Aidy Bryant Quotes

At the beginning of each week at 'Saturday Night Live,' we have a full cast meeting where Lorne Michaels introduces the upcoming host.

My 'SNL' days of working through the night have come and gone.

I'm an 'SNL' junkie, and being backstage and seeing how it works behind the curtain for a couple days was something I'll never forget.

Some people think it's an easy gig working as an extra, but you often have to stay very concentrated for long stretches in challenging conditions.

You might have, as a character, 30 pages of dialogue a day if you're what they call a 'front-burner story.' So you go home, you learn your lines for the next day, you get up, you're there at 7 in the morning, you do a quick rehearsal, you're on camera, you might leave, you know, at 7 at night and start the whole thing over again.

Well, usually, when you're doing a sitcom, you get a script and every word or for the most part, is written. So, you know, if it's a 30-minute sitcom, then it's a 35-page script or something like that.

Normally, if you do a television show, it's 25 episodes. Your year is kind of shot, you know what I mean?

The first two years I was on 'MADtv' were really, really fun. We always thought it was 'Saturday Night Live's very nice, slightly asthmatic, shorter cousin.

I will admit I am a little bit of a line fudger. I will change the line a bit to make it feel better in my mouth. That is something they'll allow you to do on 'Veep' unless it's a particular joke where they're like, 'No, it just sounds better like this.' But with a lot of network shows, the script is law; you cannot change it all.

When I got to 'Saturday Night Live,' it was a lot like going from pre-school to Harvard, and it took a long time to figure stuff out.

It's hard work just being on set 14 hours a day.

'Family Ties' was a very successful situation comedy. And, in almost every respect, it functioned on a day to day basis like a well-run, well conditioned basketball team. The show was performed live each week in front of a studio audience on Friday night.

My experience is at The Groundlings Theater, where we created different characters and did sketch comedy. And sometimes the characters were outrageous, but they always came from a real place. So even working there, we had to create characters from the people that we knew.

Doing a sitcom is like doing a play - you rehearse for three or four days, and then you shoot what you rehearsed on Friday night in front of an audience. An hour-long drama is like shooting a movie. You're shooting 13-14 hour days. The endurance itself is different.

I have to give the SNL crew props - it cannot have been easy to work with me.

In ten episodes, we were able to do our writers' room first. We did that all summer and wrote for 15 weeks and got everything in really good shape.

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

My dad would write these sketches for me while I was at 'SNL.'

Shooting a season can be a grind. It can be seven to eight months of work. Once you stop, it slows down any momentum you had.

Television is blue-collar work. You clock in in the morning; you work 12, 13 hours - sometimes 18 hours if you're doing 'Orphan Black.'

'SNL' doesn't have a traditional writer's room. On Monday, there's the pitch meeting with the guest, and I played that like it was stand-up.

'Longmire' is an incredibly hard shooting schedule because the locations are usually an hour away every morning, and I come home every weekend. I fly back to L.A. for about 26 hours a weekend, just to touch base back at home. It's a lot of work. It's four really intense months.

Unfortunately, the back log for writing for 'Walking Dead' is pretty backed up! Usually, we wouldn't see the scripts until the week before - or sometimes even the week of.

As far as my sketches, I've always loved 'What's Up With That.' It's just a whole lot of fun, and I love 'Black Jeopardy,' too. Any kind of host capacity, I'm usually pretty good at.

Every sketch goes through a rewrite stage where a group of writers sits around a table and pitches more jokes and ideas for the piece.