Paul F. Tompkins
I got married and we had a relatively simple wedding and there were not a lot of thrills to it.Collection: Wedding
I always liked dressing up. I think, because I always liked performing, I always liked costumes and things like that.
I enjoy very traditional stuff, and I enjoy kind of outlandish stuff, and I just really like clothes. I always have.
I have a friend who only buttons the bottom button of his suit jacket, which you're not supposed to do. 'Supposed to do.' But it's his thing, and it's his personal style, and it's like you've got to honor that. People can do whatever they want.
I always wanted to be a performer.
When I first started doing stand-up back in Philadelphia, the idea of being a professional writer was completely beyond me. It didn't even occur to me that that was something you could do.
For me, writing is just a means to an end. It gives me something to do on stage.
Writing a book is something I actually feel like I could do. I don't know when that would happen, but I feel like if the right idea strikes, whether it be short stories or a novel or even a memoir that would be more substantial than most of the comedian memoirs people put out where it's big font and all the chapters are like ten pages long.
The podcasting world has changed the way I book my shows. I knew that I could announce a gig on a podcast and that people would hear it. People that like what I do would hear, 'Oh, he's in my city.' And that makes it so much easier.
Earwolf had approached me a long time ago, even before I had started the 'Pod F. Tompkast.' I knew that I wanted to do a podcast, and I knew everyone there and that it was something for me to do, but I didn't know quite what I wanted to do yet.
I think, in a way, the stand-up prepped me for the improv, because I do a lot of riffing in my stand-up.
Ice-T is a great sport about people doing impressions of him, apparently, obviously, and so I have no choice but to be a great sport about being pranked by Ice-T.
I love clothing, and I love fashion, but I think that there is too much pedantry in fashion, and saying, 'You have to wear all of these things together; you can't button this button.' You know, all of that kind of stuff.
Dress how you like to dress. Don't worry so much about rules.
I would love to see the Replacements get back together at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina, because I never got to see them live and I love Charleston.
An audience can become a mob very easily.
I have a hernia scar from when I was a kid. I had a hernia when I was like in fourth grade.
My first car was a 2011 Mini Cooper, because I only learned to drive in 2010.
It is so easy to avoid getting in a fist fight. If you're at a point where you're squaring up against someone in public, then it's on you. There are so many ways to not get in a fist fight.
I think I've almost killed myself 1,000 times eating some sandwich as fast as I possibly could and almost choking. It's a miracle that I'm still alive.
When the response to comedy becomes cheering instead of laughing, that is so irritating. It's the worst.
Overall, I just love performing so much that when I write, I want to write for me. I kind of learned that on 'Mr. Show,' that even in an environment where you can write whatever you want - which is what that environment was - I realized, 'Man, I still want to be the guy out in front.'
I love to do the stream-of-consciousness thing, because it's exciting for me, and I like to think it's exciting for the audience, too.
When I started stand-up, the people I admired most were the people who were the most themselves onstage.
Performing live can be a drag, the process that leads up to the actual performance. It's all the travel, it's working up all the details and everything, which I hate.
We all forget that when a TV network says, 'Look, we're broke,' it means that they're not making as much money as they would like to be making. They're still making millions and millions of dollars - they're just not making billions and billions of dollars.
I do think I'm terrific at giving advice. Although in our hearts we usually know what we should do. It's rare that you get in a situation in life where you don't know how to proceed. You know the thing you should do, but don't want to.
Everyone is always asking me about clothes.
You can find nice clothes that suit your style at any number of places - Goodwill, Salvation Army, stores like that. They're all over the place. If you put in the time, you can find good stuff at decent prices.
A struggle in my life is to feel like I'm a good person and to feel like I'm a nice person. I try to be and anytime I fall short of that it feels really bad.
I think that a lot of times Mr. Peanutbutter is absolutely speaking directly to the audience and saying basic, human truths that we need to hear.
I love The Rock. I never want him to be president.
I seem to be one of those people that's immune to Super Bowl fever. I may be a carrier, but I'm immune to it myself.
The first time I did Cake Boss or Ice-T or Andrew Lloyd Webber was on 'Best Week Ever.'
If written with enough care and thoughtfulness, a joke can make you laugh at a belief you hold dear.
It's important for us all to elect people not just on blind party loyalty. We've got to really examine what candidates say and do.
There are absolutely no limits with podcasting because you can do anything you want.
TV jobs that I've had in the past, one of the side effects that is so wonderful is that it gives you a sense of normalcy because you're going to the same place every day, and you sleep in your own bed at night.
It's great to work with friends. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, but everybody goes into it knowing that. Like, 'We might be really good friends, but we might be terrible collaborators.'
I make my money from a lot of different sources, so I'm not depending on any one thing to really pull through.
Cake Boss, I guess, has been made aware of my impression and finds it amusing and recognizes that it's not a completely accurate impersonation of who he is in his daily life. He seems to be a good sport about it.
When Huell Howser died, James Adomian had done Huell Howser for years. As crazy as that impression was, James genuinely loved Huell Howser.
If you pay attention, stand-up can be great improv training ground. But one of the things that helped me the most was doing warm-up for the 'Mr. Show' tapings way back when.
What I love about improv so much is that we are all discovering it at roughly the same time. The performers are maybe, what, a half second ahead of the audience? There's very little lag time. I think of a thing, I say it, then the audience is laughing and it all happened in a second.
How did we kill time before smartphones? I honestly can't recall. I have a vague recollection of flipping through magazines in waiting-room-type situations, but what did we do, say, in line at the post office? Waiting for a bus? Waiting for someone to meet us at a restaurant? I mean, did we just look around or something?
More than just a sobering history lesson, 'Angry Birds' is a beautiful game. It's absolutely lovely.
Look, we have long known that birds and pigs are mortal enemies. That's just the way of the world. Birds hate pigs.
I don't know grammar but I do know that I love playing games on my phone.
Happy Days,' 'Laverne & Shirley,' 'Mork & Mindy' - it takes no effort at all to conjure, physically, the profound excitement I felt watching these shows in prime time. I remember sitting on the floor, too close to the TV, rapt.
I loved Garry Marshall. The television shows he created in the '80s were the most deeply important entertainment of my childhood.