I can't imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.
I've become a writer, an actor, producing films, and having a TV show. I'm pretty successful and proud of it.
If you are going to be a writer, you have to have self-belief, every writer gets rejections, they say the difference between a successful and unsuccessful writer is an unsuccessful writer gives up, if you keep going you will succeed.
Anyone watching '30 Rock' always knew Tina Fey was playing a fictionalized version of herself, a workaholic comedy writer who also plays one on TV. She's the boss; Liz Lemon just works here.
I am not doing comedy because the genre is successful. If that was the case, I would have done a run-of-the-mill comedy film. I set my own trends. I like to give something new and different to my audiences. I want to do the kind of comedy that has been missing till now.
I don't want to be a TV star for the sake of being on TV. I want to have a TV show that's based around my comedy.
I've done a movie and a TV series, and someday I'd like to do a successful movie and a successful TV series. That would be nice.
Comedy lives on in the web and TV, but nobody's pressing comedy albums anymore.
In the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.
I want to do more comedy... I've done a couple TV shows that had some comedy going on.
I don't think of myself as a producer. In television, it's part of the business - if you progress and become successful as a writer, you're called a writer-producer. What that means is that you have a lot of say in casting and behind-the-scenes stuff. But I'm just a writer.
I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose - short pieces for my blog - because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy!
At the end of the day I'm writing comedy. If you get too realistic as a comedy writer with your disasters, it stops being funny.
With comedy especially, it feels like such a clear-cut thing to be a writer-director. There is so much nuance and tone in a comedy that it's hard to contextualise it in a script.
I don't know what it must be like to be a writer in general, but to be a comedy writer, it's got to be something - it's a very special kind of talent.
It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.