When someone's an actor and you're an actor, you meet them and you feel like you know them. We're in the same business, and we all speak the same comedy language.

I'm thinking of doing a marital comedy for one of the studios, but I want it to be so painful that it'll have a profound effect on married couples who see it together.

I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, "If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I'll stay home."

I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression.

Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.

A friend of mine is trying to do a documentary where he brings Jewish and Arab comedians to occupied territories in Israel. He wants to do shows as a way of finding some comedic common denominator. When he proposed the idea to one of the officials at the Jenin refuge camp, the guy just stared at him and said, "This is not a joke to us. We don't think that laughing is the answer."

Parents tell us things to protect us, or they educate us from their own misinformation or misconceptions.