So cool people talking about this kind of stuff and having all the conversations about race, etc. since the show premiered. As far as Rachel (and other love interests too), we didn't set out to cast someone white and auditioned people of all ethnic backgrounds, and wanted to cast the person I seemed to have the best chemistry with to sell this huge relationship arc. In the end, Noel blew us away. And, for the writing, I'm pulling a lot from my own real current relationship, which is with a "white" person - so we can do interesting scenes like the scene in 109 (Mornings) about the parents (which many South East Asians have told me really resonated with them and they'd never seen an interracia...
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It might be surprising but keeping a straight face in many of the situations we get into on the show is quite difficult for me. I began to realize that I'll sometimes do this thing where I act like I'm picking a piece of food out of my back teeth to cover the fact that I'm smiling. Then if I can't get it together within a few seconds, I might ask for some dental floss or something because I've clearly been picking at this tooth for 20 seconds or so.
Some moments that stand out off the top of my head would be the Gas Station episode where the owner told me that he drinks his grandson's urine to ward off fear. I often laugh when I feel uncomfortable too, so I remember having to turn my head a...
The pros and cons of live action and animation are pretty much what you'd expect: in live action, you can shoot the same scene from a thousand angles for a thousand takes and figure out how to assemble the scene in "post," but if you realize that a character should have been looking a different direction or wearing a different kind of hat, you're either CGing their eyeballs or you're screwed. In animation, you can make eyeballs and hats change until the cows come home, but on the other hand, your script has to be darn near finished before the first actor even records their first line. The funny thing to me is that in live action, you can type "a room full of people" and nobody will have a he...
Really fun, and kind of surreal. I remember Garry Shandling coming up to me after we filmed a take. He had a note for me, but made a point of saying "only do this if you think it's funny." I was impressed by that.
The first time we did it, Fred just starting doing that voice ("Whaaaaaat are you doing here?!") and Kristen and I were like "What?" It was so funny. I hadn't heard him do it before. Man o man it made me laugh. Then it became a game of who could stretch out the vowels in their sentences the most. It got crazy.
I like animated shows better because I hate living people who act. They always make fun of my crooked teeth.
My parents were never informed of anything. They were never paid to do the show. They never shot promos for the network. They were just living their lives and we would show up and prank them. This was before anyone had seen anything like this on TV so it was a much different reaction from people watching back then. People freaked out!
Question: Peter and Nancy are my favorite characters on the show. What was the inspiration for Peter's pasta addiction and will they go anymore adventures like starting a B&B??
Answer: That came from a real dinner that Carrie and I had in Los Angeles. And we were looking at the menu, and we just thought "well obviously we can't order pasta, so I guess we have to order this." So we started talking about, why do we have to avoid pasta so much? So it was more that we were weighing the difference between the difference between enjoying life and really living, or ordering salmon.
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I think comedians dating other comedians is great. But not if one is a hack and one is good. Or if they have a kid who's a hack.
During my first year, I had a crush on a brainy, raven-haired boy from my dorm ... he would ask me at least once a day if I had ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket and I would remind him that I had not ... After several weeks of mistaking this for flirtation, I tried to kiss him one night by the Monroe Hill dorms and he literally ran away. Not figuratively. Literally.
The worst date I've ever been on was with a guy who I was super excited about, really attracted to, and then on the date it became apparent that it WASNT a date. He was just a straight dude who was psyched to have dinner with me in a platonic way. He talked about an actress he really wanted to date and we split the check. Thus is dating in Los Angeles.
Oh man there were so many. I actually had butterflies in my stomach during a lot of those dates. Rachel, who doesn't like wearing socks, was tough to get a read on. But a fascinating person. LA, the lady who was trying to promote her album, was also a delight. Lais, who tried to kiss me.. that was a really intense one for me. It was very surreal how seriously competitive the women were getting. Actually, a fight broke out (verbal, not physical) between two of the women over how much time they were getting with me. We ended up cutting it from the episode because it felt a bit too much like a moment you'd actually see in The Bachelor, but it was a very crazy moment and a very surreal night.
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Q: "Dan, it seems like people tend to assume you're sexist because you don't shower and have that oppositional defiant disorder edginess that often comes with closet chauvinism among comedy writers, but is it true you're, like, super pro-actively invested in the obliteration of the entertainment industry's glass ceiling?"
A: I'm glad you asked that, Kevin, but you see, even with that question, we're already slipping into progress' biggest impedance within the male worldview which is the unspoken characterization of feminism as some kind of charity or favor. While pro-active steps need to be taken for any effective change to occur, in my opinion, my taking of those steps has never been me "d...
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