Peter Kay Quotes

'Saturday Night Live' will always be this amazing, powerful behemoth, but it's also not the only thing happening in comedy anymore.

I think that for the most part, when I started doing comedy, it had become very commercialized.

Taste in comedy, like fashion, changes all the time.

Improv seemed to replace stand-up, which was very big before that. Stand-up comedy was real hot in the late '80s and through the '90s.

I didn't want to write sketch comedy after 'Mr. Show.' I felt like, after 'Mr. Show', why would you want to go work at any of the other places that existed then?

What they call 'alt-comedy' now is basically what comedy was like in the '80s. People tried different things, and everybody went to the clubs; there was no other place. Then somehow, the clubs became infiltrated by Dice Clay and Carrot Top types.

The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.

I have always felt that the rise of what became known as alternative comedy was born out of the loins of the alternative theatre movement.

There's the exciting part about comedy - if you catch an act just before they go mainstream, that's the best. After they hit the mainstream, everything gets watered down a little bit.

Canadian comedians are generally more well-rounded... They have to do a lot more. In order to have a career in this country, you have to do everything. And in the States you can narrow-cast, you can be just a sitcom performer or a stand-up comedian or a sketch performer.

I like doing the mainstream, right-down-the-pike broad comedies as much as I like doing the kind of unorthodox different stuff.

I would call it a comedy variety show. We have some people just doing straight standup. We usually try to have one musical act of sort. So its just people being funny in different ways, not just sketch, not just standup, not just characters, all of those things.

I love comedy; I'm super passionate about it, and thank God it's super in right now to have female empowered comedies.

There was a sea of change in comedy in the late 1950s and '60s. We were dealing with vignettes as opposed to jokes. We were more socially aware.

Comediennes are the lucky ones, because if you're funny, you can be 125 years old and they will still accept you.

I grew up loving David Letterman and Pee-wee Herman, but as far as live performance comedy, all I knew were the Jerry Seinfeld-type comedians of the world, and that's what I thought live performance comedy was all about.

At first, there was a separation of clubs and sketch comedy. Now there's all kinds of comedy, making us one big happy family.

There's so many ways to do stand up, and I think, for awhile, people weren't really maximizing the freedom of it. We were all kind of doing a similar kind of stand up, and I started to see some original voices come out of Boston.

Obviously comedic styles do change.

Going from drama to just straight-up comedy with Tommy Davidson and Jamie Foxx - what a blast.

The alternative comedy scene is actually pretty small, I guess.

Years ago, there was a variety theatre in every British town, and people paid to go down and see it. Comedy was the main part of the theatre, and comedians earned a living by being funny. Now you have comedy in television instead. Comedians now have to be funny within a play.

People who have theater or sketch-comedy backgrounds seem to be more, you know, our speed. Like Amy Poehler and Will Arnett - we double date.

I just watched a ton of comedy and saw a ton of different styles, and eventually you think, 'Oh, yeah, I could be like that.'

My first improv was Second City in Chicago. Before that, I worked at - with a partner, doing comedy sketches.