Q:How did you get started in Improv?
A:I went to Northwestern in Evanston, near Chicago, and we had a really good Improv troupe at school. I saw them my freshman year and really wanted to be a part of that. By my senior year, I was going down to Chicago and taking Improv classes and after I graduated, I just stuck around Chicago doing that.
Q:What did you aspire to be when you were in college ?
A:I was a radio/tv/film major, and I wanted to be a movie director. But film was really hard. It was a lot more like science than I wanted it to be. As I started improvising more, I thought ‘I’m going to try to do this until they tell me to stop’ and that was kind of my plan. I guess by senior year of college, I was doing my last impression before graduation, and I was thinking, ‘I don’t want to stop doing this just because I graduate’.
Q:What’s it like working on SNL?
A:Mainly it’s great. The greatest thing about it is that it’s live and it sort of resets itself every week like if you were writing for episodic TV, you would have to build an arc of a season and follow certain story lines and write for certain characters which I would imagine is incredibly hard. Whereas the hard part for us, is that we have a new star every week that we have to write around, but it’s a really fun puzzle and it’s incredibly challenging. So that’s what I like the most is that it constantly refreshes itself.
Q:You’ve been working on SNL for nine years and as head writer for four years, how do you keep things fresh?
A:Well, for me as I started as a cast member, you know, your responsibility as a cast member is to write for yourself, like take care of yourself, put the best version of you forward. I did that and that was all well and good, but being a head writer is way more interesting to me, because it’s about the whole show and is a far more macro outlook, taking care of different cast members and helping them with their ideas. So in a lot of ways, four years ago, I felt like I got a new job and three years ago, I got another new job which was doing Update, which I prefer way more than being in sketches.
Q:Do you find it more challenging to be a writer than to be in the sketches or which one do you like better?
A:I think it was more challenging for me to be a cast member, just because I don’t feel like I have those skill sets in the same way I do as a writer. I was constantly amazed by what the other people in our cast were able to do that I was unable to do, but hopefully as a writer, there are things that I can do that they can’t.
Q:Which do you like the best: SNL, stand-up or movies?
A:Definitely not movies, because they are so slow. You get so spoiled at SNL, because it’s so fast. You build a whole 90 minute show in a week. You start on Monday and people don’t even have ideas yet. You start writing and they don’t even start building the sets until Wednesday night. It’s crazy. And so that break-neck pace is like if you did a lot of crack cocaine and then you were like, now I’m just going to do salad. Because it just moves so fast, you just get such a rush. But I really like stand-up, because it’s a different kind of night. It’s you for an hour. You just kind of strip down. It’s not about sets and costumes, it’s purely you for an hour.
Q:How do you come up with material for your stand-up?
A:Just different observations. I feel like the more outlets you have for comedy, the more you can find places for everything. There are a lot of times where you come up with a funny observation that would work in stand-up that would make a terrible sketch and vice versa. Or you come up with a story that would make a great screen play, but not a great sketch so as a writer, I’m really happy that I have a lot places to put my ideas.
Q:What are your future plans?
A:I’m in no rush to leave SNL, so I’ll be there for a couple more years and then, the funny thing is that someday I would maybe like to direct, which is the thing I didn’t want to do, you know, 10 or 15 years down the road, so I’m working my way towards that.