You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.
Harry ShearerI think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.
Harry ShearerThe act of getting married, stripped of the necessity to have a secure setting to raise children, seems to me no less grim than registering your emotions with the government.
Harry ShearerIn the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.
Harry ShearerI think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.
Harry ShearerEven under the best of circumstances men are hard creatures to trap. Women who flatter themselves into thinking they've trapped one are like people who believe they can get rid of the cockroaches in their kitchen. They're in for a big surprise late one night when they turn on the light.
Harry Shearer