from: BostonHerald.comNANTUCKET — Hundreds of Nantucket Film Festival fans felt like flies on the wall yesterday as funny guys Jerry Seinfeld, Ben Stiller, Seth Meyers, Colin Quinn and Aziz Ansari took to the stage to talk amongst themselves about making people laugh.
The high hilarity at the high school, moderated by Meyers, the head writer of “Saturday Night Live,” was an hour-plus inside look into making hit TV sitcoms, sketch comedy shows, funny films and stand-up routines.
And here’s a sample of some of the things we overheard:
•Stiller, who flew in from New York after closing his Broadway show, “The House of Blue Leaves,” on Saturday night, bombed at his first try at stand-up comedy.
“I think it’s the hardest thing you can do in show business,” he said. “At 16, I took a class at The Improv in New York, and I wrote a horrible bit about alternate-side-of-the-street parking.” Whereupon Quinn said, “Hmm. Jerry did a whole episode on that.”
• Seinfeld said his one regret about his uberpopular, long-running sitcom was pulling the plug on doing an entire episode in Claymation.
“I didn’t do it because Tim Allen has already done a Claymation scene in ‘Home Improvement,’ and I didn’t want to imitate Tim Allen,” he said. “I regret that.”
• And speaking of Seinfeld, he missed the griminess of stand-up comedy when he was starring in the hit NBC comedy series. But he still can’t understand why his jokes need to be approved by an audience. Because, really isn’t he the funny one?
“If a joke doesn’t work, how come I have to come and ask you?” Jerry asks a hypothetical audience. “What do you know about comedy? If you were funny, you wouldn’t be here (in the audience).”
• Quinn, who has been touring with his one-man show “Long Story Short,” directed by Seinfeld, said the last time he was in Massachusetts for a stand-up gig, it was in Gloucester and a fight started outside the club.
“There was a giant brawl after the show,” he said. “This little waitress comes back inside and I said, ‘I’m sorry about this’ and she said, ‘It’s awesome.’ Goes to show you the clientele...”
• Ansari, who stars as Tom Haverford on NBC’s “Parks & Recreation,” joked he would much prefer to have others write great material for him — like they do on his sitcom.
“Writing is soooo hard,” said the proprietor of the faux Pawnee uberconglomerate ‘Entertainment 720.’ “But seriously it’s really important to write your own stuff.”
• Meyers, who confessed he thinks Bill Hader’s alter ego Stefon is the “funniest character on “SNL,” said writers only have two hours after two run-throughs to tweak the show and get it down to 90 minutes before it airs at 11:35 p.m. And many weeks, it’s a nail-biter. Also nearly half of the Weekend Update jokes are tossed out before he performs the bit for real.
The audience at the Nantucket Film Festival’s final big event included many aspiring Jerry Seinfelds (although the questions from the audience at the end were rather lame). So we asked Jerry what’s the secret to a blockbuster comedy career?
“You got to fall in love with it,” he said. “I am a big fan of obsessive behavior. I’m a big fan of what people think of as workaholism. I don’t think that this is a real problem in (our) culture that people are working too hard. I’ve seen the antithesis of that. So I am a big fan of go crazy and become obsessed to the exclusion of all other things.
“People say you need to have balance in your life and a broad perspective. I’m against all these things,” Jer told the Track. “I advocate for narrow and unbalanced. And that is the only possible route to becoming a comedian.”
And not that there’s anything wrong with that ...
