So it's safe to say that you've had a few important helping hands along the way.
Yeah, a lot of people have helped me. Laraine Newman and Charles Grodin recommended me to Lorne Michaels. Penny Marshall was really nice and helped me a lot when I was starting out. Before I shot my first show on SNL, the first thing I ever did was this short film for the show when Madonna was the host. I remember being in this park to shoot this thing, and Penny Marshall was there, and she befriended me and years later she put me in her movies. But I just learned from her that that's what you do--you help people. I mean, she never actually said to help other people, but you know, it's just what you do.

Is that why you take the time to respond to fans on your blog?
I enjoy helping people because there's so much stuff to know about acting and how it actually works and what you need to do. And there's a lot of misinformation out there, and people don't know what it's really like or the reality of the situation. And I, of course, didn't know anything when I first started. Standup comedy isn't a competition. You're selling your own personality, and it's completely subjective. But it's fun for me to tell people this is how you do it. And there's also satisfaction when years later people will come up to me and tell me that I told them to get into standup and now they're doing it and they've made a career out of it. I'm like, "Really? You took my advice?" But it feels good that you can help people.

SNL recently trimmed down its cast significantly. In 1986, your second year on the show, you were part of a very small cast. Do you think that was better for your career?
Absolutely. After my first year, they released a lot of great people: Randy Quaid, Robert Downey Jr., Joan Cusack, Anthony Michael Hall, Terry Sweeney, Danitra Vance--they were all terrific, but they wanted to get new people. The second year I was there, I really missed them and it was odd being there without them. But the group we ended up with was eight of us. There were feature players like Al Franken and A. Whitney Brown, but otherwise it was just the eight of us, five men and three women: myself, Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Dennis Miller, Kevin Nealon, and then the women were Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson and Nora Dunn. And it was like that for four years, which is how it was, I think, in the original cast. So you kinda knew you were going to be in the show every week--well, almost every week--but if you were, you had a lot to do. It was very competitive, too. But if you weren't in the show very much that week, it just felt like you weren't a part of it. Like your career was over [laughs]. It was very competitive, but also enjoyable. And we respected each other a lot.

What was it like when your time on SNL was coming to an end?
Mike Myers was there about the last year and a half I was there, and things started changing. After him, they added Chris Farley and Sandler. They hired the two of them to take my place. But it sounds funny now to say that because nobody knew who they were at the time.

When you were doing Master Thespian on SNL, but more specifically, the Tommy Flanagan character, did you have any idea how big "Yeah, that's the ticket!" would become?
In 1985, The Groundlings were doing a new show and Jim McCauley, a producer at the Tonight Show who booked all the comedians, booked The Groundlings. There were three sketches, and I was in two of them, and in one of them I did my liar character. So after I did it, a few weeks later, The Groundlings had a 10th anniversary reunion, and people came up to me at that and said how they saw me do the character on The Tonight Show and that they were imitating me on their answering machines. So when I got on SNL, I thought that if I got to do the liar character on the show, there would be a chance that people would imitate it. So I did it on the second show, and the following week, Robert Smigel, who was just starting at SNL that year, too, told me that he was in Lorne's office and an electrician from NBC came upstairs and said to Lorne, "You know that liar character is the funniest thing I've seen on the show in years." So that's when they started putting that character into the show more and more. Back then, I also had this friend in an all-female rock band who was touring the country and was telling me that everywhere she went people were imitating my character. And then more people started coming up and telling me this, but I'd never heard anybody doing it, ever. I was just being told everyone was imitating me, but I never saw it.

But you eventually did, right?
I was driving in Los Angeles, and I heard this radio commercial for Riverside Raceway where this guy was imitating the liar character. My jaw just dropped. Then that same week I did Comic Relief and I went out and said, "Hello, I'm Tommy Flanagan, I'm a member of Pathological Liars Anonymous," and the whole place went nuts. And you can see it in my face--my eyes went all big, and I remember watching the tape afterwards and I saw Danny DeVito sitting behind me laughing, and I went, "Look! I'm making Danny DeVito laugh!" Then, also that summer my dad called me up and said, "Jon, look at the Sunday paper. Doonesbury did a whole cartoon on you." And it was one of the Doonesbury characters going, "Yeah, that's the ticket." I couldn't believe it.

I didn't make up "That's the ticket." I got it from old movies like The Thin Man, but I know that character definitely brought that phrase back into the language. And just as recently as last week I was at a restaurant watching a football game and there was this guy there going, "Yeah, c'mon, score! That's the ticket!" And he kept saying it. He didn't see me sitting next to him. It's just amazing that it's still out there. In my opinion, it's probably the biggest catchphrase they've ever had on that show--not that others weren't huge--but this is 21 years later and people are still saying it. But I don't think half of those people even know it's from SNL. It's just part of the language now. But I'm not giving so much credit to myself as I am to the power of television. Back then you were on SNL and people would look to the show for characters to imitate.

That's true, because I think in the earlier days of SNL, the audience would seem to wait to hear certain characters' catchphrases, like Dan Akroyd's "Jane, you ignorant slut" or Dana Carvey's "Isn't that special?"
The original cast and the people after--Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Martin Short--the audience would just look to them and the show for things to imitate. That's how it was back then. I was never trying to do a catchphrase--it just became one. It was just a part of the character and how he talked. You have three minutes to establish a whole person and an identifiable character. And when learning characters at The Groundlings, I was taught that people have habits that they do and they repeat certain things when they talk. It was just a way of writing a sketch.

What's it like having Dennis Miller and Dana Carvey give you advice on standup?
Dennis has been encouraging me for years, and you know what I was saying about my heart beating through my chest--when I told Dana that I was gonna go for it, he said just keep going up onstage and eventually the fear goes away--you just have to get used to it. Dennis and I watched the tape of this comedian one time who was making the classic mistake of the long setup and one joke, then switching topics with another long setup and just one joke, which is just a recipe for exhausting the audience.

I've had a lot of experience performing, of course, but it was that kind of stuff that saved me years of learning standup. I remember Johnny Carson saying once that you have to get to the jokes as quick as you can. And I never realized how much learning Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce's routines when I was in college would help today. The fun thing about standup is you get to write your own material and perform it, and you can always get better. So if that's in your head--to continually go out to every show to improve and grow--it becomes fun. But if you just walk through it, then it becomes boring, like anything else.

You've sung at Carnegie Hall, you sang the national anthem at Dodger Stadium and you've sung on a Robbie Williams album. How much training as a singer have you had?
I had maybe 10 lessons. My dad wanted to be a singer. He was a doctor but he was always singing opera in the house. So we all just grew up singing. But those lessons helped and I just practiced all the time.

Did you get your sense of humor from your parents?
My dad would goof off and be funny, but my grandfather Lou Melman--we called him Papa Lou-- he was hilarious. And he really influenced me a ton. I was very close to him, and a lot of my sense of humor is from him. I also grew up with David Kudrow, Lisa Kudrow's brother. I grew up with their family. And David is really funny and his dad is funny. I just always liked being around people who were funny. And then I've got a group of friends. We've all been friends since the eighth grade. They're all really funny, too, and the one thing we have in common is our sense of humor. I wish they all could have gotten into comedy.

None of these guys are in the business?
No, David Kudrow is one of the best neurologists in Los Angeles right now. But he's very talented and very funny. In fact, Lisa and I have talked about how he could do comedy if he wanted. But the other guys are a surgeon, an architect, a builder and a lawyer. And I'm the comedian. But when we get together, before you know it, we're back in eighth grade. We all know how rare it is that we're all still friends, but the thing that bonds us is this sense of humor.

As a fan of Bob Saget, I'm curious to know why you started singing your Bob Saget songs.
I've known Bob for 20 years. When I started doing standup I would make up these funny songs about my manager to tease him, but nobody knew who he was. So Bob was in the club one night and I asked him if I could make up the songs about him. He thinks it's funny. He called me up saying, "My daughter's graduating high school and we're doing a show at The Laugh Factory, could you come and sing all your songs about me?" Bob told me he was in Irvine once and someone said to him, "Hey, did you know Lovitz is singing all these songs about you?" And he goes, "Yeah, I know!" Bob tries to make 'em up, too, but then asks me, "Why are all your songs funny, but mine aren't?" And I just tell him, "Because I'm funny." It's just a friend teasing a friend onstage. I'm not comparing myself to them at all, but it's like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby when they would take jabs at each other. It's in that spirit.

In my opinion, one of your best onscreen performances was the opening to Todd Solondz's movie "Happiness," in which you play devastated to relieved to vengeful in the span of six minutes. Can you tell me about that experience?

First of all, Todd [Solondz] wrote a great scene. It's rare to get a great scene like that. A lot of the stuff I do--I mean, I have fun doing it--but the scene's just okay and then you have to work really hard to figure out how to make it work. But when the material is great, in a different way it's harder because you have to come up to the level of that material to make the scene work. It's a challenge. Shakespeare is one of the best writers, but it's also very difficult to do.

Anyway, I met with Todd about being in the movie. I was either going to get that part [Andy Kornbluth] or the part that he gave to Phillip Seymour Hoffman. It was going to be one or the other, he said. Then I didn't hear anything for five months, so I figured I wasn't going to be in the movie. But then he called and said he wanted me, so I met with him and we worked on the scene. We shot it in one day, but I had to cry over and over again, so emotionally it was exhausting. I was crying for 12 hours, it made me depressed for two weeks. Even though it wasn't real, I was crying all day long, and my body was going through that, so at the end of the day, it's not like I was bubbly, you know? And I had to keep thinking of different things that would make me cry, so I was just thinking of sad stuff all day long.

Jon Lovitz is in New York City all weekend long and will be performing standup at Comix on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Showtimes and ticket info available here. THE APIARY DISCOUNT: Save 20% off ($7.00 per ticket) any of Lovitz's shows by using the discount code "apiary".

Keith Huang is a regular contributor to The Apiary and Gelf Magazine and digs improv.