A Quote by Thomas Lennon
I'm always doing what I can to look for and just feel out funny things that are happening in the scene and improvise off of them.
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What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.
That word 'funny' always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman - he really tries to be funny. I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I'm sort of reporting.
I feel like my comedy voice is to take the news and everything that's happening and put a funny spin on it or to pick out the things I find funny about it.
If you don't like the scene you're in, if you're unhappy, if you're lonely, if you don't feel that things are happening, change your scene. Paint a new backdrop.
Improv is more than just spitting out a bunch of funny stuff that's unrelated to the material. You have to stay in character, you have to react and respond as the character you're trying to play. You have to service the story, and I think improv training has helped with my listening, responding, and my audition technique. It's sounds so silly, but it's true. Because not only do you improvise during the audition, but once you get the part, they'll say, "Throw away everything. Just improv this scene. Do whatever you want." Someone could panic if they're not used to doing something like that.
Most things I get hired on, I get hired because I improvise something funny, or they just think I look weird.
The truth of it is that people are not going to want to go to improvisational theater if it's not funny. You can succeed in doing all the things you're supposed to do - be truthful to scene - and if it's not funny, I'm telling you that no one's gonna care.
Funny bones, to me, are more important than funny lines. If a comedian is just not likable and doing the lines, you could read them yourself. Whereas if someone [you like] shambles out, and they tell you what a bad day they've had, they don't have to say anything. I love them. I want to hug them because they've been through something. And it comes back to empathy, always empathy.
Robin Williams is great; it's just like having a conversation when you're doing a scene with him really. It's just so relaxed on the set whenever he's around. Also he's just always telling jokes; he's always on. It must be funny for him though because he must think everyone's brain goes so much slower than his. He's working overtime on all these different ideas that pop into his head. Everyone else must feel miles behind!
When I was in improv workshops or doing stand-up or writing comedy with others, or just doing comedy, I just laughed. Funny was funny; I loved to laugh. I always liked people I found generally funny.
If you feel like you can't throw a party, just put a timeline together. There are always little things you can do ahead of time - like washing and pressing linens and bringing out your tableware. Check them off as you complete them.
One of the great things about cricket, and certainly something that I found helpful, was that as soon as you step over the boundary rope you can switch off everything that is happening off the field and focus solely on what is happening out on the pitch.
We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.
I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene. That was the thing about vaudeville: You didn't have to worry about the beginning and ends of these things.
That's a big part of my life - doing things that I'm not prepared to do. Doing things that I don't know how to do, and keep doing them until I get good at them. I always try to put myself out of my comfort zone and out of my depth, and hopefully somewhere along the line I'll catch up.
I'm really bad at doing my hair, so the front always looks a little bit off. I think that the front is the most important in terms of the whole look. So, because the front layers just get awkward sometimes, I feel like I have to clip them back.
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