different, as long as it's a really well-written script and well-written character.

As a comedian I appreciate every kind of comedy. You decide for yourself what you're going to do.

When I started out I was definitely more traditional. It was 1988. Everyone was doing the Jerry Seinfeld.

It is a good plan, with a young person of a character to be much affected by ludicrous and absurd representations, to show him plainly by examples that there is nothing which may not be thus represented. He will hardly need to be told that everything is not a mere joke.

It's very rare that an older comedian sort of slips into an old-school clunker. You know, you don't hear too much of that anymore.

I see parody as another form of comedy. If you are making a comedy, there are a lot of different ways to do it. I'm not necessarily always aware of my quote-unquote persona when doing things like that. It's more, "What does the character need at the time?" I'm certainly drawn to certain types of material, there's no doubt about that.

Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.

I watched some of Lost series. And I realized that the character they wanted me to play didn't really come in for a long time. It would have just been the wrong thing for me to do.

I have that sort of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David/George Costanza thing where people are like, "How did you feel writing such an unlikable character?" And I'm like, "It's me! I based him on myself!" There are certain moments where they do feel like unwittingly personal attacks.

I don't really think it matters if you go into stage or TV as long as you do a bit of character work, really.

Most people think I'm Danny Glover's son when they meet me. So when they ask, I say 'No, I'm Crispin Glover's son.' Then we stare at each other for a long time.

Stand-up was interesting to me at the beginning, because I was trying to parody it. My early stand-up was really Andy Kaufman-esque, and then I became the very thing I was making fun of.

The only thing I can say about W. C. Fields ... is this: Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

I've always loved The Simpsons, just because it was really, really funny. As a kid, you love the characters. You know that the dad is dumb and frustrated, and you know that the boy is smarter than everyone else around him and is constantly getting into mischief.

Many writers write across difference of one kind or another. Sometimes the difference is large and recognizable: gender, or race, or religion, or sexuality. And sometimes the differences are smaller. ... Where authors get into trouble is in trying to make those different characters stand in for whole groups of people, or for creating characters only to fetishize or explore their supposed otherness. Your character can be wildly different from you, as long as he's written with respect and, moreover, specificity.