I drew a lot. I always had sketchbooks. My parents were really great about any gift-giving holiday - birthdays, Hanukkah, Christmas - it was always art supplies for my brother and I.
Abbi Jacobson
What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.
Adam Braun
On 'Adam Ruins Everything' we do the broadest sketch comedy possible. We do stuff where you can see it immediately and know it's a joke - characters in big silly costumes; here's Uncle Sam and he's twiddling his fingers saying, 'Oh, I'm naughty.'
Adam Conover
I can't think of another place other than TV where a five-person sketch comedy group could make a living.
I wrote for this sketch group called Olde English for about six years and we made a movie together, but we sort of stopped making sketches.
One of my favorite things about sketch comedy is doing parodies and music videos.
I get less and less sketching done at shows, as more and more people want to come up and talk or get stuff signed. Most requested character? Probably Catwoman.
Adam Hughes
It takes a lot of time to write and put up a sketch show, but that's part of who I am. I don't think that ever goes away, that sensibility - especially coming from the Upright Citizens Brigade. That's just who I am.
Adam Pally
What I love about sketch is that the writing of it is idea-based. It's not story-based. It's like, 'This is a behavior, and we're going to write, in a small sample, the funniest way to heighten this behavior.' Sitcoms or movies are about story.
After I work with my editor to get the manuscript in good shape, I sketch and lay out a whole book loosely, usually in black and white. You learn things about your text when you have to think about pacing and page-turns.
Adam Rex
I was just taking my sketchbook to Kinko's and making photocopies and hand-assembling them - folding them over and stapling them.
Adrian Tomine
I grew up in rural Ireland; we only had a few TV channels and had never even heard of sketch shows, but it was completely natural for me to tell jokes and stories.
Aisling Bea
When I was either 7 or 8 years old, I did a sketch every day of my teacher and what she wore. At the end of the year, I gave her the sketchbook. For me, the sketching of dresses was about fantasy and dreams.
Alber Elbaz
I work on fittings, mostly. You know, I sketch less and less in my work. I sketch for the show sometimes, but then it becomes more conceptual. But when I don't sketch, it becomes more pragmatic.
For me, the sketching of dresses was about fantasy and dreams. In my little room at home, I felt that I was somewhere else. In Paris, for instance.
I think that one of Tim's great qualities and abilities is in what seems like a thumbnail sketch to get something quite telling, very simply, when you're doing it or being in that thumbnail sketch, you don't feel that it's important.
Albert Finney
Animation is very similar to sketch comedy: you have a short amount of time to do something big and ridiculous and funny.
Alex Borstein
My mom would take me to restaurants, and the first thing I'd ask for would be a pen and a napkin, and I'd sketch shoes and shoes and shoes.
Alexander Wang
Sometimes you go for weeks without writing successfully, and you don't feel like a writer anymore. When friends ask me how my week was or how I'm doing, I think back on it, and I've just been by myself. Like, I'm just a sketch.
Alexandra Kleeman
I liked that improv and sketch comedy were collaborative, but you really depended on other people and a stage to perform. With stand-up comedy, I liked that you had no one else to blame and depend on.
Ali Wong
I got a custom-made silk dress from a Chinese tailor for really cheap. I sketched it out on a piece of paper, and they took my measurements and made the dress for me in a day!
Whenever I've done a sketch in which I'm asked to play a mom, my brain goes to Minnesota. It makes the character seem matronly, warm, the kind of person that takes care of you and brings you Campbell's soup when you're sick. It's a great shortcut.
I moved to Chicago and I did theater, and then I started writing and I stop acting and I did sketch. You know, I did all of the things that, if you were serious about doing television, don't do.
I've done some version of that Minnesota accent - that Midwestern accent - in sketch comedy for years. It's the quickest way to symbolize you're a mom.
Comedy is really my passion. I started out way before television doing sketch comedy with other women. Very much along the lines of, at the time it was 'Sensible Footwear', but now it's 'Smack The Pony', 'French And Saunders', that kind of thing. That's how I started out.
I love all kinds of art. I mean, I love sketching and acting and music.
When you're doing sketch comedy and you're pregnant, it's like wearing a giant sombrero in every sketch.
I think I'm one of those guys who was sort of always in comedy. I thought of myself - and other people seemed to think of me - as funny from a very young age. I was a very young comedy nerd and I even did sketch comedy in high school and college. I wrote and shot sketches on video and acted in them.
I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein's descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.
The more you create, the more ambitious you become with your projects. Short films were a direct result of over 200 web series sketches and vlogs. After you create enough 2-minute videos, you start to wonder what else there is. Deadlines and discipline and quantity with a focus on quality have always been what keeps me going.
It's a very hard thing to explain when we sit with writers on our shows. But then if they show us a sketch, instinctively we'd know who we'd play.
SM:TV' is where we learned our trade. It was young, we could try out new sketches every week. When we got better ratings than our BBC rival, 'Live And Kicking,' it was amazing.
Looking back, when my cousins and I were kids, we'd put together these little skits - these 10-minute improv scenes. I didn't really understand what I was doing - that I was writing these mini-sketches and acting - but we were all totally into it.
Because it's uncensored cable, I think we'll be able to do the kind of sketch comedy that really hasn't been seen before. We can actually finish jokes.
When I travel, I draw and paint sketches which is great fun. And as long as you are fully aware that it has nothing to do with actual art, I think that's all right.
To tell you the truth, I always wanted to be a sketch comedian and a comedy actor.
When I had a full-time job, I would write dialogue and sketch characters on my commute and during meetings. Now, I forsake showers and regular meals and stay at my desk for hours, taking breaks to drink tea and eat something sweet, usually cake.
As soon as I start reading, drawing comes to me more easily. I find I work in my sketchbooks more. But if I'm working on a new show, my reading completely stops except when I'm on a plane. I take a stack of New Yorkers with me. I feel awful about those stacks of New Yorkers.
I would love to have my own fashion line because I love sketching.
I used to put on sketch shows at boarding school when I was eight. I'm not sure about the material, but it did used to get a laugh.
Science was always a passion, but I also loved 'Monty Python' and 'The Young Ones,' and I discovered the Footlights comedy club at university, where a lot of those people got their start. I had a go and loved it immediately. After that, I just couldn't stop writing sketches, and it all took off from there.
I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.
A man who fails is funny... if my sketches teach anything, it is that, for the male, sex is a snare and a delusion. What's so corrupting about that?
I was in a sketch group in L.A., and we were playing, like, backyards in Glendale and stuff. It was pretty ugly because we didn't have any money.
I think sketch writing is a good spot for everyone to start because it requires you to develop characters, have a beginning, middle and end and have a bunch of jokes in a short amount of time.
It's kind of hard coming from 'Saturday Night Live,' which is a sketch-driven show, to a movie.
My experience - and it might be just the kind of comedy that I do, which is usually sketch comedy - is that there's a lot more texture and subplot in drama than in comedy.
I steal props from 'SNL' a great deal. Almost every sketch I'm in, I try to grab something from it, so I have a storage space full of props.
I want to see Bob Dylan do sketch comedy. I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan.
My younger sister's a comedian. She has a sketch comedy group in Chicago called Schadenfreude and I look at her with such admiration and envy because it's such an amazing thing to make someone laugh.
