A Quote by Jessi Klein
Basically, I was always very interested in comedy, but I was much more sort of academic. And then, after college, loaded with my art history degree, I decided to go work at Comedy Central as a temp.
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When I first got to New York, Comedy Central was the only place to go if you weren't on HBO or network. And then FX, Adult Swim, and other sort of ventures came up, and all of a sudden there were other places to go, and I think Comedy Central is making a concerted effort to become a place where smart, funny weirdoes can come and do their stuff.
After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that's where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.
I think I'm one of those guys who was sort of always in comedy. I thought of myself - and other people seemed to think of me - as funny from a very young age. I was a very young comedy nerd and I even did sketch comedy in high school and college. I wrote and shot sketches on video and acted in them.
I acted in high school and studied at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford for one summer. I minored in theater, and I was always acting growing up and stuff, but really, I was just more interested in the comedy of it all. So for me, it's always comedy, and then acting is just one medium of comedy.
It's very hard to find a good comedy. I prefer doing comedy far over anything else because I think they're actually more profound. But finding a good one and a great ensemble is very difficult to do and I'm delighted that in these particular times there is so much interest in comedy and that comedy is having so much success.
I was bad at sports and picked last every day. I couldn't quite figure out what my role was in the social order, so I decided I was interested in comedy. And what was then interesting was, nobody else was interested in it at all. I didn't find one friend who was interested in comedy until I moved to California and met other comedians. And suddenly I knew hundreds of people who knew as much about SCTV as I did. But it took me 20 years to find those people.
I had always drawn, every day as long as I had held a pencil, and just assumed everyone else had too…Art had saved me and helped me fit in…Art was always my saving grace…Comedy didn’t come until much later for me. I’ve always tried to combine the two things, art and comedy, and couldn’t make a choice between the two. It was always my ambition to make comedy with an art-school slant, and art that could be funny instead of po-faced.
Because I was familiar with Taika's Watiti work and there's a very subversive, funny streak amongst all of them. I don't think he turned [Hunt for the Wilderpeople] into a sort of drama, there's too much dark material underneath it for it to be a comedy; it wasn't designed to be a comedy. I think it's a comedy... I think it's a drama that's funny; which is different.
A rap is a tweaked version of comedy, because comedy came first. People weren't spitting before they were doing comedy. Comedy has been relevant for years. It's the same art form, pretty much. Discovering that and applying it, I think that has made my stand-up better.
In college, I didn't perform so much, but when I graduated is when I discovered Second City. Then I realized, 'Oh, there are people who can focus on comedy and especially improvisational comedy and make a career out of it.'
I'm very interested in trying to make comedy shows that are a bit bigger, more theatrical, more of a "show." Some people might say I'm trying too hard, but that's a compliment to me. I like to inject a bit of production value and flair to comedy, or at least to my little corner of comedy.
I always loved comedy, but in my mind, it wasn't a viable career option. I always thought, 'You go to college. You get a job, and then you pay off college.'
There's comedy in tragedy, and tragedy in comedy. There's always light and dark in most jobs. Whether it's framed as a comedy, drama or tragedy, you try to mix it up within that. You can work on a comedy and it's not laugh-a-minute off set. You can work on a tragedy that's absolutely hilarious.
I love a good comedy, but the slapstick sitcom belly-laugh sort of comedy - the multicam thing - is not really where my interests lie. I'm very interested in single-cam, in intimate portraits. I like it when comedies have a little bit of realism and a little bit of darkness to them. It makes them more palatable and more relatable and grounded.
The connection between pathos and broad comedy is very tight. But you do far more work in a comedy scene than you do in a straight scene. It's much harder.
The Muppet Show is very much seen as an English thing. So for us in the U.K. it is one of the treasures of the history of children's TV and of comedy basically.
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