The comedies are not a million laughs on the set. Its business and the dramas are business as well, really. When I'm writing it I struggle more with drama because I started out in comedy.
Doing drama is, in a sense, easier. In doing comedy, if you don't get that laugh, there's something wrong.
To my family and friends, I'm very definitely a clown. But do you know what? Doing a drama would almost seem easy because I wouldn't need to find that gag in a line.
I love live theater. I get my rocks off by doing stand-up, and I am the only actor. But to show up eight times a week and not have that time for myself; to do someone else's lines? When I work for Wendy Wasserstein or Terrence McNally, Neil Simon or even Shakespeare, I do not have the right to change the lines.
I love comedy, but it's dramas that stick with me.
When you make a drama, you spend all day beating a guy to death with a hammer, or what have you. Or, you have to take a bite out of somebody's face. On the other hand, with a comedy, you yell at Billy Crystal for an hour, and you go home.
After 20 years of doing comedy, I find dramatic work more challenging.
I don't know if I even consider myself a comedian really - I do comedic acting in some films and dramatic in others.
The great amount of fun that I have is I can cast dramatic actors to play comedic roles, and I can cast comedic actors to play dramatic roles because, really, there's no such thing. There's just actors.
The great thing with comedy is that I don't memorize ahead of time like I did on 'Breaking Bad.' With 'Breaking Bad,' I wanted to know those words inside and out, really have my lines down so I could say them verbatim. But with comedy, you keep it a lot more loose.
Comedy can be harder because if you aren't making the audience laugh, they're going to turn on you quicker. They'll go along with mediocre drama more than they'll go along with mediocre comedy.
There's certain people you want to see in comedies; there's certain people you just want to see in dramas. Not that there aren't individuals who do both, but it's not everyone.
I had to choose, I'd be so sad. They are flip sides of the same coin. I love both comedy and drama.
Women and minorities have excelled beautifully in comedy, but very few women are the lead in a drama.
Society would be better off if Billy Eichner started getting more dramatic work.
My experience - and it might be just the kind of comedy that I do, which is usually sketch comedy - is that there's a lot more texture and subplot in drama than in comedy.
I would say I've actually done a lot more comedy than I've done drama. It's weird the way that worked out, because when I came out of theater school I took myself way too seriously, so it's kind of ironic that I ended up sort of going down the comedy path.
There is a little bit of snobbery with casting, and unless you're a really successful comedian like Ruth Jones, you don't get to be in the drama side of things.
I’m very curious in regards to "The Hateful Eight" specifically about the blocking of the movie. Because in comedies, we don’t block. We basically like have to position the actors’ bodies in the way that is most conducive to filming both of them simultaneously.
One thing that bugs me in comedy is when somebody does a fake cry, you know, like they fake cry in a comedy. But in a drama they'll really cry. That bugs me.
There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn't comedy be treated as seriously as drama?
I get asked all the time if I want to do more dramatic acting, and I really doubt that dramatic actors get asked if they want to do more comedies. I don't really know why that is.
I came from a very different sort of background and pedigree from the people who were on "The Daily Show". I was an actor. I was sort of - the irony is that I've done as much dramatic work in my career as comedic work and I don't really think of myself as a comedian.
With comedy, it's a combination of knowing the comedic beat was good - it made you laugh, it made people on the crew laugh. With drama, you do something deep and if your stuff was really effective, the ultimate result is silence. Silence is not necessarily... that would also be the result if you sucked.
I like comedy a lot, and dramatics show how I can really act. Because a lot of people can do comedy - I'm not saying it's easy, but dramatics are very hard.
