Words matter. These are the best Scott Adsit Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I feel like I’ve done Pete Hornberger, and that is a painting I have signed, and I don’t need to play that character anymore. So I’ll get offers for panicky, pathetic guys, and while it’s a great compliment to get them, I feel like I don’t need to play that again.
I never looked at my future as comedy. Even at Second City, I always thought of it as acting. I knew I was going to be an actor financially, emotionally, egotistically.
I came up through Second City, so I’m used to playing 20 characters every night who are very different from each other. I wouldn’t want my career to be any different.
I’ve heard New York actors say Chicago actors intimidate them because apparently we’re the real nitty-gritty actors who’re in a town where being onstage doesn’t necessarily get you anything except your craft.
I might’ve been witty, but I didn’t have a shtick. So, I never considered myself a comedian.
I think most of my tastes were British, as far as comedy went, when I was growing up.
I see my share of loons. I just performed with someone who had a meltdown on stage. He needed focus, and he was ‘stealing it’ and just being crazy and selfish and childish and having a great time doing it – to the detriment of everybody else.
I think it’s all the same animal for me. There are actors who sing, and there are actors who direct, and I also improvise. That’s one thing I do as part of my acting. I don’t really separate the two.
The rules of improvisation apply beautifully to life. Never say no – you have to be interested to be interesting, and your job is to support your partners.
I’m afraid of my mother’s paranoia. The more she watches Fox News, the more afraid she gets.
I still feel very close to the people I wrote shows with and some of the people I toured with. I feel very close to them, like a family or like college friends who you know and who have seen you at your worst and you spend 14 hours driving a van all piled on top of each other.
A nightmare would be when somebody is trying to be funnier than everyone else. And you’ve got a group scene or two-person scene, and one person decides, ‘I’m the funny in this,’ and bulldozes everyone else, and they make sure they’re the reason everyone loves the scene.
I got an agent when I needed one, when I had a contract negotiation for the first time. I was doing the Second City E.T.C., and I got invited to audition for the last season, it turns out, of ‘In Living Color.’
‘Monty Python’ and ‘The Simpsons’ have ruined comedy for writers for the rest of our lives.
The way I was brought up in improv was that any idea you have is not as good as your partner’s idea, so if I see someone else initiating at the same time I am, I just defer to them because I assume their idea is going be better. And hopefully, they’re doing the same with me.
I was doing a show in L.A. called ‘Celebrity Autobiography,’ where celebrities read excerpts from other celebrities’ books and hang themselves with their own rope.
I enjoy doing physical comedy.
What crushed my soul was hanging out with bitter, desperate comics backstage. They’re a different breed than the bitter yet eager psyches in the wings of an improv theatre. Struggling stand-ups have externalized self-loathing into an art form. They’re a hunching, quaking, unshaven lot.
Wikipedia gets a lot of things wrong.
I did a bunch of commercial voiceovers in Chicago before I left. For Balducci’s pizza, I did a whole series. Actually I was making a good living with voiceover before I left.
New York has surprised me a couple of times. I was a snob about pizza, but I’ve found one or two places that allow me to forget deep dish for a while.
New York is almost as important as Chicago, improv-wise.
I went to film school at Columbia and did that for a couple years, and really thought I was going to be a filmmaker, and then I kind of drifted over to the acting side after that.
I would be onstage all the time if I could.
‘Baymax’ is quite different. I think when Don Hall found the title and didn’t know it, he researched and saw great potential in the relationship between a boy and a robot.
