Adam Pally Quotes

Eddie Izzard is absolutely brilliant. I would love to write something for him.

A sketch should be about two to three minutes, which is basically what most songs are. They're usually done by groups. Good examples of each build and have different parts and twists in them. I guess sketch would be the comedy version of music.

I never set out to do a sketch show.

I don't really write jokes down. I tend to have a premise that I work out and test on stage.

If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

My sister sometimes does a Todd Barry tribute act.

I started doing standup when I was in college, and I would incorporate a lot of characters into my act.

When I tell people I'm a comedian they say, 'Oh, are you funny?' I say, 'No, it's not that kind of comedy.'

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

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

Recently, I went up to Casino Rama to see Martin Short's show, just to see how he put it all together. And after the show, I went backstage and picked his brain to find out why he did certain things.

People don't understand how much time and work it takes to make somebody laugh, and how hard it is to write a script, to put together the story, the characters. When everyone laughs simultaneously, there's no greater feeling.

I write these shows one joke at a time. There's no continuity. I do try to figure an order to the stories, but there's not continuity.

No matter how many times you've done it, the early stages of getting a show up on its feet is very hit and miss. There seem to be thousands of options on every page to discover.

It takes a lot of time to write and put up a sketch show, but that's part of who I am. I don't think that ever goes away, that sensibility - especially coming from the Upright Citizens Brigade. That's just who I am.

What I love is getting a new joke, or a premise like a sketch idea or a movie idea. That's the best feeling for a comedian.

I certainly tried to talk about less complex things, but I've had to accept that it's just not what I do. That isn't to say that my shows are depressing - they aren't. At least, I hope they aren't! The problem I have with stories about happy things is that they don't require any skill from a comic - they just repeat the details verbatim.

There's [John Mulaney Show] jokes that I have in stand up that I wouldn't try to put in, I would try to have someone just speak extemporaneously in the middle of a scene about an episode of "Law and Order" or something.

The victory of the show is in the writing. Coming up with sketches and stand-up bits. The rest is just hitting buttons on a machine more or less.

With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material (butterfly wings around 1955, fh) - the constituent parts of which remain indistinguishable - with the aim of producing a very vivid effect of scintillation, I realised that, for me, this responds to needs of the same order as those that formerly led me, in many drawings and paintings, to organize my lines and patches of colour so that the objects represented would meld into everything around them, so that the result would be a sort of continuous, universal soup with an intensive flavour of life.

To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.

I don't write my standup on paper or anything; but I just organically do it on stage, have an idea, chat it up a little bit. I'm keeping notes. I'm trying to keep up with this world and try to bring out a special every year.

I've always been partial to comedy. I love the idea of working on a comedic scene.

One of the funniest lines in my show was written for me by Alan Bursky. I really want to learn this routine!

I try to see as much dance, theatre and films as I can because all of it feeds me in a way that I need feeding for what I do.