Graham Linehan Quotes

We call ourselves comedy writer-performers, and that encompasses everything, and I certainly have a very open mind about it.

I'd never really done comedy before 'Community,' so getting to work day in and day out with all these great people, directors, writers, and actors, I feel like I've learned a lot.

With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.

I'm doing comedy development at National Lampoon.

But long story short, I didn't start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up.

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

Coming up with comedy is hard, man. Those bits aren't easy to think of!

I love doing sitcoms. I love doing comedy. I love the whole shooting match.

When you're writing a sketch, it has to be surrounded by a situation. It can't just be out of the air.

I use a method approach to all my sitcom work.

There are so many really good comedians, and I would never be as good as they are. It's not my calling.

What I love about sketch is that the writing of it is idea-based. It's not story-based. It's like, 'This is a behavior, and we're going to write, in a small sample, the funniest way to heighten this behavior.' Sitcoms or movies are about story.

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.

As a kid I would watch 'SCTV,' 'Saturday Night Live,' 'Monty Python' and 'The Kids in the Hall,' and be amazed that these guys got to be different people every week. It spoke to the acting side in me.

One of the most positive takeaways I've had from 'SNL' is when we'd make videos back in the day: we'd just write material as we were inspired, and so, in a given year, we'd only put out two or three videos.

I don't want to do procedural: I want to do longform.

The hardest thing to write is sitcom.

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?

Whenever a young comic asks me for advice I only have two things to say. One is to try and do what you think is genuinely funny and the other is just do loads of gigs.

I was working with Peter Tolan, who was my writing partner on those two [Rescue Me and The Job], and he did The Larry Sanders Show with Garry Shandling, and he always said that the second season is better because you know the actors.

Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I've learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could've on my own.

I knew at an early age that I wanted to pursue comedy.

People ask me about my influences and I say all the comedians in the 1970s and Dave Allen was a massive influence and a very big influence on a lot of modern comics.

Everyone talks about the gags, but the most difficult thing is coming up with the stories. You have to learn to do that for sitcoms.

The role of a comedian is to go in and make something funny. That might be a situation where I'm writing, a situation where I'm in control, like standup or something of my own that I'm making, or it might be something like being an actor in someone else's project.