The four main characters in the show
are a crew,
like a research team of aliens
who come to earth and assume human form,
created a sort of facsimile
of an American family
as best they can figure it out.
Uh... they are
Dick, Sally, Tommy and Harry.
And they've just sort of installed themselves
in a small town in the Ohio Midwest--
a small town, college town in Ohio.
And I, as Dick Solomon,
am the leader of this group.
Just imagine them a university research team in a foreign country.
That's basically what we're like.
And I have fiddled myself a job
as a physics professor.
And it's a perfect setting
to develop a camouflage
because I'm no more eccentric
than everybody else at the college.
And basically we're on earth
to try to figure out human society.
So that's the sort of premise,
and off we go.
There's almost nothing that we don't explore and try to figure out,
and usually we get it wrong.
Well, I think it's--
as the aliens are trying to figure out human behavior,
so we're all trying to figure out
how to be human.
The things that we come up against--
when the show first began, they were very rudimentary--
like what is a car,
and a doorknob,
and a box of Kleenex?
Just figuring out the tools of life.
But now they're into much more sophisticated things--
trying to figure out professional jealousy,
romance versus sex,
the class system.
You know, things that are much subtler
and much more complex and difficult to explain
even to ourselves.
I think that's why people relate to the show.
They know these problems, too,
and they know how unsolvable they are.
I think the rehearsal, the first--
well, I don't know.
Every aspect of it is fun.
Certainly the performance itself
in front of the live audience
is a real ecstatic experience.
But the rehearsal is a very, very creative process.
It's where we try everything out.
We work very closely with the writers.
There's not a lot of time.
It's a kind of sprint to the finish.
If you put it all together, we really have only five days
to put together a half-an-hour
one-act comedy.
And that's a very...
energizing experience for an actor
'cause it reminds me much more
of theater than film.
And the aspect of theater
that it reminds me of most is the rehearsal.
You know, you really get to take time to prepare.
Movies, you just arrive on the set usually
and do your scenes.
This, by the time we perform it, we know exactly what we're doing.
Well, they are very similar.
We sort of pride ourselves
on giving the studio audience a real theater experience,
giving them a great time.
I mean, they enjoy it when we screw up,
but they also like to feel that we know just exactly what we're doing.
All of us come from the theater,
and we're accustomed to
playing an audience, timing laughs.
We love that. We love that process.
You know, we've all done some film,
but we sort of grew up in theater,
Jane and French and Kristen and me.
And joey Gordon-Levitt,
who has sort of come-- he grew up in movies.
He prescribed himself a play last hiatus
'cause he felt, "no, I gotta have the theater experience, too.
I see how important it is."
Oh, that's almost impossible to answer.
Uh, I think the funniest episode for me
was when I disguised myself as a woman
to try to figure out how women think.
Well, that was a wash.
We have recently done
a fabulous episode
where I get tired of
the dorky reputation
of a physics professor,
and I decide I want to be a cop.
And I and Wayne knight
have this good cop/bad cop interrogation scene.
I loved that.
I loved the episode where I got hooked on tobacco.
I loved the whole turn
where I played my evil twin brother.
Well, well, well, if it isn't
the former high commander.
It seems that I've underestimated
your... stupidity.
That was your first mistake.
Here's your second. Look over there!
Where?
I loved working with john Cleese.
And I loved our big three -Dimensional extravaganza.
- Where are you taking me? - We're taking you to the truth room.
Actually, I need to go to the bathroom. This is scary.
Now that's an effort, to answer your question,
what is my favorite episode?
There are a couple of answers to that.
One is, it is indeed a show about aliens.
We are outsiders
all over the world.
And I think it sort of unites the entire world
as humans
vis-à-vis the aliens.
But also, I think it has a kind of...
alien energy to it.
It's a very atypical American comedy.
It's typical of an old kind of American comedy
when it was much more vaudeville-Based--
the silent film era, the Marx brothers,
early television.
But television in the U.S.
Has evolved into something much more naturalistic.
It's still comedy, but it's not quite
the knockabout energy that we bring to it.
We sort of model ourselves on British comedy--
"fawlty towers," "Monty python"--
which was why it was so wonderful to have john Cleese join us.
He's one of our heroes.
Dick Solomon is very much
a part for john Cleese.
He'll never get it, of course, but--
and that's why I think, for one thing,
it transfers effortlessly to the British isles.
They sort of recognize it as their style.
But it also owes a lot
to the high energy of French farce, I think.
Jacques tati is one of my models for Dick Solomon.
I even think of
Italy and commedia dell'arte.
I think it transfers.
Primarily, the people who were proposing it to me--
this was bonnie and Terry turner
who are the creators of the show.
They are friends of mine from when they were writers
on "Saturday night live" and I was a guest host.
They were extremely successful
as feature film comedy writers
when they pitched "3rd rock" to me.
I thought, "well, if they're ready
to take a chance on sitcom, episodic television,
they must know what they're doing.
I'll take the chance with them."
It's not something I ever intended to do.
I never even considered doing a sitcom,
but I loved the idea of working for them.
It was a good time in my life,
to take a job that kept me home.
My kids are only going to be in school for another five years,
which I figured is
about the minimum life expectancy
of "3rd rock."
And... I don't know.
I had gotten a little bit frustrated
with a life of just feature films.
Features have a terrible way of disappointing you.
So much work goes into them.
They get released about a year after you do them.
And they fail
far more frequently than they succeed,
at least in meeting your expectations.
Making a movie, you always persuade yourself
you've done something really great, and it never quite--
only once or twice has it ever really matched my hopes.
In basic ways, you approach them exactly the same.
I mean, you try to motivate every moment
and lend it some reality.
But, of course, with comedy, it's a heightened reality.
There's a much greater energy,
and you're concentrating on laughs.
I mean, you want the audience to laugh hard
at several specific moments.
If too much time goes by without a laugh, you're in big trouble.
You don't even think about that in drama.
You do think of the rhythms of a scene
and the moments at which you want to make a great impact,
but calculating laughs is a whole science unto itself.