I left 'Saturday Night Live' without a film to go to, and I'd filmed 'Old School' while I was in my last season of the show, and that hadn't come out yet. I was a free agent, in a way, but I knew it was time to leave the show and test the water.
— Will Ferrell
'Elf' has become this big holiday movie, and I remember running around the streets of New York in tights saying, 'This could be the last movie I ever make,' and I could never have predicted that it'd become such a popular film.
In the fourth grade, I learned how to fake walking into a door. You know, you hit it with your hand and snap your head back. The girls loved it.
I know the nature of comedy, and you never know what will happen with the next movie or whether people will find it funny.
I did plenty of jobs that I hated. I was a bank teller and terrible at it. I parked cars, a valet. I answered phones. I somehow avoided being a waiter. I knew I wouldn't be able to keep the order straight. I'm not much of a multi-tasker.
The funny guy doesn't get the girl until later in life. High school, college, everyone still wants the brooding, dangerous guy you shouldn't have.
I'm a Progressive. Much in the same way our founding fathers - who, oddly enough, wouldn't get elected today - were Progressives.
Often times I'm confronted with a quote that I don't remember saying. So, on one hand it's very flattering, it is just so surreal.
I have only been funny about seventy four per cent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four per cent of the time.
My dad turned me onto Peter Sellers as a kid. I loved the fact that he was a unique combination of being extremely subtle and over-the-top all at the same time, and that's a hard thing to do. I admire that.
I've always loved watching the news on TV. As a kid, I loved watching Walter Cronkite, for some reason.
I was never a class clown or anything like that, but I do remember being in the first grade and my teacher, Mr. Chad, told the class one day that we were going to do some exercises. He meant math exercises, but I stood up and started doing jumping jacks. To this day, I don't know what possessed me to do that, but all my friends cracked up.
I was a strange kid in that, while most kids hate school and want to turn 18 or 21, I loved high school.
I left home to go to college, and then I moved back home. I moved back for three years from 21 to 24.
I've never been a conceited person or cocky, never felt boastful, but I always had a sense of self-worth; I always had a real sense of myself.
I always find it actually funny that the analysis is that the characters I play in comedies are the manchild, the adolescent, characters that refuse to grow up. And yet, if you look back in the history of comedy all the way back to the Marx brothers, that's a big part of comedy.
James Caan told me at the end of filming 'Elf' that he had been waiting through the whole film for me to be funny - and I never was.
All you have in comedy, in general, is just going with your instincts. You can only hope that other people think that what you think is funny is funny. I don't have an answer but I just try to plough straight ahead.
Aren't we all striving to be overpaid for what we do?
By the time I was ready for college, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I think I secretly wanted a show business career, but I was suppressing it.
I grew up in an entertainment family, and so I saw how susceptible you are to the ups and downs of this business.
When I was ten, I wrote an essay on what I would be when I grew up and said I would be a professional soccer player and a comedian in off season.
There's nothing sexy about Orange County.
Members of the Senate and House, if they want to send troops into war, should be forced to send a family member. That would really make everyone stop and go, 'Ohhh-kaaay.'
Saturday Night Live is such a comedy boot camp in a way, because you get to work with so many different people who come in to host the show and you get thrown into so many situations and learn how to think on your feet, so filmmaking actually feels slow, in a good way.
I think a lot of the instincts you have doing comedy are really the same for doing drama, in that it's essentially about listening. The way I approach comedy, is you have to commit to everything as if it's a dramatic role, meaning you play it straight.
A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.
