Kevin McDonald Quotes

The idea of trying to write sketches the same way we did on Saturday Night Live every day would be damn near impossible.

I love '30 Rock.' It's one of my favorite shows. It's certainly the gold standard of comedy writing.

I hired Tina Fey for 'SNL,' which was certainly a good match. She took off right away there.

Still, on 'Friends', we had some guest-stars who were less than spectacular, not the stunt-casting, but just regular guest-stars, and they weren't particularly great actors, but the material was so good that they scored. It's the writing.

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

If you want good sketches, go pick up Sid Caesar. The best of Your Show of Shows. That's the greatest sketch comedy you'll ever see on television.

I tend to think that there is a sophistication to everything at 'Saturday Night Live,' including the sketches.

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.

Working on the Dave Chappelle show was amazing.

I'm hoping that, over the years, people will come back to 'MADtv' and think it isn't that bad. We had some really talented people on there.

I'd love to do comedy. And I think I have pretty good sense of comic timing, so I'd really like to try that.

I came from the Groundlings Theatre in L.A., and there, you're guaranteed to at least try something out in front of an audience. At 'SNL,' only the best stuff gets picked, and it's taught me a very defined language of comedy. You learn the structure of a joke, which is not something I was very good at beforehand.

I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it's been something that I've always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.

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.

Certainly situation comedy is harder than people who are good at it make it look, but it's fun to do something different.

With comedy, if you write something for me, I'm better at it. I'm not sure I'm so good at improvisational stuff.

Obviously Mad TV, SNL are one kind of show, whereas The State belongs to the kind of show that is entirely conceived written and performed by a set group that existed before the TV show.

I think the hardest thing to do in the world, show-business-wise, is write comedy.

I went to Second City, where you learned to make the other actor look good so you looked good and National Lampoon, where you had to create everything out of nothing, and SNL, where you couldn't make any mistakes, and you learned what collaboration was.

I would love the opportunity to create my own program. I feel like a TV show with a format of monologue with lots of sketches thrown in could be really fun. But you know, that may never happen. Minimally, I just want to keep making stand-up.

Something that's good in the mini-culture of 'Happy Endings' is that the goal is to try and make each other laugh. There is a pretty high bar, and you want to make the writers laugh, and you want to elevate what's already great material - and also, we're like, 'Who is even watching this? Let's just go for it.'

I remember on 'Dr. Katz,' there was no script really at all. There were just scene outlines.

I loved doing 'Frisky Business.' I didn't come up with it. I think John Oliver and the writers did.

I love Jennifer Saunders, the 'Absolutely Fabulous' creator.

Storytelling takes many forms, and even feature-length storytelling is often 90 minutes or two hours. There's nothing stopping us from trying to do that on a week-to-week basis.