I guess I considered myself just sort of a sketch comedian, you know? Actual screenwriting hadn't really occurred to me as a viable job - I didn't really know anything about it.

Writing studio movies is the best job in the world... it's awesome.

I was on the speech team, we called it forensics.

The first record I bought with my own money was Rio.

We wanted the humor to come from the characters and their world - you go down there to escape the world up here for a while. So when the crew would write jokes that would refer to American TV or culture, I'd just eliminate them because it just seemed odd that SpongeBob would know about it.

I needed to be more self-determining, and the most self-determining thing you can do in comedy is stand-up.

I'm all in favor of people - myself included - going into the same territory if there's something that can be done with it. But if somebody says, 'Make a sequel to 'Heathers',' I feel like, no, someone should make a good movie that's a dark, satirical comedy that has that sensibility.

Apparently nobody really read it, it was a cheap movie, it fit their schedule in terms of things so fine, let the guy make that high school comedy. I used to work with Mel Brooks so they figured oh it's going to be one of those really silly movies and that's how it got made.