Ed Helms Quotes

The biggest thing that comes out of improv that gets built on is just character traits. You know, for me the singing was born out of improv.

It's incredibly fun to play someone that you don't like. It exorcises your own demons in a way. It's cathartic. We all have things that we don't like about ourselves, little things. And I get to amplify those things and put them out there. It's fun and it has a cleansing effect.

Vulnerability is huge. I love to see that in characters. It's something I feel like a lot of my comedic heroes have always done.

Alcohol causes conflicts, firearms resolve conflicts.

We did some camera tests blacking it out, we made a prosthetic with a gap in it, but that made me look like a donkey, so I vetoed that right away. And then I just finally called my dentist and said, 'You know, I've had this implant for 20 years. What's it involve in taking it out?' And he said, 'It's actually not that big a deal. We can do that.' So we took it out and I was toothless for three months, for the run of the movie [ The Hangover] .I take my job very seriously.

You take a vacation to a place like Thailand and you're ready for the excitement of something new and foreign. But when you're working 14-hour days, all you want is something familiar to ground you. And there's just nothing there.

My friend and I sang an a cappella rendition of Extreme's "More Than Words" at one of our football pep rallies in a desperate attempt to look cool. For a while, I wore pink Converse All Stars because I thought it made me seem daring and irreverent.

It's just one of those things like when you're not supposed to laugh, it makes it that much harder to stop laughing. And for some reason Zach [ Galifianakis] and I get in this feedback mood of giggling, and on the set of Hangover we just couldn't get through stuff.

When you try hard at everything you do, even when it feels foolish to do so, you’re opening up doors and possibilities you might not be seeing in the moment.

When you're in New York City or Los Angeles, even if you're not dealing with show business, there's still this sense that it's the center of the universe. And I think that's a really dangerous, limiting mindset.

That's actually a rare thing to be on a set full of people that you admire and make you laugh all the time.

There are currently more political parties in Iraq than unbombed buildings to hold them.

I'm sort of laughing and so Zach [ Galifianakis] started laughing [on the set of The Hangover]. And Todd [Phillips] was baffled because what we were saying wasn't that funny, you know what I mean? And it was like all the baby's face. So Todd was like, 'What is going on? Get it together guys.'

It has been said that a rolling stone gathers no moss. I would add that sometimes a rolling stone also gathers no verifiable facts or even the tiniest morsels of journalistic integrity.

It's a fascinating culture [the South in the Civil War period] and so rife with comedic possibilities. And not in a way that...I have no intention of making fun of re-enactors. I think it's more just a celebration of their passion and enthusiasm, which is so infectious and maybe at times a little misguided.

There is something beautiful in the mundane if you take enough microscope to it and focus in on something that seems innocuous to begin with.

There really aren't any deletes [in The Hanover movie]. There's like one or two deleted scenes but they're not important or meaningful scenes.

April is tax month. If you are having trouble filing your taxes, then you should hire an accountant. They'll give you the same advice that they've given hundreds of corporations - taxes are for douche bags.

As much as you do get beat-up doing even small action sequences, it's incredibly fun.

A lot of kind of like the way that Andy [Bernard] talks, you know, the writers pick up on those things - little moments that I inject and then they start to write it in later. It's hard to say if a whole storyline is spun out of an improv. I feel like it has happened on The Office, I just can't think of it.

I'm a very jaded and cynical person.

The improv stuff, that's always surprising so a lot of times that's really funny.

This word gets overused in describing actors but I think it applies to Mike [Tyson] in this case - he was totally fearless. He jumped in and played with us comedically and improvised a lot. A lot of jokes in those scenes with him are from him improvising.

I'm working on a script right about Civil War re-enactors who go back in time to the actual Civil War. It's kind of a big, crazy Back to the Future comedy. So, of course, it's the Civil War - I play the banjo. I was just having a conversation with one of the producers about some of the material and he was like, 'You know, we have to work in a scene where you play the banjo. And I was like I'll get behind that.

Improvisation is about finding the best joke or the silliest way to get something across. Improvising conflict is always fun because you can just go for it.

They [Mike Tyson and Todd Phillips] actually struck up a really pretty incredible chemistry, those two, and I think they really trusted each other.

I loved the show Lost, in part because the writers were so nimble in how they would take things from previous episodes, that probably weren't created with any intent towards a larger narrative, and they would get woven into narratives in a really elegant and exciting way.

I worked as an assistant editor, actually, for a few years. That was right when I was just starting to get out at night and do a lot of stand-up, improv, and sketch work in New York. It really is invaluable. I think it pounded into me an awareness of what an editor wants and needs, in terms of clarity of a moment, where and when to start and stop a line.

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.

People who grew up in New York City or Los Angeles tend not to even understand what goes on in the rest of the country. I'm really glad to have grown up in an environment where I actually was kind of a weirdo because I was obsessed with comedy and movies and stuff.

I lived in New York for 10 years, I loved it, I never second-guessed it. There were definitely times when I thought, "I will never leave this place." And I kind of got into that center-of-the-universe mindset.

It's a very collaborative environment [making The Office]. We always do takes of how it's scripted, but then we also mix it up a lot too. And it's kind of a crapshoot, you never know which one... I mean a lot of time improvisation doesn't go anywhere and it's not good at all but, so what was written is often times better.

So long as your desire to explore is greater than your desire to not screw up, you're on the right track.

I think the culture of Civil War re-enacting is also incredibly fascinating.

There are certain relationships in our lives that implode, and it can feel really inexplicable and terrifying. You don't know why, and sometimes relationships end for reasons that one person keeps from the other person, and it's just totally unclear, and it just goes south and it's heartbreaking.

Let's just say it was damn hard [to make the Hangover]. I've got the bumps and bruises to show for it. It's funny because things that don't even look that bad on screen were still extremely painful.

[Chickens] are very frenetic. So if you think about it and you look back in other movies, like if someone's taking a crazy bus ride somewhere and it's like, 'Oh, what makes this bus ride crazy?' There's a chicken in the aisle, or like there's a chicken in a crate. So I just think the presence of chickens makes things crazy.

I love travel. I love to go spend time in new places. And even though I got horribly sick in Thailand, and it was the sickest I may have ever been in my life, I still loved the trip.

All I knew is that I loved movies and comedy and TV, and I wanted to perform. I made a bunch of shorts and movies in college, and that was always fun too. I directed some plays in college. It was taking it all in and trying to immerse myself in as much of it as possible.

We played around and improvised a ton [in The Hangover], and I think it's hard to say at this point what's what. Gosh, I wouldn't even know how to take a stab at it. The script was so good that we really didn't need to improvise very much, but I think we just found a lot of moments on the set. It's really cool when you get onto the set of a movie and you start shooting the scenes and you start to actually incorporate the environment.

When we were not shooting [The Hangover] we were sleeping, so pretty much every waking moment we spent together. And, you know, Bradley [Cooper], Zach [Galifianakis] and I were acquaintances before the movie started but we became good friends very quickly and spent so much time together that it was just inevitable we were either going to really hate each other or really like each other. Thank god it turned out to be the latter.

Working on The Daily Show, I co-produced all those field segments, and that's another huge thing.I probably did more than 100 field segments.

The Daily Show was an incredible training ground for that kind of thing. It was all about discipline and generating material constantly.

I'm sure I cause just as much consternation for editors as any other actor, but it definitely makes me feel more comfortable understanding how and why all the different camera setups exist.

Chickens are a symbol of chaos. Wherever you stick a chicken, unless it's a chicken farm, it's just chaos.

You are literally too stupid to insult.

I'm pretty sure no one's reading action scripts saying, 'This has got to be Ed Helms.'

The scene [in The Hangover] where the tiger actually pops up behind us, that's actually a Jim Henson tiger puppet. The Jim Henson Company actually supplied that tiger. And it's really cool. Its entire face moves. It has like all these little motors in its eyebrows and cheeks and mouth. It was amazing.