Scott Adsit Quotes

There are lots of comic bosses and fathers in sitcoms, but the comic landlord remains rare.

There was a time when I couldn't watch sitcoms for a while because it was just cacophony, it was just noise.

Television, particularly as it becomes more and more serialised, comedies no longer have to tie the stories up neatly within 20-plus minutes. 'Arrested Development' had evolving storylines, as did both versions of 'The Office.' We're seeing that more and more. That allows it to be really, whatever the tone, almost literary.

Tina Fey writes crazy, off-color, racist, hilarious stuff for '30 Rock,' but it's always funny because you're in this almost two-dimensional world where there's Jenna Maroney and these over-the-top characters. That's the framework.

If you're doing gags, I think it's important to have characters who are as strong-willed and impactful as possible.

I think, in comedy, you only hit about one or two great characters in your career. Sometimes my character will be just a sketch... what is the funniest situation to put this person in?

In the overall scheme of things, Tommy Dreamer and The Franchise are opposite characters.

Character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini have found themselves getting more and more leading roles because they are permitted to behave onscreen in ways that George Clooney and Matt Damon never could.

If you end up growing a character too quickly, you don't have anywhere to go after that point.

I've always had a lot of story ideas rattling around in my head, but 'Nimona' felt very tangible very early. I knew the ending. So I just started making more and more pages, and then I made it a webcomic, like, 'OK, I'm really gonna do this.'

I have tried many times to write a TV sitcom - with little success.

My first draft of Marvel Knights 'Black Panther' was not funny at all. They smartly rejected the entire script and counseled me to inject liberal doses of humor into very serious subject matter.

As an actor I want more and more challenges, I want to reinvent myself.

When a show starts out, you're immediately trying to identify your goodies and baddies, and trying to place people in your mind where you think they belong.

I think we're so advanced when it comes to watching narrative material. I mean, it's all we do is consume content all day long. So when a character walks onscreen, you immediately start making connections for that character: Is that a good guy? Is that a bad guy?

Sarah Cooper sounds like a character on 'The O.C.,' who was written out in season two, and it's like she moved into my body and gentrified my whole personality.

I love doing humorous roles and I write my characters that way. But I haven't received many offers from others to do comedy.

To those many millions of you unfamiliar with my work, I play a caddish British doctor in practice with Mindy Kaling on her excellent sitcom 'The Mindy Project.'

In some ways, every character we write, especially the protagonist, is some version of ourselves, as a writer/director, even if they aren't the same gender.

I'm a big fan of when you model a character as someone with a biological origin, doing deep dives and a lot of research.

When you write a show, every character is you to some extent.

There are lots of theories that the simpler a comic character is drawn the more relatable they become. People can imprint themselves onto the gaps in the picture. The skill of cartooning is often working out how much can be stripped away.

I'm not sure what my material would have been if I'd have started earlier. I probably would have started with 'Damsels in Distress' kinds of films because that's the kind of comedy I was writing in college. So I didn't really have any life experience to work off of.

Woody Allen's 'The Complete Prose' - It's just the best selection of comic writing by one author. You know it's good comedy when you get quite demoralised about yourself.

When I was a kid watching wrestling, that's kind of how it was. You had these long feuds and storylines, and you just got more and more interested, and you wanted to see where it was going to go. You wanted to see the big blow-off match, and I like that stuff because that's what I grew up watching.