Comedy Process Quotes

Reviews are written by people who don't understand the process of sitcom. I don't read reviews of anything. I go by word of mouth.

When you put comedy in the room it's supposed to be in, you start learning it's a process. Not everything is a home run. You have singles, and you ground a few out. But ultimately, it's the journey you have with that comedian, whether it's ten minutes or an hour.

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.

'SNL' doesn't have a traditional writer's room. On Monday, there's the pitch meeting with the guest, and I played that like it was stand-up.

I don't think my comedy is that political. It's more social. But whatever. When you make comedy and you do stand-up, you work alone. Movies have to go under so much scrutiny. A stand-up special is a vision, and a movie is a consensus in a lot of ways.

When you do comedy, the audience is not your boss. They are your collaborators and when you collaborate with someone you don't have to listen to everything they think or say. Sometimes you're not getting the laughs you want or at the place you want but that doesn't mean it's not funny. It means you haven't explored it enough. I'll get laughs in the places I don't want them and that makes me realize the direction I want to go in.

What I didn't realize is that the writing process for comedies is that you do your table read, and if you aren't funny on that first day during the table read, they take your jokes away and give them to somebody else.

There's a thing in comedy where you take one step into a bad idea, but if you take 10, then it becomes a good idea again.

So many times I've done a CD, and then the week after I record it, I've got this new tagline that's killer. And it makes the whole bit better. It happens all the time. But that's just the process of comedy.

When we started doing sketch comedy - actually in '91 in Chicago - making your own videos, which we did, took forever. It would take like, a year to make one video. It was just so difficult to edit and just do everything you had to do.

Sometimes when you're doing a comedy, the director will yell out "alts" and then the director gets the first laugh.