'Saturday Night Live' will always be this amazing, powerful behemoth, but it's also not the only thing happening in comedy anymore.
Arguably, the first five years of 'Saturday Night Live' were some of the most radical things ever seen on television. When NBC said, 'Okay, you can do a show from 11:30 to 1 on Saturday night,' they didn't think anyone would watch. It was like giving a piece of the candy store to the kids.
'The Simpsons' is like Charlie Parker or Marlon Brando or Richard Pryor: Comedy couldn't go back to the way it was after 'The Simpsons' came out.
I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what the Velvet Underground was to music - it's like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.
When I first started out, 'Time' magazine did an article on what it called 'the sick comics,' and they were myself, Shelley Berman, Nichols & May, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl. We were considered 'sick.'
I loved reading when the critics in New York would say that some of my films reminded them of Lenny Bruce.
Neck-down comedy was no longer valid after the 1980s alternative comedy revolution. Everything became about the cerebral. And with that came positive things - it helped get rid of some of the sexism and homophobia - but it also meant a lot of physical comedy was lost.
When I hit the scene, there was Billy Connolly and Max Boyce. It was all mother-in-law and Irish jokes, and we broke the mould. Now there are thousands of comedians out there, and I don't think I can be above it all.
Comedy Central was a great network, but 'Chappelle's Show' took it to a completely different level. Other shows got bigger because so many viewers were watching the 'Chappelle' reruns. For BET, the 'Real Husbands of Hollywood' has that same potential.
Tina Fey is part of a generation of women who have changed the face of comedy at 'Second City,' 'SNL,' in sitcoms and in film.
I think 'Mean Girls' was a kind of significant movie. It was a very successful comedy, and it was also before 'Bridesmaids,' and it really launched some of today's biggest women in comedy.
I think 'Bridesmaids' has changed things socially and culturally. Before, it was really difficult for women to do scatological humour without seeming gross.
I'm like the Davy Crockett of comedy... after Davy Crockett opened up the West and helped everybody... they didn't need him anymore. I freed a lot of comics... if I never would have done comedy, it would've been a different art form... I'm sure of it.
The idea of a Japanese comedian was not only a rarity, it was non-existent.
I just loved jokes so much as a child. I remember wanting to perform at, like... age seven by reading from a kids' joke book, and my parents being like, 'That's not what standup comedy is,' and me being like, 'Not yet it isn't! I'm going to change the game.'
I was also a big Woody Allen fan. When I got into college I listened to Lenny Bruce but it's taken me years to put him into context historically and really get what he did.
Any comic like myself owes everything he has to Lenny Bruce. He was the originator. The godfather of uncensored American stand-up is clearly Lenny Bruce.
When Rock was on 'Saturday Night Live,' that's what propelled him into the mainstream and made everyone realize, 'Holy crap, this guy is really talented.'
It was really exciting to see how 'Bridesmaids' was accepted and how well it did.
Like leggings, comedies created by women came into vogue in the late 1980s, exploded in the early '90s, went mainstream in the mid-'90s, and were shoved into the back of the closet around 1997.
There really is no Johnny Carson anymore. There is no one place a comedian can appear and explode.
'Bridesmaids,' I think, opened up a door to allow women to show a bunch of different women in different ways of being funny. It was kind of like an arrival moment.
I was about 12 when I heard my first Lenny Bruce record. He was already dead. But it changed my life and really did change the world.
