My favorite sitcom of all time is 'Cheers.' That's a perfect example of how, like, people made fun of Cliff, but you never got the sense that they didn't like Cliff.

You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.

With mockumentaries, the conceit is that the characters are being interviewed, so you can start a scene and cut to a character looking at the camera and saying, "I'm working on this project," instead of having to figure out ways for people to talk naturally about what they're doing. You see this problem in pilots - people end up explaining things to each other that they'd never explain in real life.

People think of taxes as money just being robbed from you. They don't consider the benefits of paying taxes. The benefits that they get and also the benefit of just being a part of a large group of people: a town, or a city, or a country, or a society that allegedly should stand together and all try to help each other.

I would far rather add a character who generates strong feelings than someone who just kind of floats along, generating medium-warmth smiles of gentle affirmation.

The first joke I got on the air I remember clearly. Dennis McNicholas and Robert Carlock wrote a sketch where they were evacuating the Titanic, and the last two guys on the entire ship were the two black guys, Samuel L. Jackson and Tracy Morgan. So Will Ferrell was running back and forth, saying, "All first-class passengers get in the lifeboat. All second-class passengers and third-class passengers get in the lifeboat. Let's get all the animals in the lifeboat. Let's put all the empty luggage in the lifeboat."

It's so much easier to write for an actor than for an imaginary character and then try to fit that character to an actor. It doesn't work very often in my experience.