Happiness Quote by Kevin McDonald

McDonald is drawing a bright line between comedy as costume and comedy as craft, and he does it with the plainspoken defensiveness of someone who’s had to justify that choice in rooms full of people asking for bigger wigs. “Balloons in our shirts” and “high voices” aren’t just cheap gags; they’re shorthand for a whole tradition of sketch comedy that mistakes surface distortion for invention. He’s insisting the laughs must be earned from the character’s inner logic, not pasted on with visual noise.

The subtext is a quiet manifesto: respect the audience enough to build a person, not a prop. In sketch, the easy move is to announce “funny” with a look or a sound. McDonald’s point is that those signals expire fast. A character-based laugh lasts because it comes from recognizable want, status anxiety, delusion, neediness - the stuff that keeps generating new beats once the premise is set. It’s also a way of protecting the performer. If the joke is “I look ridiculous,” the actor is disposable; if the joke is “this person believes something ridiculous,” the actor becomes a writer of behavior.

Context matters: coming out of alt-comedy and ensemble sketch (Kids in the Hall territory), this is a stake in the ground against broader, louder, network-safe mugging. It’s not puritanical; it’s strategic. McDonald is arguing for comedy that survives replay, that can be quoted without the costume, that doesn’t rely on the audience’s reflex to laugh at the obvious. The “very important to us” lands like a mission statement - not just taste, but identity.