Ed Helms quotes:

My friend and I sang an a cappella rendition of Extreme's 'More Than Words' at one of our football pep rallies in a desperate attempt to look cool. For a while, I wore pink Converse All Stars because I thought it made me seem daring and irreverent.

I feel like I'm worried about my later years in life because I feel like I'm using up so much good karma right now. There's going to be some sort of karmic backlash somewhere down the road.

April is tax month. If you are having trouble filing your taxes, then you should hire an accountant. They'll give you the same advice that they've given hundreds of corporations - taxes are for douche bags.

First there was the New Hampshire primary, and we had nearly a year leading up to it. And now, look! Three primaries in one weekend! How many of these things are they going to have?

I've been to Indonesia, but I've never been to Thailand. I hear the people are lovely, the food is delicious, and that the heat and humidity are lethal.

You take a vacation to a place like Thailand and you're ready for the excitement of something new and foreign. But when you're working 14-hour days, all you want is something familiar to ground you. And there's just nothing there.

When you're in New York City or Los Angeles, even if you're not dealing with show business, there's still this sense that it's the center of the universe. And I think that's a really dangerous, limiting mindset.

When you're playing a fictional character reacting to the real world, it's incredibly difficult and confusing and kind of messes with your values a bit.

This may come as a surprise, given the nature of my job, but I am very guarded and contemplative. I'm not a naturally boisterous person.

I told personal stories the way [Bill] Cosby would spin a yarn for ten minutes. I think in hindsight it works better as a long story than as a condensed monologue.

It's incredibly fun to play someone that you don't like. It exorcises your own demons in a way. It's cathartic. We all have things that we don't like about ourselves, little things. And I get to amplify those things and put them out there. It's fun and it has a cleansing effect.

Working on The Daily Show, I co-produced all those field segments, and that's another huge thing.I probably did more than 100 field segments.

To be totally candid, it was really born out of a panic attack the summer between my sophomore and junior years, when I realized I wasn't going to graduate in four years unless I somehow managed to glue together all the courses I'd taken. That said, I'm really glad I did it, 'cause it was really fun, and I was able to just take whatever the hell I wanted.

So long as your desire to explore is greater than your desire to not screw up, you're on the right track.

You make adjustments according to the specifics of the character.It's something I feel like a lot of my comedic heroes have always done. It's not even necessarily vulnerability, always, but it's an earnestness, a genuine desire to actually do the right thing, but then still make really misguided, stupid decisions along the way.

People who grew up in New York City or Los Angeles tend not to even understand what goes on in the rest of the country. I'm really glad to have grown up in an environment where I actually was kind of a weirdo because I was obsessed with comedy and movies and stuff.

I try to explain to people that you get the roles that are right when they're right. If you have a nerd character but you're kind of a cool guy, you're probably not going to get the nerd part. The nerd is going to get the nerd part. You know, someone like me.

I'm sure I cause just as much consternation for editors as any other actor, but it definitely makes me feel more comfortable understanding how and why all the different camera setups exist.

Vulnerability is huge. I love to see that in characters. It's something I feel like a lot of my comedic heroes have always done.

As an actor, you can really play the intensity and gravity and seriousness of the moment, and just rely on the circumstances being funny. The joke is kind of the situation you're in, or the way you're reacting to something, as opposed to the characters just saying something witty.

I'm a very jaded and cynical person.

I had envisioned doing comedy since childhood. For sure.

Don't be afraid of fear. Because it sharpens you, it challenges you, it makes you stronger; and when you run away from fear, you also run away from the opportunity to be your best possible self.

I worked as an assistant editor, actually, for a few years. That was right when I was just starting to get out at night and do a lot of stand-up, improv, and sketch work in New York. It really is invaluable. I think it pounded into me an awareness of what an editor wants and needs, in terms of clarity of a moment, where and when to start and stop a line.

It has been said that a rolling stone gathers no moss. I would add that sometimes a rolling stone also gathers no verifiable facts or even the tiniest morsels of journalistic integrity.

There really aren't any deletes [in The Hanover movie]. There's like one or two deleted scenes but they're not important or meaningful scenes.

I'm kind of embarrassed by how quickly I adjusted to L.A. I really love it. It's so pleasant.

We spent six weeks there [in Vegas]. The only thing crazy that I did was shoot that movie [The Hangovers]. The stuff in that movie is way crazier than anything I might have done, drunk one night in Vegas. I mean we did it for real in the movie, so that's as crazy as it got.

I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.

You are literally too stupid to insult.

[Mike Tyson] was fantastic. Well, here's the cool thing about Tyson. It turns out he's a huge fan of Old School, which was one of Todd Phillips' earlier movies. So he got to the set and he already liked Todd and he trusted Todd.

I think that music at inappropriate times with inappropriate volumes can be the funniest thing ever.

I cannot stress this enough - if you try to install an HDTV in a non-HDTV compatible house, you may tear the space-time continuum.

Alcohol causes conflicts, firearms resolve conflicts.

When I was 15 I lost a tooth and had an implant put in. Cut to 20 years later, I'm doing this part [Andy Bernard] and the script calls for my character to lose a tooth.

Who among us wouldn't rush out and buy a Pepsi if we thought it would make the Osborne's disappear?

Shouldn't EVERY week be Infection Control Week?

It's kind of hard to win most elections on anti-family, immorality, and Satan-worship.

There are currently more political parties in Iraq than unbombed buildings to hold them.

I happen to think singing is hilarious, especially when it pops out at the wrong time.

We did some camera tests blacking it out, we made a prosthetic with a gap in it, but that made me look like a donkey, so I vetoed that right away. And then I just finally called my dentist and said, 'You know, I've had this implant for 20 years. What's it involve in taking it out?' And he said, 'It's actually not that big a deal. We can do that.' So we took it out and I was toothless for three months, for the run of the movie [ The Hangover] .I take my job very seriously.

I didn't mention the tooth thing to anyone until it became clear that...we started to discuss just taking it out of the movie [The Hangover] because we couldn't find anything that worked and they couldn't afford to do a full like digital effect. So that's when I called my dentist and it worked out.

February is a month of months, and there is one special day: Valentine's Day on the 14th. I know it's still a ways off, but I just can't wait. Janice, if you're watching, will you make me the happiest man in the world and get out of my apartment?

When we were not shooting [The Hangover] we were sleeping, so pretty much every waking moment we spent together. And, you know, Bradley [Cooper], Zach [Galifianakis] and I were acquaintances before the movie started but we became good friends very quickly and spent so much time together that it was just inevitable we were either going to really hate each other or really like each other. Thank god it turned out to be the latter.

I mean they [ Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis] are both just really good guys and also they're both extremely funny in very unique ways. We made each other laugh an awful lot, and that goes a long way. And we also went through some hard times. I mean it was hard to make this movie [The Hangover].

I'm the worst in The Office. It's a problem. They've had to shut down the set for like 30 minutes because of me.

A lot of kind of like the way that Andy [Bernard] talks, you know, the writers pick up on those things - little moments that I inject and then they start to write it in later. It's hard to say if a whole storyline is spun out of an improv. I feel like it has happened on The Office, I just can't think of it.

One of the biggest breaks we had actually, one of the biggest, the hardest I laughed on the movie [The Hangover] was the baby was just doing ridiculous things and making hilarious faces. But I'm sitting there and I'm supposed to be having this exchange with Zach [ Galifianakis] and the baby is like staring at me with these huge eyes and acting, and just making the most cerebral faces, and I could not keep it together.

The biggest thing that comes out of improv that gets built on is just character traits. You know, for me the singing was born out of improv.

It's a very collaborative environment [making The Office]. We always do takes of how it's scripted, but then we also mix it up a lot too. And it's kind of a crapshoot, you never know which one... I mean a lot of time improvisation doesn't go anywhere and it's not good at all but, so what was written is often times better.

I'm sort of laughing and so Zach [ Galifianakis] started laughing [on the set of The Hangover]. And Todd [Phillips] was baffled because what we were saying wasn't that funny, you know what I mean? And it was like all the baby's face. So Todd was like, 'What is going on? Get it together guys.'

The improv stuff, that's always surprising so a lot of times that's really funny.

It's just one of those things like when you're not supposed to laugh, it makes it that much harder to stop laughing. And for some reason Zach [ Galifianakis] and I get in this feedback mood of giggling, and on the set of Hangover we just couldn't get through stuff.

Todd [Phillips] doesn't care. That's part of his genius as a director, he will say anything to anybody.

They [Mike Tyson and Todd Phillips] actually struck up a really pretty incredible chemistry, those two, and I think they really trusted each other.

Almost everything is in the movie [The Hangover]. I think the fun little Easter eggs on the DVD will be sort of the gag reel stuff. There's a lot of takes we just couldn't get through.We were laughing.

It was never tough [ being the new guy]. It's just the warmest group of people [The Office stuff] you could ever hope to work with.

I'm working on a script right about Civil War re-enactors who go back in time to the actual Civil War. It's kind of a big, crazy Back to the Future comedy. So, of course, it's the Civil War - I play the banjo. I was just having a conversation with one of the producers about some of the material and he was like, 'You know, we have to work in a scene where you play the banjo. And I was like I'll get behind that.

This word gets overused in describing actors but I think it applies to Mike [Tyson] in this case - he was totally fearless. He jumped in and played with us comedically and improvised a lot. A lot of jokes in those scenes with him are from him improvising.

Let's just say it was damn hard [to make the Hangover]. I've got the bumps and bruises to show for it. It's funny because things that don't even look that bad on screen were still extremely painful.

God bless him, I mean a lot of times you get non-actors on a set and they get really self-conscious, especially when doing something crazy like singing along with Phil Collins. They get sort of reserved and self-conscious. Mike [Tyson] completely trusted Todd [Phillips] and totally put everything into it.

As much as you do get beat-up doing even small action sequences, it's incredibly fun.

We played around and improvised a ton [in The Hangover], and I think it's hard to say at this point what's what. Gosh, I wouldn't even know how to take a stab at it. The script was so good that we really didn't need to improvise very much, but I think we just found a lot of moments on the set. It's really cool when you get onto the set of a movie and you start shooting the scenes and you start to actually incorporate the environment.

The piano song that I do in the movie [The Hangover], it's a great example, that was never - that wasn't in the script.

The scene [in The Hangover] where the tiger actually pops up behind us, that's actually a Jim Henson tiger puppet. The Jim Henson Company actually supplied that tiger. And it's really cool. Its entire face moves. It has like all these little motors in its eyebrows and cheeks and mouth. It was amazing.

No one employed [ chaos] better than Jim Henson, by the way, on The Muppets. He had all these chicken Muppets that just brought in the most glorious chaos to whatever scene they were a part of.

[Chickens] are very frenetic. So if you think about it and you look back in other movies, like if someone's taking a crazy bus ride somewhere and it's like, 'Oh, what makes this bus ride crazy?' There's a chicken in the aisle, or like there's a chicken in a crate. So I just think the presence of chickens makes things crazy.

I think the culture of Civil War re-enacting is also incredibly fascinating.

I grew up in Georgia and I think if you're raised in the South it's where a lot of the war was fought, and it's just more present in the sort of psyche of the South. So I've always just been interested and sort of fascinated by [Civil War].

People now genuinely respond to it and associate me with music. It's really fun.

It's incredible how big a part of my acting career music has become. I get asked about it all the time, and I love it. It's one of my favorite things, and I'm so glad that I get to sort of work that in.

I mean the fun part about when Andy Bernard sings on The Office is he usually embellishes the songs in fun, stupid ways. That's just something that I do in life, like in the shower or whatever. So a lot of that stuff is pretty spontaneous.

The Daily Show was an incredible training ground for that kind of thing. It was all about discipline and generating material constantly.

I was just fooling around with the piano and Todd [Phillips] was like, 'Hey there's a great spot in the movie [The Hangover] where we need a little bit of a breath in the narrative. You should write a song and stick it in there.' And I was like, 'Well, what should the song be about?' And he said, 'The tiger.' 'Oh, okay.' So I went off and I wrote this song. I came back and Todd and I tinkered with it a little more and then we shot it right then. It all happened in a day.

You see a lot of sides of people on a movie set because it can be really taxing and to kind of go through all that together - you really get to know someone.

It's a fascinating culture [the South in the Civil War period] and so rife with comedic possibilities. And not in a way that...I have no intention of making fun of re-enactors. I think it's more just a celebration of their passion and enthusiasm, which is so infectious and maybe at times a little misguided.

Chickens are a symbol of chaos. Wherever you stick a chicken, unless it's a chicken farm, it's just chaos.

I'm pretty sure no one's reading action scripts saying, 'This has got to be Ed Helms.'

What's cool is that in the story of the movie [The Hangover] our characters are also really kind of getting to know each other and bonding over the course of the movie. And I think you're seeing a real, a literal sort of friendship growing both in us as actors and on screen as characters.

Improvisation is about finding the best joke or the silliest way to get something across. Improvising conflict is always fun because you can just go for it.

I love travel. I love to go spend time in new places. And even though I got horribly sick in Thailand, and it was the sickest I may have ever been in my life, I still loved the trip.

I loved the show Lost, in part because the writers were so nimble in how they would take things from previous episodes, that probably weren't created with any intent towards a larger narrative, and they would get woven into narratives in a really elegant and exciting way.

I found myself often asking the question, "Who deserves to be made fun of?" Depending on your mood, the answer can be no one or everyone. It took me a while to understand the math of how those field pieces came together. I don't think that ridicule is ever funny, but there are times when that gets the biggest response.

I have profound respect for Sacha Baron Cohen, but Borat is not a particularly comfortable movie for me to sit through.

[I read news] because no one's going to tell me what they really think of something.

Whenever I've messed around with radio-controlled things, there's always been a part of me that's thought, I wonder if there might actually be a little guy piloting these vehicles.

As a hobbyist, there's something about miniature anything that captures my imagination.

I've always been into toys and kits and models. I'm kind of a toy nerd.

There is something beautiful in the mundane if you take enough microscope to it and focus in on something that seems innocuous to begin with.

With the tiger you're always on edge, and you always have to keep your distance. The monkey is far less threatening so you're more relaxed around the monkey, and I think that's actually hazardous.

Getting any movie made is just like trying to push a giant boulder up a mountain, and there's so many moving parts. Obviously, there's the creative side, and then there's the logistical side, and they're both colossal.

Probably my favorite thing about watching a movie that I'm in the first time is to see all the things I didn't know were happening in a scene around me.

I went to Oberlin College, and they don't have a film major, but they do have what's called an individual major, where you can sort of pitch to a committee your own course study, and if they approve it, you have essentially just designed your own major. So Oberlin doesn't have a film major; they do have a film minor.And then my spring semester of my junior year, I went off to NYU film school as a visiting student - they have a program for kids from other schools to come in for a semester.

I'm glad to always have that connection to a part of the country that doesn't really have anything to do with what I do. That said, there seems to be a lot of production drumming up in Atlanta these days. It would be kind of a dream come true to go back to Atlanta to work on a movie, but we'll see what happens.

Going into editing when I got to New York was part of that. I guess I just kind of wanted to know as much as possible. But I have a real love of the whole process, from start to finish. So right now, I fit into the acting part of the process, but I wouldn't rule anything out. I'm enamored with how the whole thing works.

Sometimes you just create a joke out of thin air in the editing room. So I'm really glad I've had that experience. It gives me a little more confidence in front of the camera.

All I knew is that I loved movies and comedy and TV, and I wanted to perform. I made a bunch of shorts and movies in college, and that was always fun too. I directed some plays in college. It was taking it all in and trying to immerse myself in as much of it as possible.

I lived in New York for 10 years, I loved it, I never second-guessed it. There were definitely times when I thought, "I will never leave this place." And I kind of got into that center-of-the-universe mindset.

That's actually a rare thing to be on a set full of people that you admire and make you laugh all the time.

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting that, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want. And also, the problems editors run into when trying to edit performances - it helps me head that off at the pass a little.