David Morse Quotes

I'm doing comedy development at National Lampoon.

Most development doesn't make it to series. So you want the writer and director to have a really good experience with development because, if it doesn't work out, you want to work with them again. You have to know their work really well, know the drafts really well, and when you give notes, you need to have really thought them through.

When you have a writing partner and you're writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.

I share an office with Jason Sudeikis, and I'm friends with him, so I end up writing for him a lot.

When I give notes on a script, I say, 'Guys, I may drift, but it's part of the process.' So I'm aware that I'm drifting, but I'm grabbing a lot of stuff.

I think writing in a group, even though it can be a challenge - you have to be on your toes all the time - is the way the best comedy gets written. It's very, very collaborative. A lot of comedy writers are definitely introverted nerds.

I've been writing the show with Nigel Coan, the director of 'Luxury Comedy', and Tom Meeten. Three's good. With two, you can lock horns a bit. On your own, you're not sure whether what you've made is any good. I don't know how people write novels. I would go mad.

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.

I think comedy is the hardest actual form of writing there is.

That's the best advice I can give - when you're trying to write a comedy, first write a drama, and then make it funny.

I always remember writing a page of jokes for a comedian and handing it to him backstage at a club and he read it and then took his cigarette lighter and lit the page on...

There’s a need to perfect things in a writers’ room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It’s a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.

The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.

Comics know that they do best. They might not be best to rewrite to another person's comedy, but they know what is best for them. Luckily, I come from both a writing background - with 'Workaholics' - and I also act in what I've written.

It's terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but observably not.

I loved the idea that I could write a joke and someone else would have to take the risk of performing it.

When I talk to Ryan Murphy or Ali Adler about my past or things in my personal life, occasionally pieces of that will end up in the script, and I think that's true of everybody. It's true of that entire writer's room, certainly of Ryan and Ali. I think that he writes really well for actors, for his actors, and he writes to their strengths. I always feel very well taken care of with him.

I don't remember what script it was, but at the Monday table read, the [opening] teaser didn't work.We went back and had to think of a new teaser, and [after] four hours, five hours, we weren't landing on anything.And it was probably Glen [Charles] who said, "What are we, cowards?" You had to do it, no matter how long it took.

Every joke is an experiment. When you sit, alone, and write a script, or just a joke, you really have no idea if it will succeed.

I wake up to an email from the writers with the new script, and I always get so excited because I know it'll be better all-around than the script from the week before.

What it is is that comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write. Anyone can write, and then you leave it to special effects to make it look good. But comedy, you've got to do some writing.

On these feature films there are people on the staff who can draw 100 times better then I can, and animate better then I can, and light better then I can, write comedy better then I can. I basically am in the middle of kind of a creative typhoon and I'm just kind of talking the film up on to the screen. Minute to minute, meeting by meeting, day by day.

Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.

My favorite way of working is if somebody gives me a piece of music, because I'm quite limited as a player, so it's my favorite thing if somebody gives me a piece of music, and then I can write lyrics and melodies.

I like writing for other people. I love it. It's great because you write it and then you hand it off to someone else. But in terms of directing, anything I direct will be something I've written or re-written. I'm in no crazy rush to direct.