Paul F. Tompkins Quotes

I'm not a Larry David. I don't have a 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' and a 'Seinfeld' in me.

Sitcoms are like summer stock. You put it up in three days, and then you do it in front of an audience, so it's a really great transition from theatre into camera work.

The current Babe Ruth of improv? Sacha Baron Cohen. He's pretty amazing.

I'm a singer and performer in a hybrid show that's standup, music and audience participation.

Martin Lawrence is one of my comedic heroes, and he's a genius.

We took up the offer with the BBC, and that was Monty Python's Flying Circus. I didn't have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went.

Carol Burnett probably had the biggest influence on me as kid. Although I was very young and watched her a lot in reruns, I was mesmerized by the way she transformed, by her physical comedy and the rolling laughter from the live studio audience. I loved her most as Scarlett O'Hara and her well known Cleaning Lady character.

I stumbled into this format for 'Last Call with Carson Daly' that I really like, inspired by cable and Dave Attell's 'Insomniac.' I love being out on the street.

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 was in a sketch group in L.A., and we were playing, like, backyards in Glendale and stuff. It was pretty ugly because we didn't have any money.

With a sitcom, everyday you do a run through, and people are judging you, and the scripts are being changed nightly, nightly, nightly.

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

The original Dean Martin Comedy Hour handed me some hysterical sketches. I've got highlights on tons of these variety shows, given to me by their great writers. I'd love to be doing all that again.

When I worked with Robin Williams, now there is improv! He is just as funny as you think he is. We did at least five or six takes of every scene, improvising every scene differently. He was a riot.

There are a lot of really funny guys who are very natural in what they do: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen.

You can go on 'Saturday Night Live' now and not even play live.

I grew up on Don Knotts and Jerry Lewis and all the guys from Second City.

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.

There was no Groundlings or Upright Citizens Brigade where I was from. Looking back on it, I was trying to do sketch comedy in my stand-up, which is still kind of what I am doing now. To go full-circle here, it's kind of like one-man sketch.

I had great fun in the 'BroomCupboard,' learning the skills of live TV.

I worked on a weekly one-hour show live from Los Angeles called 'The Dixie Boat Show.' We only had one camera, so there was a lot of panning because it was always on, and anything that went wrong, from actors fluffing their lines to sets falling down in mid-scene, you let it go by.

We come from a live background of sketch improv and standup.

I always honestly dreamed of coming to Second City in Chicago, although I've never even been there to see a show. But I did a ton of sketch comedy at the Second City in LA, which (at the time, in a different location) wasn't really a theater, it was just a space where you took some classes.

People think "The Office" was improvised, but it's all on the page. We do that because what we found is that in the early days of "The Office," we went in with it sort of 80 percent scripted and we did some things and then we improv'd and we did - you know, and it gets a laugh on the floor because it's the first time they've heard it.

I worked in Trenton, and then I got sidetracked into comedy and then onto 'SNL.' And then into being a live performer - what I do now; virtually that's what I am: I'm a live entertainer.