It's been very funny to try to act like an adult. Even getting dressed. Every day, I'm like, 'Should I wear a blazer and walk around with an umbrella? Do I carry a briefcase?' Because I'm trying to be some image of the adults I saw on TV growing up.
— John Mulaney
I have too many influences to name. I like a wide variety of stuff, which I think has been helpful. I liked every comedian I saw on TV growing up in the '80s. Every comedian.
Nick Kroll, A.D. Miles, Chelsea Peretti - those were the people I was always doing open mics with.
If someone had written a review saying, ''Oh, Hello' is stupid,' we would have said, 'Yeah, it is. You're absolutely right.' That people liked it was extremely cool.
Being president looks like the worst job in the world.
My childhood was completely dominated by Bill Clinton and the OJ trial. I don't think we had a family dinner where one didn't come up.
I like to pace onstage.
Things have to be funny first, and if they want to have a point, that's awesome.
I have found that people who really want to work at 'Saturday Night Live' and pursue it get pretty close. You have to be funny - but everyone who works there, it was their dream to work there. So it's kind of nice in that way - there's a lot of people who say, 'I just always wanted to do this, and now I'm doing it.'
The more you do stuff, the better you get at dealing with how you still fail at it a lot of the time.
All my money is in a savings account. My dad has explained the stock market to me maybe 75 times. I still don't understand it.
I like making fun of myself a lot. I like being made fun of, too. I've always enjoyed it. There's just something really, really funny about someone tearing into me.
I look back on being 17 and think, 'Oh my God, how did I not die?'
I never turn on the crowd. Sometimes, you think it's a terrible show, and then afterward, sometimes people say they really liked it. So turning on the crowd is only going to alienate the few people who might like it. What do I do in that situation? Get through it.
Most open-mic experiences I had were okay.
I still like to turn on the TV and watch whatever's on.
My dad is and was very funny and had a really dry sense of humor, which, as a kid, seemed un-fun. But in retrospect, it's kind of hilarious.
I'm pretty self-critical about everything I've ever done: stand-up, 'SNL.'
I never knew you were supposed to push off of your feet when you walked. And I tried it, and I walked much faster.
If something is very, very funny but possibly controversial, if it's truly funny, then it's worth doing. Things aren't worth doing for the sake of being controversial.
You can do good work simply staying up all night and eating nothing but junk food, but probably not in the long term.
I plan to join the 'SNL' band as a maraca player and stand behind saxophonist Lenny Pickett. That way they will at least cut to me before commercial breaks. I'll be sure to look right into camera.
Stand-up for me is just my opinions on things, so it wouldn't be as fun translated into a sketch. Nor would a sketch be as fun if it were me standing there saying it.
As I got into high school and after puberty, I was a little more inward. I was a real extrovert when I was little, but I don't know, I just got quieter... With my friends, I was still an extrovert.
I just watched a ton of comedy and saw a ton of different styles, and eventually you think, 'Oh, yeah, I could be like that.'
I love comedians that dive into politics. I personally don't feel comfortable, with my background, weighing in unless I have a take that I think is funny enough that I would put it in front of an audience.
I don't make plans anymore. So I'm not living minute to minute.
I've seen most of the major, important shows, but I watch them all at once, like movies, so my TV relationships are still with shows like 'Law And Order: SVU,' 'Shark Tank,' and HGTV.
Bill Clinton fascinates me because, at the time, it seemed like his shenanigans and the people after him were the biggest political stories you could ever imagine. I remember when the 'Starr Report' was published in the newspaper, all of us were reading it in the high-school cafeteria, and a dean started taking the newspapers away from us.
Sometimes I - with comedy, it's like someone liking you in high school. They either do, or they don't. And when they don't, they don't. And that's it. There are no appeals. You show up, and you're like, 'Hi! I'm -' and you stumble, and they're like, 'It's over.'
It's important to remember that life is a joke, and that outlook grants a lot of perspective, but I don't think comedy should change and become political due to other things. It should just laugh at that cosmic joke that life is all the time.
When you have something that you did so many jobs on and were so front and center on, and then people dislike it, you want to learn lessons from it, and you want to move on, and you want to move on too fast.
You can't always see both sides of the story. Eventually, you have to pick a side and stick with it. No more equivocating. You have to commit.
Going on the road for long stretches can seem daunting, and I certainly miss being home sometimes, but the chance to see so many different cities, let alone perform in them, is something I am really grateful for.
The difficulty of getting a movie made through a major studio is so extreme that when a movie comes out, everyone should give it four stars because it was accomplished.
