I get recognised a fair bit. It goes up when Peep Show or the sketch show is on the telly or when were doing loads of interviews.
I think that if you just kind of try to throw together a sketch show, but you don't have any real vision for what you want to do with the sketch, I don't think your chances are very good. You know, "Let's just have a sketch show!" You have to do something different with it; you have to reinvent that form every so often.
I've always wanted to do a sketch show. And they've sort of gone out of fashion for a bit, or they've just stopped doing them for whatever reason.
When I was doing the breakfast show, I used to get up at three o'clock in the morning and go fishing before doing the show.
And that's the thing about our show: what are they going to do put on the poster? I don't know. It's always easier when you have someone like Cedric the Entertainer where you can go, "You know this guy. You love this guy. Watch his sketch show." And then people tune in and go, "I though I knew that guy. I don't love that guy in a sketch show."
I think that 'Mr. Show' was a huge influence on me. It was literally the reason I started doing comedy, because I was asked to do a bit at The Comedy Store, and B.J. Porter and I went to see Bob and David - who I'd never heard of - do a live show, which was one of the shows that got them the 'Mr. Show' show.
I've always loved working, doing interviews with the guys on the 'Today' show; everyone's really easygoing, and I always feel comfortable on the show.
I literally get up and get to do the one thing I dreamed about doing every day. And that is being a part of a television show and a radio show that is based in Hollywood.
Standups have all the talk shows, but you never see a sketch group on a talk show. Even on so-called variety shows, if you do see a sketch group or character, it's written specifically for that variety show and usually written around the host of the show or a celebrity.
Where I get bored is when I show up for a shoot and they want me to wear a feather boa. Too obvious a thing for a poof on the telly to do.
The first two, three, four weeks are wasted. I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn't show up invited, eventually she just shows up.
It takes a lot of time to write and put up a sketch show, but that's part of who I am. I don't think that ever goes away, that sensibility - especially coming from the Upright Citizens Brigade. That's just who I am.
I have friends who will say, "Oh you gotta come and see our show." And the first thing I say is, "Is it sketch or improv?" I'll go in a minute to see a sketch show. I love sketch; it's my favorite form. But if it's all improv, they're either very good and it's annoying how good they are and it makes you feel bad, or they're not too good then you're sweating for them. And you don't want to sweat for them, see actors repeating each other's lines.
In the stand-up comedy top, there's room for everyone - if you're good, there's room for everyone. You'll put on your own show - no one casts you. You cast your own show as a stand-up comedian. When you get good at stand-up comedy you book a theater and if people show up, people show up. If people don't show up, people don't show up. You don't have a director or a casting agent or anybody saying if you're good enough - the audience will decide.
We have to do what I would call anomalies: we have to look for strange things that show up once in a while. They don't show up all the time. We have to be scanning the horizon, and doing that, once in a while something will show up that makes a lot of sense, and then you act on it.
For myself, the way that I learned comedy was doing it live for four years, and only after doing sketch for four years did I feel confident enough to be like, 'Okay, I feel good about starting to put stuff on the Internet where it lives forever.' As opposed to one time at a college sketch show where it bombs and we never speak of it again.