Mel Brooks and David Zucker - there are very few people who know silly, and they're usually hugely intelligent, because you have to be intelligent to get it. Like the Marx brothers. I love it.
I'm not a comedian. I didn't study sketch comedy; my background isn't that.
Improv requires your audience to be informed about what improv is. With stand-up, anybody can sit down and watch stand-up and laugh at jokes.
When you've been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don't know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be.
I'm not a big comedy show-watcher, but I love Ricky Gervais' stuff and Sacha Baron Cohen's things. But I'm not an expert on them. I've seen them once.
My sense of stand up comedy would be so esoteric.
People, when they talk or write about comedy, they don't really get it.
In some sense, Comedy Central has made their audience into comedy connoisseurs.
I thought they may have presumed too much knowledge of certain things for people who are not comedians. Like Montreal. A comic understands what it is and its importance, but someone else may not know about it.
I learned a few things on my own since, and modified some of the things he taught me, but everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from Danny Simon.
When I started stand-up - and this is in the '90s - there was definitely people hadn't watched decades of Comedy Central, where people are really much more educated on stand-up comedy.
I've got to say, I've probably seen a lot more of the Three Stooges than of the Marx Brothers.
I wasn't even a big comedy nerd. A lot of the comedians I know - a lot of my friends are comedians - they knew a lot about comedy growing up.
Your average comedian doesn't know the podcast universe, really.
I think some people's comedy IQ's aren't as high as other people's, so they don't really know what's going on. Or they think they know what's going on, but they don't really.
My mom watches really obscure stuff on IFC. She's a real comedy fan. She knows everything that's going on.
