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Half of the great comedians I've had in my shows and that I paid a lot of money to and who made my customers shriek were not only not funny to me, but I couldn't understand why they were funny to anybody.

Comedians sometimes forget that there's an audience. You gotta be conscious that you're performing for other human beings.

Comedians work great as actors because they're good under pressure. With a lot of actors, you have to make them feel like everything's going really well to get a good performance out of them. But, if you have a comedian on the set, you can tell them, 'Hey, you really are screwing this up,' and then they just get better.

Every time I've done comedy in, like, traditional comedy clubs, there's always these comedians that do really well with audiences but that the other comedians hate because they're just, you know, doing kind of cheap stuff like dancing around or doing, like, very kind of base sex humor a lot, and stuff like that.

Comedians tend to find a comfort zone and stay there and do lamer versions of themselves for the rest of their career.

When you see a crowd of people jumping up and down at a pop concert, all gloriously in the moment, I don't think you'll ever see a comedian there. They'll all be standing at the sides, looking at how it all fits together.

The only one that got through was Jimmy Walker, because he plays the gas station attendant. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just that we were kind of purists at the time, and we didn't want any comedians.

I was always self-conscious about the fact that I didn't have as much comedy experience as other people at 'SNL,' and I kept thinking they were going to realize they'd made a mistake by hiring me.

The tragedy for comedians is there's nothing more they want than to be liked. We desperately seek approval. It's almost like a personality disorder you can do as a job.

Once you become a comedian, you accept that people are just going to yell stuff at you.