I want to see Brian Williams with no irony wearing a mustache.

A dry stretch of commentary in the middle of an ‘Anchorman‘ movie would have been a terrible thing.

Actually, ‘Wayne‘s World 2’ I kind of liked. I think ‘Wayne’s World 2’ does have some creative things in it, some ideas in it.

‘Blazing Saddles‘ is one of the funniest movies ever made.

For ‘Breaking Bad,’ people were with Walter White for 99% of that show, even though that guy is a monster.

I think there’s a tendency to think geeks and nerds are just sweet guys that were picked on, but that hasn’t been my experience. I’m certainly not like that, in a lot of ways.

It should be a law for one whole year that all laugh tracks are Seth Rogen. The world would get ever so slightly better.

I hired a personal trainer to help me lose 25 pounds and get from obese to fat. My next step will be to get from fat to chubby.

I got the sense that Alabama is a place where people don’t want handouts and don’t much care for people talking out of the side of their mouth.

Nothing heightens chaos more than a berserk wild animal right in the middle.

I gotta say – if I clicked on a movie interview, and the first part was all about Walt Whitman, I’d love that article.

I was a huge fan of comedy in high school.

I always thought George Bush was more oblivious than mean, but oblivious can quickly go to mean.

George W. Bush was a silver spoon dolt with no record to speak of other than bankruptcy and selling tropical plants, and we let him sail into the White House, but Barack talks about religious fundamentalism and guns being prevalent in poor areas, and we roast him for weeks?

Having two kids, I don’t get out to see stand up much anymore.

Basically, we used to have a rule at ‘Saturday Night Live‘ that you‘re not allowed to bring up ‘The Simpsons‘ at the rewrite table, because ‘The Simpsons‘ has done every joke there is. Every week there would be guys going, ‘The Simpsons did that.’ I go, ‘C’mon.’ And ‘South Park,’ too.

If you’re calling yourself a maverick and you’re not Dirk Nowitzki, then you are probably not one. In fact, this rule applies to anyone declaring themselves a ‘God-fearing Christian‘ or a ‘Man of the people.’

McCain is the kid who was really cool in middle school but never got high school game and people are sick of him acting like he’s still popular.

America is a country that prides itself on being able to identify a ‘straight shooter‘ or ‘the genuine article’ when it comes to our leaders. As a nation, we can ‘feel it in our gut‘ when someone is giving us a bum steer.

You can’t really do a big character in an action film; you’re already suspending your disbelief in the action, then to suspend your disbelief in the character is too much.

After thousands of hours of news coverage, we have learned that Hillary is a liar and Barack is a terrorist or something.

First off, no one award-wise ever rewards comedy, which is… whatever. I don’t care about that.

Tom Brokaw was never young.

Sometimes I know a joke I’m going to yell out ahead of time, but most of the time it’s stream of conscious. You never really know it until you’ve got everyone dressed up, the set is built, all the extras are here.

The ‘Police Academy‘ stuff was all hyper-slapsticky.

If you go back and watch ‘The French Connection,’ it’s been cannibalized so many times. There are certain movies like that, where you see the original and think, ‘This isn’t so great.’ And the reason it isn’t so great is because everyone has copied it.

If you do a Western that’s funny, there’s no way people don’t call it a spoof or a parody, even though it may not be.

I always say the classier cousin of ‘Anchorman’ is ‘Mad Men,’ because when you really look at it, why do people really love Don Draper in ‘Mad Men?’ He’s just a terrible guy. But we know why he’s terrible, and I think that’s really key to why you can be sympathetic to a character.

Benito Mussolini created the word ‘fascism.’ He defined it as ‘the merging of the state and the corporation.’ He also said a more accurate word would be ‘corporatism.’ This was the definition in Webster’s up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster’s and changed it to exclude any mention of corporations.

I like to remind myself how hard acting is. I do parts in friends‘ stuff.

We lost our minds in the ‘80s and ’90s; we really as a society just felt that everyone could only care about themselves. There was no responsibility to discuss what’s going on in your town, your state, your nation. And it was a blast, it was really fun, but it doesn’t work.

If you’re making comedies, they have to have a fun and a rhythm to them.

Obamacare is a private mandate that will drive billions to the insurance industry, much like the auto insurance mandate. Hardly socialism. In fact, it was a Republican plan to begin with.

Old man with an old phone. That’s never not funny.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

Nothing is funnier than confidently doing the wrong thing.

Nothing is more enjoyable for me than when I’m watching a movie or a TV show and there’s that sense that anything can happen. It is the most fun feeling in the world.

You know how in every heist movie they get past the security cameras that show the hallway leading to the diamonds by jamming the screens with a fake signal of everything looking safe and quiet? Usually a guard coughs so they don’t notice the blip from switching to the bogus feed.

The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way, you can break the ice. It’s crazy, but even at funerals, people will get huge laughs.

‘Firewall’ seems both scary and protective at the same time. And how often does that happen within one word besides ‘military‘ and ‘government?’

Celebrities and ‘famous‘ people are just regular folks. I know, it’s a shocking and potentially dangerous statement.

I think I’m better than Mamet, I would say.

Word of mouth and the Internet are the only press we have left.

Most of what’s tricky about comedy is the perception of it and the audience‘s expectation.

In general, the final filter of Hollywood is for-profit. Nothing goes through unless it can make money.

All we have is our vote. But it’s powerful.

If you aim for parody right off the bat and it misses, no offense to the filmmakers, but it is Meet the Spartans.

I don’t want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of ‘Idiocracy’ and ‘Borat,’ without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.

There’s nothing more fun than mean-spirited characters.

David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He’s not only a great director, but he’s also a great writer.

There’s nothing more fun than making fun of what’s sacred.

We’re always looking for the backbone, the central idea, and once you have that you know everything can circle around it.

My wife is pretty geeky and will occasionally quote ‘Anchorman’ at me.

Bush already gave obscene tax breaks to people like me and Warren Buffet, and we are saying it’s not fair.

You need the audience to go on the ride with you. You can’t just isolate them.

My first joke was about a company called Five Star Parking that was all over Philadelphia: ‘Who’s reviewing parking lots?’

Sequels are desperate.

I’m a huge hip hop fan going way back, like, back to ’83. I had my Gemini mixer listening to Run-DMC and Kurtis Blow.

I would never do ‘Stardust Memories‘ because I don’t particularly like that kind of movie – that would be why I wouldn’t do that.

You’re not a slave to those test audiences.

I was born in Colorado and grew up in Pennsylvania with family in Texas and Oklahoma.

Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You’re already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren’t.

I think when a lot of actors hear improv, they think of throwing a line in or doing a slightly different take.

Any time Chris Nolan wants to call me for advice, he can.

It’s just funny that Americans have to contend with 2000 channels, and 60 different specific news sources, and the confusion that it creates, and the junk that we get to see is hilarious.

The one thing for sure is, I don’t ever want to waste a movie. I don’t ever want to waste effort.

White-collar crime has been marketed – billions of dollars have been put in to have us be bored by it.

Wal-Mart is the biggest distributor of DVDs out there, but personally, I think their manufacturing policies have destroyed our economy, and they don’t pay their employees enough. I have massive problems with them.

Anyone in the comedy world knows that Horatio Sanz and Chris Parnell are two of the funniest guys around.

Every time a congressman or pundit says its ‘class warfare‘ to increase taxes on the wealthy, it’s a massive lie.

The way you really stop Al-Qaeda is by stopping their funding. It’s not by carpet-bombing or land invasions or anything.

Creative freedom is a huge carrot.

Things I used to get in trouble for writing at ‘SNL,’ suddenly other people like it.

We, Will Ferrell and I, were approached by Sequoia, which is a big financing firm up in Palo Alto; they do a lot of Internet stuff, and they came to us and said they had an idea for a comedy site, and Will and I were sorta like, ‘Yeah, we don’t know. It’s the Internet, we’ve seen it come and go.’

There’s nothing more American than movies.

I was shocked when ‘The Hobbit‘ ended where it ended. I wasn’t paying attention to what they were doing; I didn’t know they had another movie, and I couldn’t believe it was when the dragon came out.

Obama is the new kid with the weird name who people just sense is a little classier than his surroundings. He moved from a private school where he was class president and is now at the giant public high school with the metal detectors and the smoking lounge.

If you make action movies, the critics will savage you, and then your movies are outdated the following week with the new wave of special effects.

Billions have been spent for one purpose and one purpose only: to obscure and distract from the fact that Mitt Romney is backing the identical agenda George W. Bush did.

Governor Palin leans far closer to ‘spokesperson‘ than representative of the people.

The corporate right fires up the religious right against gay marriage and abortion and uses their votes to push their deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. It’s an old trick. The House of Saud has the same arrangement with the Mullahs in Saudi Arabia.

Matt Braunger really makes me laugh; I like that guy a lot.

First and foremost when you’re doing comedy, you gotta be relevant and applicable to the times that you’re living in. When you try and just do comedy about who is dating who and lifestyle jokes, it gets tiring after a while. It’s hard to be funny in that realm.

I actually opened for Chris Rock at the Funny Bone one time.

‘Step Brothers 2′ would have been fun, there’s no doubt about it. Maybe someday. Does that idea age? I don’t know. It all depends on how the movie ages.

Everyone is sort of in their own little area counting lines and no one talks when film’s not rolling. There’s constantly actors coming to me back behind the monitor screaming at me, “Why did my line count drop?” It’s a nasty tense environment.

A lot of shorts spend too much time setting up the idea; sometimes they meander.

I’m sure when they partied when Rome was burning, that was a really great party.

I don’t think arrested-adolescent humor will fade. Maybe the form will change, but I guarantee its replacement will still be based in immature behavior from mature figures.

Dick Cheney and Bush’s rise to power were built on tons of money from corporations and a dulled press.

With the derivatives market larger than ever, we need way more regulation of Wall Street, not less.

For some reason, people with comedy, any time they can detect a pattern, it kind of freaks them out. ‘Those guys are always together!’ Yeah, they’re a comedy team. Anything they can recognize as a pattern they think is a hole.

The stuff that’s going on is just so over-the-top, with the banking crisis and destroying the Gulf of Mexico, and the outrage hasn’t quite caught up with the people yet. But when it does, I think you’re going to see really virulent anti-authoritarian kind of comedy coming out.

The crush of lobbyists on Washington and purchase of the media by corporations has created a big business-run government and a worthless press leaving Americans screwed and ill-informed.

There’s nothing the people love more than a Federal Reserve joke.

I love ‘The Wire;’ that’s my favorite show, so I’ll watch that.

I was completely with the reality TV boom for a while. I really liked a lot of the reality TV, and the one that lost me was the ballroom dancing one they do, ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ That was the one where I watched it and I was perplexed. I thought it was really boring.

Other than Green Day, we haven‘t had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.

There are many aspects to directing that have a romantic place in people’s minds.

You think of movies like ‘Midnight Run’ and ‘48 Hours‘, those are great movies, especially ‘Midnight Run.’

‘The Real World‘ is the most predictable arc ever. They get on the show, they’re all excited, we’re gonna be best friends, then people start drinking and get hammered, and say stupid stuff, and that’s pretty much it.