Quotes About Improv

I'd like to do 'Saturday Night Live.'

I'm good with a script.

When I did 'Scrubs', we were able to always do one as scripted, and then we got to play a little bit and do some stuff. I thought that was pretty loose, but then coming on 'Happy Endings,' it's even looser.

I did Second City, and Nia Vardalos also did Second City, so I knew her from there.

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.

I can make anything in the room funny in a few seconds.

I do enjoy working with Ryan although he owes me money.

My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.

The way I was brought up in improv was that any idea you have is not as good as your partner's idea, so if I see someone else initiating at the same time I am, I just defer to them because I assume their idea is going be better. And hopefully, they're doing the same with me.

I think there's something really freeing about improv, that it's a collective, creative, in-the-moment piece. That's really exciting and really frustrating, because it's there and gone. There's an amazing interaction with the audience that happens because they are very much another scene partner.

We come from Second City where you're taught if you make your fellow stage partner look good, that makes you look good.

One thing my old improv teacher taught me is when you're not in the improv scene and you're standing back watching your partners, you ask, 'What does the scene need?'

I took a Groundlings class in my 20s, and I was terrible. They didn't even pass me to the next level.

If a director brings a guy to their movie who does improv, they've got to let him do what he does - otherwise it's like bringing Michael Jordan to your basketball team and telling him to just pass the ball and don't shoot.

I love and enjoy vocal performance, but I also have a huge passion for comedy and improv.

I'm a huge sketch comedy fan, and I think my love of sketch is reflected in my stand-up in that I do a lot of vignettes and voices and characters.

I like to play the guy that has no self-awareness.

I'm always in awe of improvisers that make something out of complete nothing.

I'm more comfortable doing a character than being myself.

Comedy has no rules, per se.

My brother was an improviser. He's now a lobbyist, but he used to perform improv in the city when he was in high school, and one of the funniest guys I know to this day.

I went to a French immersion school, and French-Canadian improv is a big thing, and we had an improv team at school, and 12 of us would get up and make things up against other elementary schools. I'd always wanted to perform, and that was just another extension of it.

I love creating characters that are ridiculous and flawed. To me, the most important thing about comedy is the joy it can bring to the performers and the audience alike. I love making people laugh and not over-thinking things. Some of my favorite moments are when I am doing an improv scene with friends, and I can't stop laughing during it.

What I love about improv so much is that we are all discovering it at roughly the same time. The performers are maybe, what, a half second ahead of the audience? There's very little lag time. I think of a thing, I say it, then the audience is laughing and it all happened in a second.