Adam McKay

We lost our minds in the '80s and '90s; we really as a society just felt that everyone could only care about themselves. There was no responsibility to discuss what's going on in your town, your state, your nation. And it was a blast, it was really fun, but it doesn't work.

I think everyone knows the news has become ridiculous. It's entertainment driven.

You need the audience to go on the ride with you. You can't just isolate them.

You're not a slave to those test audiences.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

I'm a huge hip hop fan going way back, like, back to '83. I had my Gemini mixer listening to Run-DMC and Kurtis Blow.

I gotta say - if I clicked on a movie interview, and the first part was all about Walt Whitman, I'd love that article.

The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way, you can break the ice. It's crazy, but even at funerals, people will get huge laughs.

I like to remind myself how hard acting is. I do parts in friends' stuff.

For some reason, people with comedy, any time they can detect a pattern, it kind of freaks them out. 'Those guys are always together!' Yeah, they're a comedy team. Anything they can recognize as a pattern they think is a hole.

There's nothing more fun than mean-spirited characters.

I always thought George Bush was more oblivious than mean, but oblivious can quickly go to mean.

If you aim for parody right off the bat and it misses, no offense to the filmmakers, but it is Meet the Spartans.

I think there's a tendency to think geeks and nerds are just sweet guys that were picked on, but that hasn't been my experience. I'm certainly not like that, in a lot of ways.

You think of movies like 'Midnight Run' and '48 Hours', those are great movies, especially 'Midnight Run.'

In the past, in the '60s and '70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.

Nowadays, the truth is, I think a lot of the newer generation of action stars usually are pretty self-deprecating and cool. I mean, Dwayne Johnson is a great example.

You can't really do a big character in an action film; you're already suspending your disbelief in the action, then to suspend your disbelief in the character is too much.

I love Paul Rudd.

I am actually talking about possibly adapting 'The Boys,' by Garth Ennis, which would not be a comedy, but an action movie with comedy elements to it.

My wife is pretty geeky and will occasionally quote 'Anchorman' at me.

Any time Chris Nolan wants to call me for advice, he can.

Things I used to get in trouble for writing at 'SNL,' suddenly other people like it.

We, Will Ferrell and I, were approached by Sequoia, which is a big financing firm up in Palo Alto; they do a lot of Internet stuff, and they came to us and said they had an idea for a comedy site, and Will and I were sorta like, 'Yeah, we don't know. It's the Internet, we've seen it come and go.'

A lot of shorts spend too much time setting up the idea; sometimes they meander.

As far as what makes a viral video, then it's gotta be something that you've either never seen before, a fresh piece of comedy, or something that relates to something topical.

I hired Tina Fey for 'SNL,' which was certainly a good match. She took off right away there.

My theme song is 'One Tin Soldier' by Coven.

I was completely with the reality TV boom for a while. I really liked a lot of the reality TV, and the one that lost me was the ballroom dancing one they do, 'Dancing with the Stars.' That was the one where I watched it and I was perplexed. I thought it was really boring.

I love 'The Wire;' that's my favorite show, so I'll watch that.

'The Real World' is the most predictable arc ever. They get on the show, they're all excited, we're gonna be best friends, then people start drinking and get hammered, and say stupid stuff, and that's pretty much it.

For my money, I don't think there's been a better comedy than 'Kung Fu Hustle' in a lot of years. That movie just knocked me over.

The stuff that's going on is just so over-the-top, with the banking crisis and destroying the Gulf of Mexico, and the outrage hasn't quite caught up with the people yet. But when it does, I think you're going to see really virulent anti-authoritarian kind of comedy coming out.

It's Will Ferrell, he does Will Ferrell movies. But if you really look at it, he tries to do something different with each one, whether it's an action cop movie like 'The Other Guys' or doing 'Talladega Nights' going into red state America or 'Casa de Mi Padre' or 'Stranger Than Fiction,' which is more of a drama.

I have no political ax to grind; I just find it absurd that huge billion-dollar corporations can take over elections. I just find it insane that, for instance, we give tax breaks to people like myself making millions of dollars, while there're no tax breaks for working people. That, to me, is not a political issue, that's a life issue.

First and foremost when you're doing comedy, you gotta be relevant and applicable to the times that you're living in. When you try and just do comedy about who is dating who and lifestyle jokes, it gets tiring after a while. It's hard to be funny in that realm.

Every time a congressman or pundit says its 'class warfare' to increase taxes on the wealthy, it's a massive lie.

I was born in Colorado and grew up in Pennsylvania with family in Texas and Oklahoma.

All we have is our vote. But it's powerful.

Pete Wilson deregulated energy as a pay out to Enron, and we blamed Gray Davis.

Arnold Schwarzenegger cut teacher's salaries and parks and libraries rather than raise taxes for the many California millionaires and billionaires.

I can't exactly say why there's not much protest music to speak off. And I know there are acts out there still putting a message in their music.

You know how in every heist movie they get past the security cameras that show the hallway leading to the diamonds by jamming the screens with a fake signal of everything looking safe and quiet? Usually a guard coughs so they don't notice the blip from switching to the bogus feed.

The truth is, there's an information blockade in America, and it must be broken. In order to find crucial facts, numbers and outside perspectives, a person must spend an hour searching and cross-searching on the computer.

Depending on what state you live in, you may only have right-wing talk radio and FOX or CBN with MSNBC three hundred channels down the dial.

George W. Bush was a silver spoon dolt with no record to speak of other than bankruptcy and selling tropical plants, and we let him sail into the White House, but Barack talks about religious fundamentalism and guns being prevalent in poor areas, and we roast him for weeks?

America is a country that prides itself on being able to identify a 'straight shooter' or 'the genuine article' when it comes to our leaders. As a nation, we can 'feel it in our gut' when someone is giving us a bum steer.

After thousands of hours of news coverage, we have learned that Hillary is a liar and Barack is a terrorist or something.

Obamacare is a private mandate that will drive billions to the insurance industry, much like the auto insurance mandate. Hardly socialism. In fact, it was a Republican plan to begin with.

Governor Palin leans far closer to 'spokesperson' than representative of the people.