Kristen Schaal recalls South Park firing her after one month, says she found her Daily Show role limiting

The Daily Beast

"I was there for like a month and I was told—I got a warning that I was talking too much," says Schaal, who like Trey Parker and Matt Stone is a Colorado native, in an interview with The Last Laugh podcast. "I was pitching too much," she adds. "I’d never been in a writers’ room before. So I was just like, let me earn my keep. I was like, 'How about this? How about this? How about this?' And that’s not how it works... I wasn’t going where the room was going. Because at that time too, South Park was doing a ton of movie parodies and my movie knowledge is not good. I couldn’t go there, so I just kept pitching another thing. So looking back, yeah, they let me go. I could do a writers’ room now, just for everybody listening, but I was too nervous and too excited to be in there." But a month after her firing, Schaal was hired on The Daily Show as Senior Women’s Issues Correspondent, which she was excited about but ultimately found limiting. "I wanted to be a regular on the show, but that meant that I would rarely, rarely be on there because there’s not a lot of women’s issues that make the news," says Schaal, adding: "At the time I was bummed. So I would just constantly be scanning the news for 'women’s issues.' Nobody, especially back then, was talking about it. But sometimes they would. But I did the show, I don’t know, 10, 13 times? And a lot of those pieces I’m so proud of because they were very unique."