Quotes from Jonathan Krisel

With all the outlets, if you have a strong comedic voice, there's a venue to do your thing. It's a bit of a meritocracy, where the best stuff rises to the top.

Bands on tour are very good cultivators of what's the avant-garde of comedy.

When people feel vulnerable, they make slapstick decisions.

There's a good family of actors in 'Portlandia.' It's a small community with people who pop up again and again. The show's a little weird show, and you want to grow with the people who are in it, like Dana who plays the chicken waitress, and Ellen who was the adult babysitter.

When you make a pilot, you've never seen the show before; you don't know what it is.

I want to work with extremely, genuinely charismatic people.

You can use cheap technology to get a great look.

You can tell a lot about a person by what comedians they like.

You see a lot of comedic content that's not funny, and you can tell that it's supposed to be funny, but it's actually not funny.

I like dry-to-the-bone stuff. I don't know what it is. I was raised on PBS showing weird British comedies.

Portland is a place where everyone closes their eyes and crosses their fingers and hopes for a better community. They keep it small and local, and usually they think if they just make great coffee, it's the best thing for the neighborhood.

I loved 'Welcome to the Dollhouse.' That was one of the most influential movies ever. You know that genre with the nerdy girl, and she redeems herself in the end. Like 'Napoleon Dynamite.' And in 'Welcome to the Dollhouse,' she doesn't. She sucks. It's like, that's what's real. That's what's heartbreaking.

With comedy, I've always had a pretty good sense of what I like and how to execute it well, but drama has its own rules.

On 'Baskets,' I'm not sure what the demographic is.

Certain shows, when it's all comedy, it's like when you eat something that's too sweet and it just tastes gross. You need that salted caramel.

I'm not a big 'scripted comedy' person necessarily. I'm open for wherever comedy can be found.

I went to film school, and I came in when video art was king, weird stuff was king, and there, you don't have a script as your bible.

In Portland, it rains all the time - but who cares? That's not funny. That's not universal.

I always want to push myself.

Once the big lights come in, you can feel self-conscious. How can you capture the scene without ruining it and freezing people up? You keep it small and lean.

I think any person who is starting out in a creative endeavor is not going to be good at it right out of the gate.

There's a thing in comedy where you take one step into a bad idea, but if you take 10, then it becomes a good idea again.

I look at a show like 'Roseanne.' That's super influential on me. It's very funny, very real, with real problems. That was a big influence, and I don't know if you see that all the time in the network world.

There is no 'recycle too much.' That's an oxymoron.