I've always liked Bernie Sanders. I've always wanted to do a Bernie Sanders impression, but I didn't believe people were familiar enough with him to pull it off. And I've gone down the rabbit hole of doing impressions that not everybody gets. It's not fun.
TV is easier: it's all planned out for you, and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up, but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over. To me, that's more pure.
Dark comedy is very difficult. You have to bring the audience in and push them away at the same time.
If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.
To my family and friends, I'm very definitely a clown. But do you know what? Doing a drama would almost seem easy because I wouldn't need to find that gag in a line.
I often think it can often be very difficult for comedians to revisit the same gag. I think Russell's a bit more than a comedian.
Dave Chappelle asked me to come do his show. I read the script, and I said, 'Has he lost his mind?'
A lot of times, as a clown, you find acting for a reason. It's a way to exercise yourself. If you're funny, you test yourself.
How precise you need to be when you're in a comedy, and the honesty you need and to have those two things meet up and have the execution just right, I always found very difficult.
The whole experience of doing a sitcom is... Telling jokes with such precision is really exciting, but it's also terrifying.
The camera is no one's friend - you have to leave your problems at home and make people laugh. That's never an easy thing to do.
Every laugh is not equal. They come from different places. That's sort of the challenge I go towards, making sure the laughs are for the reasons I want. It becomes a back and forth dance with the audience.
Comedy can be more difficult than drama. It requires more attention to timing. In the theater, you're always dependent on the audience for the energy, but in comedy the feedback you get is more important. You can judge by the quickness and the length of the laugh just where you stand with the audience.
It's harder to be funny from the position of power.
And if you have great writing, it's really easy, but if it's not so great and you have to work a little harder, I could tell where the work needed to be done but comedy is just fun.
A lot of times, comedic actors are discriminated against. People just assume they can't do something other than what they do, rather than thinking, 'Oh, wait - doing what they do normally is really hard.'
In Hollywood I got work but not the right work until Pushing Daisies. Every girl in LA wanted the part of Chuck. I was terrified - I didn't know if I could be funny.
To deliver something deadpan is very difficult; I don't think people know how hard those jokes are.
I suppose anybody just losing it and sputtering curses is pretty funny. But I think it would be more of a challenge, much more of a challenge, to make a cursing dad funny.
