"I wasn’t even sure that I liked music in my early years. There was a massive generation gap between myself and my parents, and they didn’t get it at all. They had no concept of pop culture, so the music I heard when I was a child was all light entertainment. There was a round tin in the house with a picture of tulips on it that had some singles inside and they were all awful, like “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini.” It was all comedy. Just terrible. I wasn’t interested in it. But two things woke me up. One was “Telstar” by the Tornados. I heard it in a shop, and this person on the radio said, “This is the sound of the future.” That got my interest. I remember the squeaky organ sound, and it was all jolly exciting. Then the Beatles happened."

"I remember seeing that film and having a sort of epiphany in terms of realizing that comedy didn’t have to just be about writing and performance, it could be about the way that the camera moved. I loved the way that that film is structurally really poetic and visually inventive in a wacky and delightful way. I think that Edgar Wright cites that as a favorite film of his, and I think it’s one of the films we bonded over as youngsters before we started making films together. You can see a lot of that film in our films, in the way that they rhymed scenes and they had recurring motifs and set ups and payoffs which were quite delightful to decipher. For me as a fan of the Coen brothers, even as I’m loving their more sober, serious stuff later on, I do feel that one is my favorite."

"Animal House is a classic. You should have a DVD copy of it, you should stream it, you should just have it always. You should get the celluloid, and have it playing in your backyard. It is brilliantly written, based off of a National Lampoon article about college life. I personally love John Belushi. I love the casting in this because everyone looks like they’re probably 50-years-old to be honest, and yet they’re in college. (At the time, that’s the way things worked: Grease had John Travolta, so you’re like, really, does he look like a high school kid?) But everybody was cast perfectly in [Animal House]. There are so many subtle jokes. It makes you cheer. You see a young Kevin Bacon, [he] makes a cameo. There’s great music. There are so many quotable lines, and it is definitely a go-to comedy for me."

"It’s almost impossible for me to pick a particular favorite Frank Zappa record but when I was younger, this record was like an oasis. I had gone through this beautiful phase where I was introduced – by a friend of mine – to all the progressive rock music of the seventies – like Deep Purple, Queen, Jethro Tull and Emerson Lake and Palmer and it was all really great because it had distinct compositional elements to it. But when I heard Frank Zappa, it had something that nothing else had: it had comedy, it had these really long visceral solos, and the melodies were richer and more compositional than anything else that I was listening to. How could you compare ‘Inca Roads’ with anything else? So that record was one of those was one of those rare gifts in a person’s life that changes the quality of life forever."

"A lot of people will be like, “What?” but Jim Carrey’s best performance, possibly most grounded. I know that sounds crazy, but when you really think about the character, he’s amazing in it. Every frame he’s just electric. I could watch that movie a thousand times. I think it’s beautifully directed by Ben Stiller, who’s probably the best commercial comedy director of all time. I almost put Reality Bites on this list, he’s so good. It’s just so f*cking funny, and every scene in that movie is populated with the most genius comedic minds. Jack Black, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Owen Wilson — they’re all in that movie, and they all play hugely important small parts. They’re all amazing. It’s dark and f*cked up, and I just love that f*cking movie so much. That may be Judd Apatow’s best film. It’s so good, it’s so good."

". . . is for me the greatest film ever made, and cannot stand in any list of “top ten” because it is simply of its own class. Renoir’s upstairs-downstairs comedy-drama so defies categories that it is almost impossible to talk about it. You just have to see it—over and over. It’s a film that was almost lost to us, as the original camera negative was destroyed in the early forties. This magnificent restoration (especially of the dialogue) is as close to returning the film to its magisterial pinnacle as we are likely to achieve. New Wave critical demigod André Bazin said that this film contained “the secret of a film narrative capable of expressing everything without fragmenting the world, of revealing the hidden meaning of beings and things without destroying [their] natural unity.” Bazin died at age forty, just as Truffaut was starting production of The 400 Blows."