The Daily: How do you get ideas for your digital shorts?
AS: All kinds of ways. Sometimes I'll think of something in the shower three weeks before the show … or sometimes it's literally Friday afternoon and the show is the next day and we have to have a digital short, so we just sit down and lock our office door and try to come up with something. And sometimes it goes even later than that, as happened this past week. I don't know if you guys saw the last digital short … (Gnarls Barkley) actually did cancel. They're our friends, so it's no hard feelings, but we had a whole 'nother idea, that by the way I thought of like two hours previous to that, so it was still cutting it pretty (expletive) close. We were all set up and ready to shoot and I was in that ridiculous wig and outfit and then they called and were like, we're not coming.
The Daily: What advice would you have for NU students that want to break into the same kind of career you have?
AS: Just write and shoot and perform. I would say the first 50 things I did were terrible. Not to say that everything we do now is great, but I look back at stuff that I did as recently as a few years ago and I feel a little embarrassed 'cause you learn so much so fast when you're just working a lot. And you kind of work the kinks out and sort of get a lot of bad ideas out of your system. I think with comedy especially you have to figure out what your moves are, and figure out what does work for you and what doesn't. I think the more you do it the more you develop your own style and sort of graduate from just emulating the people you look up to. But especially with the Internet now, if you feel like you have sketch ideas, shoot them. If they're good, they can catch on. It doesn't matter who you are or where you are.
The Daily: How do you feel that the Internet has affected your career?
AS: It's interesting because I feel like the press is kind of saying that we got big on the Internet and then got SNL, but we were on the Internet for like four years. We got SNL from a recommendation from writing on the MTV Movie Awards. We made something that aired on SNL on national television and then it was all over the Internet. So it took being on a network television show to really get that going. That being said, the Internet has affected us hugely, because "Lazy Sunday" just happened to be the clip that rode the YouTube wave. It was really just fortunate. That was the clip that everyone was like, "What's this YouTube?" 'cause someone forwarded it to them, and then all of the sudden they made like a hundred billion dollars. It was very fortunate for us, 'cause we got tons of press for it, and it raised our profile on the show and allowed us to make "Hot Rod" pretty much. Now there's a demand for the digital shorts, which is awesome, 'cause it gives us a little niche there.
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