I think the longer a sitcom is on the air, by necessity, the dumber the characters have to get: otherwise, they would be learning and growing, and they won't be funny, so they have to get more and more extremely whatever they are.

New York has surprised me a couple of times. I was a snob about pizza, but I've found one or two places that allow me to forget deep dish for a while.

Most sitcoms and cartoons, especially, you can rely on, because they go back to square one at the beginning of every episode.

I came up through Second City, so I'm used to playing 20 characters every night who are very different from each other. I wouldn't want my career to be any different.

You can analyse a joke and say it's funny because this guy thought this was going to happen, and that happened, and it's surprising. But not all surprising things are funny.

There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy.

The best comedy you can ever have is when you're in the pub with your mates. You can never beat that. That's what I try to recreate in stand-up.

Early on in my career, when I had basically been a sitcom actor for all of these years, and I made my first movies, and they were comedies, and they were successes, it was very important for me to stretch, and 'Parenthood' was one of those films. Even though it was a comedy, there was a great deal of authentic drama in the piece as well.