Quotes

Sequels are desperate. We're cooler than that. We kind of thought, 'Wait a minute. If we do a sequel, we'll have enough cred from the first movie that we could do crazy-ass shit. We won't have to establish new characters and story and jump right into what we want to do.' The second part was, 'Can we make a good sequel?' There are a lot of flat comedy sequels...'Can we make a sequel that doesn't suck?'

[paying homage to vintage comedies] Scattershot, ensemble comedy in which it's all different kinds of comedy - it's absurd, it's edgy, it's dry - that's my favorite kind of stuff. 'Airplane!' was the one for me. I was in sixth grade, and I remember going to see that movie seven times and just tears in my eyes I was laughing so hard. 'Boy Trapped in Refrigerator Eats Own Foot' - I've had conversations with numerous people who say that joke was a turning point in their life.

[on 'Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues'] With sequels you often see these inflated test scores. I said, 'I don't ever want this movie to get over a 90'. I want 10% of the crowd NOT to like the movie'. You want the majority to be into it, but that was literally our mission. Let's not get too lovable with this. Let's make sure we sing a love song to a shark. We open our movie with a shark attack. It's not standard storytelling.

[on performing comedy] Well, you kind of start with the premise of 'it makes us laugh', and there's a bit of checking in with the crowd. Will [Ferrell] and I write our own sense of humor. We've been doing it for a long time so there is some adjustment going on that we're not conscious of. There's some awareness that there's an audience that is going to see it. You're not completely out there. You put it up and, much like horror -in horror and comedy - the audience really has to go with you. So we don't mind losing 'em for stretches. We don't mind throwing something at 'em that they outright don't like, but that you want them to be with some of the movie.. You pick your moments to go 'Screw the audience' and you pick up you moments where you need the audience. You're trying to do something that's still something that makes us laugh, for this part where we need the audience. That's the game of comedy.

[observation, 2013 on Roger Ebert] How much we miss him. He wrote the worst review of anything I've ever done. And it was so great! We don't care. When you do comedy, you get impervious to good and bad reviews. It was 'Step Brothers' and he claimed it was 'the sign of the end of Western civilization'.

[on Dick Cheney] He's a symbol of an era where a lot of powerful messaging was put forth that government doesn't solve things. School shootings, the opioid crisis, global warming - there doesn't seem to be an even remotely serious effort to deal with these problems, which is precisely what government's for.