Joyce DeWitt Quotes

'Monty Python' and 'The Simpsons' have ruined comedy for writers for the rest of our lives.

If you look at any successful skit comedy show, ever, there is that format of introducing you to the player in the beginning, and then going on to see those sketches.

I love '30 Rock.' It's one of my favorite shows. It's certainly the gold standard of comedy writing.

I like the sitcom, as a structure.

I do think comedy needs to be a living thing, but I think without a great script and fully realized characters, you cannot keep it living. Otherwise, it just becomes long and rambling, indulgent. So I think you need both, frankly.

Well, I loved variety in television, I loved sketch comedy. At 'Saturday Night Live,' I stayed almost seven years.

In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.

I've had a lot of writers, in particular, who said they got into writing because of the 'Van Dyke Show.' They said it looked like fun.

It's so hard to make a comedy pilot and have a cool idea.

In point of fact, I'm not sure there are too many comedies with laugh tracks anymore. Most of what you hear is live studio audience laughing as a show is filmed. If this prompts you to wonder who those actual human beings are who are laughing at some of this stuff, that is a mystification I share.

I love TV. I think I'd do a half-hour single-camera comedy.

In television, a sitcom is probably the closest thing to what it's like working in the theater.

I use a method approach to all my sitcom work.

My experience tells me that any time you hear people laughing on a sitcom, it's the writers who happen to be closest to the microphones - not the audience.

Growing up, there were TV shows that were very funny but very traditional. Classic things like 'Fawlty Towers,' obviously, and 'Blackadder' were pretty traditionally shot. And then there were the ones that start to break the mold or be really ambitious. The ones that spring particularly to mind would be 'The Young Ones.'

I grew up in a time where on things like 'The Red Skeleton Show' or even to a certain extent on 'The Carol Burnett Show,' people wrote in the breakouts or ad-libs. They were scripted to look spontaneous. So I always had a dislike of that kind of thing.

I pray to the shrine of 'Mr. Show.' It saved sketch comedy.

My experience - and it might be just the kind of comedy that I do, which is usually sketch comedy - is that there's a lot more texture and subplot in drama than in comedy.

How to do half-hour comedy innovatively is something I do pride myself on. We invented it with 'I Love Lucy.'

'Big Bang' is very tightly scripted. Because we shoot in front of a live audience, it's basically like doing a filmed piece of theatre, really.

I think there are people that don't think 'SNL' should make movies because sketches don't translate. Sometimes they don't, but sometimes they do.

When I got the first e-mail suggesting we cast Zooey Deschanel in 'New Girl', I thought, 'That's exactly right.' In the pilot of 'Modern Family', when Cam is holding up the baby with the 'Lion King' theme, it was very clear we had something special.

The cool thing about 'Transparent' is that the show is funny but not like a sitcom is funny. It all comes down to the writing... The writers on that show are so good that you don't have to worry about anything. There are so many things that can go wrong making a TV show or a movie, but if the writing's good, that's, like, 95 percent of it.

I think the sitcom is the format for television. It's the essential form, and it represents more of the canon of TV, which is why I latched onto it.

Sitcom writing is difficult because it's not just about writing jokes - there's a very fine balance between characters, plot, and comedy, that if you get one thing wrong, the whole castle comes falling down.