There used to be an old bad joke. I hope it's not so much a good joke anymore. 'Everybody's from Scranton; no one's in Scranton.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We tend to prefer candidates that don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.
Apparently 'The Office' plays in Brazil. Who would've thought that Brazilians would identify with a bunch of pasty white Scrantonians in a paper company? But the Brazilians I've met have really loved the show.
I couldn't deliver a joke if you asked me to. It would have to be live and spontaneous. And that's what I was able to have in New York, at 9 o'clock in the morning, and people all over the country seemed to respond to it.
I've always been terrible on regular sitcoms with lots of jokes. I don't know how to tell jokes.
I detest jokes - when somebody tells me one, I feel my IQ dropping; the brain cells start to disappear. But something is funny when the person delivering the line doesn't know it's funny or doesn't treat it as a joke. Maybe it comes from a place of truth, or it's a sort of rage against society.
Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.
If we were making a cop comedy about bad cops or cops who were comically bad at the jobs, then the jokes would be more hijinks and more like slapstick.
I had a lot of bad jobs but the one big internship I had is I interned for 'SNL' when I was 21 years old and that was the joke. You intern there and you think man, I'm going to be with the writers and the great comedians. Then you're getting everybody sandwiches and then the doors close and then all the great creatives are doing the work.
Every joke in 'The Office' was unexpected. I cringed; I could hardly look. I cried with laughter.
The people in New York - their humor is on a level that goes, uh, very deep, you know?