Seinfeld: It’s very important to know what you don’t like. A big part of innovation is saying, “You know what I’m really sick of?” For me, that was talk shows where music plays, somebody walks out to a desk, shakes hands with the host, and sits down. 

completely changed my philosophy about stand-up. He was like, “This idea that your generation has about ‘you have to burn your material and start fresh every time’—it’s just so self-important. Not everybody’s watching everything you do, you know.” He said, “Focus on coming up with your best act for a live show. Remember: Seventy-five percent of the

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Jimmy: You can’t do that. That’s a waste of your day. But the bummer for me is that I can’t watch anyone else now because I don’t want to take any of their bits. Being an impressionist, I imitate everybody, so if I watch Letterman every night, I would start doing him in my show, and if I watch Kimmel, I’d do his bits, you know. So I get nervous and

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Growing up, I was completely obsessed with Saturday Night Live. Scarily obsessed. How deep did the nerd-dom go? I knew who all the writers were. (I also used to record the show with a cassette recorder, and then transcribe it by hand, and then study the transcription to try to understand how it all worked—but that’s a story for another day.) I

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