During the first season of 'Human Giant,' I remember the people at MTV were all over us. They hadn't really done a live-action short-film comedy show, so they didn't know what it was going to be, and they were worried. But after that, they let us do whatever we wanted.
When I first started out, I kinda just wanted to do comedy stuff, and thankfully, I had a fair amount of success. I've been able to be on, I think, almost virtually every American sitcom.
We're going for the joke on 'Children's Hospital,' and we're going for the joke on 'The League.' It's fun to go between shows, but you have to mentally remind yourself what show you're on.
There's no way to play it cool when you meet Paul McCartney. You just start sweating; you trip over your words. Everyone kind of reverts back to being a 10-year-old girl. You can't help it. He's one of the only people on planet Earth that everyone knows who he is. Everyone.
The world's so big, it's hard to pick one best friend. I like everyone in Venezuela, but in L.A., I hang out mostly with my comedy friends. Guys like Paul Scheer, Rob Riggle, Owen Burke, Ed Helms, Seth Morris - we all kind of came up together doing comedy in New York.
The cool thing about 'Transparent' is that the show is funny but not like a sitcom is funny. It all comes down to the writing... The writers on that show are so good that you don't have to worry about anything. There are so many things that can go wrong making a TV show or a movie, but if the writing's good, that's, like, 95 percent of it.
My mom has this thing where if I'm doing anything doing dirty or crazy, she sniffs it out and yells at me. But the good thing is my mom doesn't have cable, and so much of the stuff I've done was on cable, so many times she'll miss it. I tend to gloss over the crazier things I shoot.
I think there are a lot of really funny things in 'The Descendants,' but there're a lot of different tones in that movie, in the same way that 'Transparent' has a lot of different tones.
I look up so much to those movies, 'Airplane!' and 'Naked Gun.' I think that stuff is so funny. I grew up just loving all that stuff and sort of idolizing Leslie Nielsen.
I kind of got really lucky a couple of years ago: I got to do a part in 'The Descendants,' in Alexander Payne's movie. I just had a small part, but I got to do a few scenes with my best friend George Clooney.
I have two brothers, and we used to always laugh at oblivious people. People who are so cocky and full of themselves that they just don't realize how stupid they are. And those kind of idiots really make me laugh.
I have a real problem now when I go onto Netflix: it takes me a half hour to pick something out. They've got to figure something out, whether it's their algorithm... Maybe if they had it curated like a video store: 'Will Ferrell recommends this movie' or 'Jennifer Lawrence recommends these 10 movies.'
I hate hospitals. Even if it's a joyful occasion when a friend gave birth. It's like, 'Oh, look at the beautiful baby.... and all the disease on the walls...'
I grew up in the D.C. area, and I used to wear a Redskins jersey just walking around. I just had kind of a bowl haircut for a long time and no sense of style or personal hygiene. But the main thing was the haircut. You know, when you see a haircut of yourself from around 12 or 13, it's rough. I also had really bad acne.
Every other show that I'm on, they're always rushed, and you feel this pressure to hurry up and get out of the scene, but I don't feel that way on 'Transparent.' They like to linger in these scenes.
George Clooney is exactly what you would expect. He's annoyingly good looking, insanely funny, and super smart. So you just feel really inferior around him all the time. You end up feeling really bad about yourself, but you walk away feeling really great about George Clooney.
Conan O'Brien's the best. I'm glad he's in L.A. because I want to move in with him. I was a guest on that show one time to promote 'Human Giant,' and he was the coolest, funniest guy. I was really impressed. He's also eight feet tall and can shoot lightning from his fingertips.
Comedy people like other comedy people. People hang out and are friends and do shows together, and when you get something going like a TV show or a movie, you want your friends to be in it and make it funnier. That's just the way it should be.
Can I play a southern character? You betcha. Can I do the voice of Tourist Dad and Carnival Barker? Ya betcha. Can I do Fix-It Felix? Ya betcha. But I don't want to just play southern characters, so I hide it; I bury it. I tamp it down like a secret. Like a dirty little secret.
'Axe Cop' is an animated show that just started on Fox that is based off the comic book series. And here's the hook: it's written by a 5-year-old. This 5-year-old has a brother who's, like, 28 and is in the business, and the little brother kept coming up with all these awesome stories for this character he dreamed up called Axe Cop.
