There are some die-hard 'Chelsea Lately' fans, and that's where the majority of my fans come from. Chelsea is really helping make comedy audiences hipper and edgier.
There was a sea of change in comedy in the late 1950s and '60s. We were dealing with vignettes as opposed to jokes. We were more socially aware.
'Saturday Night Live' will always be this amazing, powerful behemoth, but it's also not the only thing happening in comedy anymore.
I think that for the most part, when I started doing comedy, it had become very commercialized.
I feel like it's a dangerous and dark world if 'Sunny' becomes mainstream comedy. If you were to turn on CBS at 8 o'clock on Thursday and see an episode of 'It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia,' I don't know if I want to live in that world.
Comedy taste changes. It only changes slightly, but there's always a different angle, a different attitude.
The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.
Too often, these comedy guys now only care about getting on and then getting off and getting rich.
There aren't many pratfalls in comedy anymore.
In terms of comedy, there was a Seinfeldian era of comedy that I love but got played out. Seinfeld was great, but then after him it was people acting like Seinfeld and making observations that we felt like we'd kind of heard before, and then you're seeing Seinfeldian comedy in commercials. Suddenly everything is observational funniness.
As I get older, I don't think the world is becoming that funny. Comedy is changing a bit.
Comedy is like music; it builds on itself. Once someone comes up with a theory or a different way of doing things, people start to mimic it on some level. That's why you go back to the guys you loved in the 80s... and it just seems tired now, because it was all foundation.
What they call 'alt-comedy' now is basically what comedy was like in the '80s. People tried different things, and everybody went to the clubs; there was no other place. Then somehow, the clubs became infiltrated by Dice Clay and Carrot Top types.
Hollywood comedy has gotten really silly and absurd, and I like that.
I'd love to write more observational comedy but the stuff people seem to respond to is the most personal so it's snowballed from there.
Taste in comedy, like fashion, changes all the time.
Improv seemed to replace stand-up, which was very big before that. Stand-up comedy was real hot in the late '80s and through the '90s.
Obviously comedic styles do change.
First and foremost when you're doing comedy, you gotta be relevant and applicable to the times that you're living in. When you try and just do comedy about who is dating who and lifestyle jokes, it gets tiring after a while. It's hard to be funny in that realm.
The No 1 priority in TV comedy today is 'don't frighten the horses,' and it's probably No 2 and 3 as well.
Most books that come out with a comedy label seem to be, Eric [Wareheim] and I could have written, "This is our story, and this is who we are," and sort of this navel-gazing, narcissistic approach to comedy we're seeing these days.
It's funny how comedy is, you look at people like French and Saunders, when they started out they were very alternative. A lot of those alternative comedians have ended up being mainstream, they know that longevity is about being mainstream.
Norman Lear was talking about everything in the '70s... race, sexism, all of it. The network comedy really stayed away from that in the 1980s and 1990s.
Hopefully standup will become special again.
I think stand is better now than it's ever been. I think it's the greatest time ever to do standup comedy.
