The reason most comedies don't win awards is that the filmmakers put the comedy first. This means you have to create a story around the jokes.

I love funny people, and when I'm with funny people, or people who are amusing in their weirdness, I love it. Because that to me is funny, as opposed to someone who stops and says, 'Hey let me tell you a joke.'

As tempting as it seems to wear tennis shoes with your tux, don't do it. I think it looks ridiculous. If you're 14 years old, maybe give it a shot. In general, don't portray anything that says 'I'm too cool and I don't care.

I think things go wrong when there's not a very specific plan and specific emotional roadmap. You need to know what a scene needs to get across, and what story point that needs to be advanced, whether it's discovering someone for the first time or whether it's seeing a relationship get strained. What I do as a director is really create a safe environment that everyone can feel very comfortable in and experiment within so that they don't hold back anything.

A lot of comedies fall apart because they just go from joke to joke, and the characters are all sort of being crazy off on their own.

I'm just always a bit thrown when, in the immediate aftermath of some event which makes us feel like either God's out to get us or He's not doing His job as well as He can, we all still get together and continue to ask Him for help.

I'm the biggest proponent of test screenings now. There's two ways to face test screenings. For dramas, I don't know if I would rely on them as much, although I still think you need them, because you're making a movie for an audience at the end of the day. But with comedy... You could go through a script or anything I ever worked on, where you go, "This is hilarious," and you put it in front of people and you get nothing. And then the other side of it, is something you're like, "I think this is really stupid," and it gets a giant laugh.