I was considered by my peers to be a good comedian. So that's all I ever strived to do was get some recognition from my peers.
Our first gig was a battle of the bands. We did 45 minutes of comedy and never played a note - and we won!
When I first started out, I kinda just wanted to do comedy stuff, and thankfully, I had a fair amount of success. I've been able to be on, I think, almost virtually every American sitcom.
I've had a lot of success with comedy films.
For my first gig, I got $75. I could make money being funny, so I pursued it as a career and have turned it into a lucrative business.
I have only been funny about seventy four per cent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four per cent of the time.
I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track.
If you're trying to be an actor, sometimes you get lucky, and you end up on 'The Office', but if you don't, and you know that you have something to say, it's really, really fortunate to be able to get to write and star in your own comedy.
I hired Tina Fey for 'SNL,' which was certainly a good match. She took off right away there.
Comedy is the only profession where love from a stranger is better than love from a family member. You need to perform for strangers to see if you're really funny. If they laugh and cheer, it's the greatest thing in the world.
Comedy works best when people recognise themselves.
You can be good at comedy, which means you'll be given spots, but beyond that it is luck that pushes you to the next level. There are loads of brilliant comedians who haven't had the breaks, and plenty of average comedians who have.
Everyone was doing alternative comedy. I thought I'd distinguish myself by just telling jokes, with differing degrees of success.
I wasn't necessarily looking to do comedy on TV, but I don't think it's an accident that I ended up on 'Community.'
I did so many open mics. I would write jokes on Twitter constantly, and then slowly, over time, open mics turned into shows. If you can get a joke to work at an open mic, it's a good joke.
A sign now of success with a certain audience when you do a short comedy piece, anywhere, is that it gets on YouTube and gets around. It's always something you're thinking about unconsciously.
I'm most proud of my career as a touring comedian and musician. I love doing television, I love selling records, but when I'm at these venues with hundreds of people, and they're all sitting listening to my music and my jokes, I feel like I could die that day, and I would be happy.
The American audience has really opened up to women being A.) funny and B.) kinda crude. 'Bridesmaids' is R-rated, and I think it was a major coup for women to have an R-rated comedy that did really well. Same as 'Bad Teacher.'
I like the purity of stand-up because it is all about whether people laugh at your jokes. Either they laugh or they don't.
I thought 'Borat' was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn't some studio-produced script with 14 writers.
It is not necessary to have a good sense of humour personally to do comedy well.
The thing that is incredibly helpful is that we screen the movies and we ask the audience if they like it or not and we ask a lot of questions and do testing on the movies. For comedies, at least, it's very helpful. If they're not laughing and they don't say that they loved it, then I have screwed up.
I started 'Will & Grace' when I was 39, and Nick started 'Parks and Rec' when he was 39. And he's really on the same trajectory; it's all happening with the same timing. It's so funny to see it all happening again.
The comedy seeds were planted before the Marine seeds. The thought of comedy never happening was scary. When you have a plan, you never know what will happen.
The best comedy I ever did was when people didn't know who I was.
