One of the nice things about being busy is it makes you focus on what's important to you and how you use your time.
I was in Los Angeles in 1968, and I was fortunate enough to be a writer on 'Laugh-In' and a couple of other television shows.
When Sinead O'Connor tore up the picture of the Pope, you could hear a pin drop. I didn't know it was coming, obviously, because at dress, she had held up a picture of Balkan orphans, which I thought was really meaningful and what she wanted to do.
The only show I ever really wanted to do was 'SNL.' It was some sort of merging of my talent and my metabolism. It suited who I am and what I do really well, though whatever I was thinking it was, it kept mutating and growing. At first, I didn't even know that the cast would be the thing everybody talked about. We thought it would be the hosts.
I'm always very fearful when academics get ahold of comedy. Comedy is such a clear thing - people laugh, or they don't laugh. It's involuntary. I'm not saying it can't be scrutinized, it's just that they take the enjoyment out of it.
To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.
