I probably could be a world-class screenwriter by now if I had spent the kind of work I devote on Comedy Death-Ray to that. But I do okay, in that regard. I mean, my stuff gets bought, so it's all right.

A lot of good things can come from not expecting anything.

I'm a huge Bob Hope fan, up until about the late '50s. I've seen so many of his movies up until then, and they're a big influence on me and a big influence on Woody Allen, who is basically just ripping off Bob Hope for his first five or six movies.

When we came to the network, it was a very interesting time where Portlandia had just come on the air and had been very, very successful. I think people had Portlandia-sized expectations for Comedy Bang! Bang!, especially after the first episode was sampled by quite a large number of people. I remember getting the ratings after the first episode, and the network was over the moon about it. And then the second episode tanked so hard. Like, no one watched it. It was a resounding, "Hey, a bunch of people tried your show, and they all hate it!"

Others may dispute this, we have tried to keep that sense of experimentation and putting new people up alive. And we haven't become a show, where we're like, "We know the 20 comics who are good and we're just going to keep on recycling them."

I get inspired when I look at Tom Lennon, who did Reno 911! for six seasons while writing huge movies and directing, and also doing other pilots; he did that FX pilot, the Star Trek thing.

Each week we usually have one person who's never done the show before. Last year we had close to 60 who'd never done the show before. We're constantly booking new people, sometimes to the consternation of people who live here who do the show regularly.