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I suppose some studio executive would say it's death for a comedy if people aren't all laughing in the same places, but I find with my movies that people laugh in very different places. I can't control it.

With comedy, it's really hard to tell if something's working on the page - you really need the actors to bring it alive. The scariest part is if people will laugh or not.

Usually, like, on 'Mean Girls,' the task that Tina Fey and I set for ourselves was we wanted to maintain a comic intensity throughout the movie, where people just don't really get a break from laughing. And if they do, it's for a brief emotional scene, and then we're going to once again try to knock them on their heels again with comedy.

When you're a comedic actor and you're used to just getting laughs, it's kind of scary to go serious, even for a second.

It's tricky: with comedy in any movie, you're hungry for an audience to embrace a movie and be a part of an experience that's comedic; it's the easier way to go in some ways.

You always draw on your experiences with live audiences to know how to do comedy on films. You're working for a laugh that may or may not come six months later, but you're working in a vacuum at the time you are doing it.

Comedy is surprises, so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny.

In point of fact, I'm not sure there are too many comedies with laugh tracks anymore. Most of what you hear is live studio audience laughing as a show is filmed. If this prompts you to wonder who those actual human beings are who are laughing at some of this stuff, that is a mystification I share.