Jay Harrington Quotes

I'd like to come back because I really miss doing situation comedy.

I've grown as a storyteller, and my comedic timing has gotten better.

I'm not a standup, but I play one on TV.

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.

My job is summer camp. I come and talk and try to make a TV show funny.

It's a lot easier, I think, to be an actor in a movie than to spin a joke on a sitcom.

I've been a stand-up comedian for years, and I can be silly.

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

I really loved what I was doing being creative and being funny as a stand-up comedian.

Stand-up is the foundation to my career. It's what I started out doing.

Sketches have characters, exits, entrances and are vastly different.

If I'm not clear with the character, I can't do anything with it. But once I get that character, the possibilities are endless. When you have such a defined character, I feel like I can actually read the phone book and make it funny.

I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms.

My years on 'SNL' had reconfirmed that what I do best is play for a sort of edgy comedy.

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

I'm probably not very funny. The scripts just don't come in, or the ones that do aren't that good. I suppose I'm just an old drama queen, really.

In Australia, I wrote lots of little plays and put them on, and then I worked on a few different TV shows, like the Australian equivalent of 'SNL.' I would write and perform all of my characters.

Stand-up is very broad strokes, kind of a skeleton of a story or something.

I started out being a stand up and writing my own material. That took me to 'Talk Soup,' where I was writing and performing for TV.

I don't want to sound hoity-toity, but people told me I should watch 'Cheers' because it's very funny. So I watched it, and I just went, 'This is the great show of the universe?' To me, acting is making characters believable, not just doing jokes.

Drama is easy. Comedy's hard.

Being on 'The Office' prepared me for drama. Comedy got me ready, but once you get down to it, they're two sides of the same thing. I mean, the delivery has to be different - in drama, there's more time to breathe, and comedy's all about hitting the joke.

I need to keep my ad-libbing skills honed and make sure I'm able to banter with people and treat topics a bit more light-heartedly. But as a stand-up, first and foremost, my job is to make sure that I can write the routine that hopefully people will talk about when something big happens.

I don't do standup.