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I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.

Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then.

At first, there was a separation of clubs and sketch comedy. Now there's all kinds of comedy, making us one big happy family.

I think we grew up thinking that the funniest things on TV were the old, serious movies. I always liked the Marx Brothers, but the thing that always made us laugh were movies like Zero Hour. That's what inspired us.

In the '50s, audiences accepted a level of artifice that the audiences in 1966 would chuckle at. And the audiences of 1978 would chuckle at what the audience of 1966 said was okay, too. The trick is to try to be way ahead of that curve, so they're not chuckling at your movies 20 years down the line.

I remember being fascinated by the very nature of comedy from the age of 10; why is this funny, and that isn't?

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.

And regardless of the fact that in this country, certainly in the arts, we treat comedy as a second-class citizen, I've never thought of it that way. I've always thought it to be important. The last time I looked, the Greeks were holding up two masks. I've always thought of it not only as having equal value, but as the craft of it, being funny.

Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.