Quotes from John Mulaney

Comfort is everything. You start doing something and you want it to be perfect right away, but most babies are born ugly and then they shake it out and you get beautiful toddlers.

I'm pretty self-critical about everything I've ever done: stand-up, 'SNL.'

I plan to join the 'SNL' band as a maraca player and stand behind saxophonist Lenny Pickett. That way they will at least cut to me before commercial breaks. I'll be sure to look right into camera.

I never turn on the crowd. Sometimes, you think it's a terrible show, and then afterward, sometimes people say they really liked it. So turning on the crowd is only going to alienate the few people who might like it. What do I do in that situation? Get through it.

When you have something that you did so many jobs on and were so front and center on, and then people dislike it, you want to learn lessons from it, and you want to move on, and you want to move on too fast.

Nick Kroll, A.D. Miles, Chelsea Peretti - those were the people I was always doing open mics with.

You can't always see both sides of the story. Eventually, you have to pick a side and stick with it. No more equivocating. You have to commit.

It's important to remember that life is a joke, and that outlook grants a lot of perspective, but I don't think comedy should change and become political due to other things. It should just laugh at that cosmic joke that life is all the time.

The difficulty of getting a movie made through a major studio is so extreme that when a movie comes out, everyone should give it four stars because it was accomplished.

Sometimes I - with comedy, it's like someone liking you in high school. They either do, or they don't. And when they don't, they don't. And that's it. There are no appeals. You show up, and you're like, 'Hi! I'm -' and you stumble, and they're like, 'It's over.'

You can do good work simply staying up all night and eating nothing but junk food, but probably not in the long term.

My standup persona is like I'll heighten things, but I'm observing the world as it is in sort of a heightened emotional state.

I like making fun of myself a lot. I like being made fun of, too. I've always enjoyed it. There's just something really, really funny about someone tearing into me.

I kind of thought, wouldn't it be funny to take a swing at being on the weird side of mainstream?

Things have to be funny first, and if they want to have a point, that's awesome.

I remember writing standup jokes without having done sets. But as soon as I did my first set, it didn't matter. Everything I thought would work didn't work. And everything I was iffy on was funny.

If something is very, very funny but possibly controversial, if it's truly funny, then it's worth doing. Things aren't worth doing for the sake of being controversial.