Learning to be your natural self in front of five cameras and a silent studio takes time. Trying to be funny under duress is probably a lot like trying to play golf relaxed under pressure.
When you're pitching movies, sometimes you know what the idea is, but you fully don't know the dimensions of it.
Initially, I think I was eager to get off Staten Island and go away for school, that kind of thing. Then what you do maybe 10 years after that, you start maybe appreciating all the great things about the place you grew up. You can go back and enjoy it because you don't have that angst or sense of struggle to get away anymore.
I chose to buy a house in Montauk because it has a sleepier vibe than the rest of the East End. I also felt that I would run into city people in East Hampton and wanted more of a buffer.
Almost all the golf courses in Staten Island double as something else.
Before I went to a meeting at the 'Harvard Lampoon,' I had no idea that there was even a comedy magazine at Harvard, let alone that you could write comedy potentially for a living.
When you contribute to food banks or give money that goes to having meals delivered, you're meeting the most basic need. It's such a direct way to help.
Having Twitter on your phone is like being with a journalist that hates you 24 hours a day. Anything you say on that can be spun. Truly, that's what you have to think of it as.
I did go to college with him, but everyone's always like, 'Did you meet Mark Zuckerberg? Did you hang out with him?' and I'm like, 'No,' because he was in a lab creating Facebook, and I was, like, learning about alcohol. Well, we did go to school, and I think I'm not really benefiting from that relationship in any way.
Whatever I did, I always gravitated toward trying to be funny. If I was with friends, we were joking around. If I wrote for the newspaper, it would be a humor column. If I acted, I wanted to do comedy.
When I started at 'SNL,' I was lucky to start early. So now starting on 'Update,' I am the age when most people are when they start doing that. It feels like a different world and capacity, like starting over in another challenge. A heightened challenge.
I always tell people, when they ask me what to do to be a writer or to be a performer, the key is to go to a place where there are a lot of other people who are trying to do the same thing as you and taking it very seriously.