After every single take, I laugh. It's my own awkwardness and discomfort about being an actor.

I'm intimidated anytime I work with someone who's directly outside my very insulated group of friends.

I remember thinking as I was doing the jokes for the first time, "If I can hear that very clearly, I'm not hearing laughter." It just became deafening, this buzzing noise. I mean, it was brutal. It was really terrible. Then I remember thinking, "At least nobody important, or anyone who I really respect, saw that." And then literally right when I went off the stage, Jerry Seinfeld got up and went on. So I was like, "Oh great. Seinfeld saw me bomb." On the other hand, I thought, "At least no one will be thinking of me anymore. They'll just be focusing on him."

We don't often have the luxury of time [in Steve Jobs movie ]to have these conversations where you just literally get to sit around for day and days and analyze every line of dialogue.

It never seemed like that much of a mystery why shows I was acted in failed. When you're doing a show called Freaks And Geeks about young people in high school, and it's on Saturday nights at 8 and there's no promotion for it, it's not really hard to guess why no one's watching it. And when you're doing a college goofball comedy that premières three weeks after Sept. 11, it's not that hard to piece together why that's not the most important thing on the radar.

I am lazy, but for some reason, I am so paranoid that I end up working hard.

I hadn't really done a comedy other than The Ape since Freaks and Geeks.