My first acting gig was a skit for Jay Leno on 'The Tonight Show.' It was this Barbie commercial where I got to pour mud all over Barbie dolls and watch the heads pop off. It was so exciting, a lot of fun.
I was a mad, impressionable kid, and every skit from 'The College Dropout' was telling me how I didn't need school.
There have been, like, three auditions in my life where I feel like I'm in a 'Saturday Night Live' skit.
In order to crash the party and be a clown with your own skit, you had to be there for quite a while.
My dad is a big Outlaw country guy - Johnny Cash, Johnny Horton, Waylon, Willie. He loves Elvis and turned me onto Elvis. He was always playing me stuff. He and I would sing and entertain the family. We'd have a little skit on Thanksgiving or whatever.
And I've always loved commercials. I like working out how to organically weave a brand's message into the writing process. It's like an improv show, where comics ask the audience to throw out a word and a skit is built around it.
I actually went to the university as a psychology major, and at orientation, they took us around the campus and took us to the theater for a skit. At the end of the skit, I literally could not get up out of my seat.
If you look at any successful skit comedy show, ever, there is that format of introducing you to the player in the beginning, and then going on to see those sketches.
I think I first got into acting through church. I would go to these church retreats, and they would tell us to make a skit or make a video and present it to the rest of the group. And I started doing that. And I fell in love with it.
In high school, I was doing a skit for forensics and people started laughing, more than I was prepared to deal with. It was a surprise.
