To those many millions of you unfamiliar with my work, I play a caddish British doctor in practice with Mindy Kaling on her excellent sitcom ‘The Mindy Project.’
In the back of my head, I always thought it would be great to become an actress on a sitcom.
I watched the whole of ‘How I Met Your Mother.’ I wanted to see how they could stretch it out for so long and if it was any good, but it just seems like a sitcom from the 90s.
I’m a basketball guy. No sitcom guy. I don’t care about all that jazz. I care about basketball. It’s not me. And I stayed with what I did, and I’m very proud that I did that because I make a great living and I’m lucky and I get to be involved with the thing I truly love, and that’s the game of basketball.
I think of everything as comedy, but I don’t think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There’s always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.
I would love to be on a sitcom or on Broadway.
Working in network sitcom arenas, whenever you decide to depart from the norm and tell a story that’s not typical, I think you’re always a little bit nervous.
I just do what I gotta do and try to show people I can write some funny lyrics and play piano, and hopefully that’ll make them dig further. I really believe in my form. That’s why I haven’t done a lot of telly, and I’m not a regular on any panel shows, and I’m not in a sitcom or all those things.
I don’t think I could ever do a network sitcom because the humor is often based on some trite circumstance. I don’t want to be a part of a show where it’s mostly about coming up with the jokes.
Anything I have blown a lot of money on? Well, I have three daughters and a wife – that’s four women, and I’m working on a sitcom, so you could say that I am just trying to stay alive!
I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider. It used to worry me that, in terms of TV, I did not look like ‘the girlfriend’ or ‘the daughter’. That pushed me to write my own stuff, as I thought no one else was going to write me a lead in the sitcom.
You know, it’s nice on a sitcom to have an audience there, but there’s still a wall of cameras between you and them.
There was never any career plan. When ‘Red Dwarf’ started I thought we were doing a curious little sitcom on BBC2, I didn’t think I was becoming an actor. I didn’t see that 21 years later I’d still be talking about it, let alone filming a new one. For me everything’s always been an accident.
I don’t think of myself as a guy who writes for kids, I really don’t. I try really hard to write a good, solid sitcom.
The only thing I miss from the sitcom format is that immediate gratification of when you’re, if we’re talking about comedy, of the live audience.
