The importance of being Pauly

"They're the worst," he confesses. "They give me a headache! When you have your own style, you specifically have to write for it. I respect every director I work with, but they don't know me as much as I know me."

So, since gaining a measure of clout, he is now contractually guaranteed that at least one take of each scene will be performed his way, regardless of the director's wishes.

"They edit it the way they want it," he says, "and then they test it and it doesn't work. So I have to go back and put in all my takes, and that's what happened on Jury Duty. My company helped produce this, you know, Weasel Productions, just so I could start getting credit, so people could see I'm not just the guy that shows up on the set and Ba-da-ba-da-baa! I'm creatively involved in the casting, the writing, the angles...with the uh, the editing...stuff like that.

"Comedy is such a fuckin' personal thing," Pauly says, raising his voice, on the verge of an artistic credo. "It's kind of like, y'know..if you had an insecurity, y'know, and someone named it, y'know, like, 'Oh, your eyes are fucked-up!' And, y'know. And you're like this..."

Pauly's face screws itself up into a horrified mask--the expression of a man wrestling with the extremities of existence.

A remnant of Cap'N Crunch and honey mustard fills the air.
"Like, like someone saying to me, 'You're not funny!'" he continues. "That's like , Oh!..."

He makes another face--an expression of total incredulity.
"Y'know what I mean?