Michael Schur Quotations

If a show ever tries to be cool, then it's going to be doing something wrong.

When someone pitches a joke for a character that is just perfect, and you can imagine that actor reading that line at your table read or on the set, it's like the sound of a snap snapping into place.

The best episodes of 'The West Wing' that dealt with policy and stuff, in my opinion, were the ones where they were in the middle of a crisis, and they were trying to figure out how to solve problems.

I personally think the best ideas for TV shows - at least comedies - are very low-fi ideas. High concepts often sell pitches in movies and TV, but, especially in TV when you're talking about hopefully a 100 or 150 episode proposition, those concepts just burn off, and then you're stuck with nothing.

I believe in the importance of sincerity and emotion and honesty in TV, even when it's goofy comedy.

What's important on a comedy show, or any show, is that some stories have to go somewhere. There have to be ends to the beginnings and middles you create. But sometimes it's like a way station on the highway, then the actual thing doesn't have to be this giant, climactic, life-changing, game-changing thing.

Topical-sketch writing were incredibly rational and well reasoned: don't do a joke if the subject doesn't deserve it. An ad hominem attack on someone might get you a cheap laugh, but it doesn't earn you any long-term trust. The biggest rule was: you attack whoever's in power. Don't bring your personal bias to the table.

In a weird way, it's not different from any other kind of joke-telling. You make those calculations about jokes about celebrities: is this a fair hit or not? The stakes were higher because the whole world was crumbling around us, but in terms of joke-telling, it's all about feel.

The first joke I got on the air I remember clearly. Dennis McNicholas and Robert Carlock wrote a sketch where they were evacuating the Titanic, and the last two guys on the entire ship were the two black guys, Samuel L. Jackson and Tracy Morgan. So Will Ferrell was running back and forth, saying, "All first-class passengers get in the lifeboat. All second-class passengers and third-class passengers get in the lifeboat. Let's get all the animals in the lifeboat. Let's put all the empty luggage in the lifeboat."

In high school, my friend and I discovered that your cable-access station had to let you do whatever you wanted - it was like the Wild West. We made a couple weird things, like a tribute to the Zucker brothers, where we had a panel discussion about the Naked Gun movies. We wrote a script and made jokes that I'm sure were terrible and showed clips of The Naked Gun without permission.

I don't know why anybody does anything in the world of television.

I am of the opinion that there is more high-quality television being produced than at any time in the history of television.

There's going to be a lot of people that don't like you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Instead of trying to win them over one by one, you need to do things that are getting huge swaths of votes [in the elections].

It's all about media culture and people on television, and that feeling comfortable, friendly, or warm toward a candidate [in the elections] is a reason people would emotionally attach themselves to that candidate. I get the mechanics of it, I just hate that it's true.

Every city, every town, every region in USA has these weird things - the way they pronounce words, or what they call soda, or how people drive. It's a huge country, and there's all these strange pockets of behavioral patterns that social anthropologists could spend lifetimes researching and reporting on.

You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.

Mockumentary formats are great for a couple of things. One of them is delivering the toughest part of any sitcom episode, what writers call "pipe" - the nuts and bolts of the story where you explain what's happening, the boring plot stuff.

With mockumentaries, the conceit is that the characters are being interviewed, so you can start a scene and cut to a character looking at the camera and saying, "I'm working on this project," instead of having to figure out ways for people to talk naturally about what they're doing. You see this problem in pilots - people end up explaining things to each other that they'd never explain in real life.

I love crazy names. It comes right from Monty Python and Woody Allen - nothing in the world makes me giggle more than a funny name. It became a thing I started doing when I wrote. If a person came into a store and said, "How much is this apple?" that person would have an insane name.

The news is a public service. It's a way to inform people of what's going on in their world. And when you make it about ratings and make it about ad dollars, there's no incentive to inform people. The incentive is to be sensationalistic and get as many people to watch as you can without any regard for truth or objectivity.

It's so much easier to write for an actor than for an imaginary character and then try to fit that character to an actor. It doesn't work very often in my experience.

I hate this phrase, but it's a "can do" attitude [that's important] that, whatever you do in life, you should have.

Despite the insanity of using whether you would want to have a beer with someone as a legitimate reason for voting for or against them, I always felt that is indicative of a massive problem in politics: It matters as much what your personality is as how smart you are or how good you are at your job. That is a huge, huge problem. A lot of people who are very smart or very good at their jobs are not people I would want to ever have a beer with - but I would want them making massive policy decisions with huge implications for the future of the planet.

I got a lot of texts from friends and emails from friends and most of them were just pure jealousy.

You should be nice to people because it's better to be nice to people than mean to people, not because you think there's something in it for you.

People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.

I think that that the main problem with a lot of social media stuff in terms of ratings is it's a very skewed motivation.

I stopped using Twitter for a while just because I got sick of it and I started using it again, but I don't check the "mentions."

I am not on Facebook. I'm not on Instagram. I only use Twitter, which I wish I didn't.

One of the worst things you could do in that world is curse at someone.

In a world where your interactions with humans are solely about rating one to five, two things happen: One is all humanity is lost in the name of fake pleasantries and also there's no nuance to that system. There's no room for complex interactions that are rich and meaningful.

Amy Poehler did a really cute thing, [] [her son] said his prayers before he went to sleep that she was going to win [a Golden Globe] and when she got home she put [the trophy] in his bedroom. So when he woke up, he was like “Yes I did it, I did it”. He was so excited, he felt like he had somehow engendered the trophy into existence, which is so cute.

You really don't settle on an idea until you're really sure it's the best idea. Then once you settle on it you commit to it entirely. That was always the plan.

People don't seem to make the connection between their tax money and the benefits that they get from their tax money, like free education, and the fire department, and police protection, and everything else. It drives me bonkers, because it's pretty straightforward to me.

I think if you're too concerned with being cool or hip or liked, you can't really make good TV because sincerity and coolness are opposites.

And personally I will say that Amy Poehler deserves about a thousand trophies and so one is a good start, and I'm hoping this is the first of a thousand. That's my personal hope.

If the doors aren't open, just kick them in and keep walking.

My favorite TV show of all time is 'The Wire,' which has the feeling of a project-based show. You draw in people from disparate parts of the world, and they have to work together to achieve a goal.

All of comedy at some level is trial-and-error, whether it's a stand-up trying out jokes or a comedy show trying stories.

My favorite sitcom of all time is 'Cheers.' That's a perfect example of how, like, people made fun of Cliff, but you never got the sense that they didn't like Cliff.

You can't just sit around in leopard-print slippers and drink champagne all day and think everything's gonna work out somehow.

People think of taxes as money just being robbed from you. They don't consider the benefits of paying taxes. The benefits that they get and also the benefit of just being a part of a large group of people: a town, or a city, or a country, or a society that allegedly should stand together and all try to help each other.

For storytelling purposes, there has to be conflict, but that doesn't mean the people have to be mean. I've never liked mean-spirited comedy.

As a viewer of TV shows, I always like shows more when I just feel like the people in charge have a plan. You can just tell sometimes, 'Oh, there's a plan there. They have an idea for how this is going to unfold.'

Sometimes you've got to just commit to the idea and press forward and trust that you made the right decision.

Society is completely unreasonable. People want everything and want to pay for nothing. They panic if they think about their taxes being raised, but if their garbage collection is a day late they scream and yell.

I care more about making sure the story is correct and the characters are behaving in character than I do about the individual jokes.

The best shows are always the ones that are very, very low-concept and just about great characters.