One of my oldest friends from Kansas, his sister was married to Ben [Folds] and wrote lyrics on his first couple of albums. I got to meet him the first time I saw them in concert at The Bottleneck, a great bar in Lawrence, Kansas. Then, he was the musical guest my first or second week as a writer on SNL. I was like, "I don't know if you remember me?" And he was like, "Oh my god, yeah!" He's a big photography fan, as am I.

I didn't really want to be an actor when I was growing up - I wanted to be whatever I was reading about or seeing at the time. When I read The Firm I wanted to be a lawyer; when I saw Top Gun, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. So that's why acting probably turned out to be a good thing for me because I get to be people for five minutes or 90 minutes. I'd be curious to see if I had the attention span to be like those guys on 30 Rock and play the same character season after season.

You start at 'SNL' when you're young and hungry, but I don't want my pro years to be my 'SNL' years.

That's what I love about sketch comedy: a sketch is five minutes, then it goes dark, and there's the potential for something else.

The person that always comes to mind, and it's odd now because we've become pals, is Ben Folds. I've always considered him like a musical older brother, from afar, in the sense that I always felt I had a much better understanding of what he was singing about five years after I was listening to it.

Now Ben Folds is my photography older brother. He was kind enough to give me a photo of his for my 40th birthday.

I don't know if the idea of a career in show business or in the arts in general was looked down upon as much as by baby boomers as it was by their parents.