Hailing from some of today’s funniest TV series, six actors gathered recently for an uninhibited conversation about what it takes to make people laugh at The Envelope’s Emmy Roundtable for comedy actors.

In Netflix’s “Running Point,” Kate Hudson plays Isla, a woman who becomes pro basketball’s first girl boss when she takes over the family franchise. In ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” Lisa Ann Walter portrays Melissa Schemmenti, a tough grade school teacher in Philly’s underfunded public education system. With Hulu’s “Mid-Century Modern,” Nathan Lane takes on the role of Bunny, an aging gay man who brings together a chosen family when he invites two friends to reside in his Palm Springs home. “Hacks” co-creator Paul W. Downs does double duty as Jimmy, the manager to legendary comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) in the Max series. Bridget Everett, creator of HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere,” plays Sam, a cabaret singer who moves back to her family’s sleepy Kansas town to take care of her dying sister. And David Alan Grier stars as Dr. Ron, a devoted physician and cranky veteran who’s seen it all in the overrun ER of a small-town hospital in NBC’s “St. Denis Medical.”

The talented group spoke with The Times about their respective shows, typecasting and the risks one takes to make great comedy. Read on for excerpts from our discussion — and watch video of the roundtable above.

The best comedy pushes boundaries, which means it can also skirt the edge of offensive. How do you know if you’ve gone too far, or haven’t pushed it enough?

Downs: In the “Hacks” pilot, Jean Smart’s character, Deborah Vance, says there is no line. I think there’s nothing off limits, because it’s really about execution and thoughtfulness. The thing that makes edgy comedy not funny is when it causes harm, when it’s something that’s punching down, when it’s not something that can bring people together. That, to me, isn’t worth it. But there’s nothing that’s too taboo, because that’s what comedy is for. It’s to examine things, explore things, get close to the edge.

Everett: I think that comedy is about making people feel good. I want to make people feel joy. So as long as I’m not hurting anybody’s feelings, I think everything’s on the table.

Grier: I don’t think you know the edge and that’s why it’s dangerous. I’ve done things where I thought, “This is too much,” and things where I thought, “We didn’t go far enough.” So you have to play that game. My intention is never to anger and offend, but you do have to put yourself in that position and take a chance, especially with comedy. You can prescreen it, but who are you prescreening it to? Sixty-year-old white women? High school kids? You have to take a chance.

Kate Hudson of “Running Point.”

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Hudson: I’m not a stand-up [comedian], so it’s fun to watch people walk that line. It’s exciting. What are they going to say? Is it going to be offensive? Is it not? Is it going to be brilliant? That’s part of what’s fun about being an audience of adult comedy. But I don’t like mean comedy. It’s really hard for me to see. I’ve been asked to do roasts a million times, and I just can’t do it. It just doesn’t move me in any way.

Lane: I was asked. This was the biggest mistake of my life. … A Friars [Club] Roast that was going to happen. [Jerry Lewis] was going to be roasted. And Richard Belzer said to me, “Oh, Nathan, would you be a part of it? Would you do it? It would mean a lot to Jerry.” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, sure. I’ll do the roast.” And then I’m suddenly there and I’m sitting next to Paul Shaffer and Jeff Ross, who apologized in advance for what he might say. And I realized then that, “Oh, you’re not getting up and just roasting this person. You’re attacked. You’re on the dais.” So I thought, “Oh, what have I gotten into?” And I had asked them, “Please let me go first.” And I had worked out jokes. I had a couple of writers help me, and there was an initial joke, which was, “The only reason I agreed to do this was because I thought by the time it happened, Jerry would be dead.”

Walter: I’m on a show that’s got a lot of kids, and families can watch it together, which was Lorraine Ali Quinta Brunson’s intention. But there are things that the kids won’t get and that adults get. Melissa Schemmenti gets bleeped out regularly because she curses. She’s South Philly! As a comic, I only am interested in edge, that’s where I want to live … It’s easier to make a point and get ears when you’re making people laugh. And we do that on the show quite frequently. They’ll do a storyline about the school-to-prison pipeline, but it’s not ham-fisted, it’s not preachy. It’s edgy and it’s all within jokes. Anytime you’re making people laugh, I think you can say whatever you want.

What’s the strangest or most difficult skill you’ve had to learn for a role?

Hudson: In “Almost Famous,” [director] Cameron [Crowe] wanted me to learn how to roll cigarettes fast with one hand. And so I was learning how to roll, and I got really good at it really fast. And then when we were doing camera tests, I was doing it and I was smoking. And he was like, “No.” And I was like, “What? I just spent months trying to learn how to do that!” Then I started rolling my own cigarettes and got into a really bad habit and then spent years trying to quit.

Paul W. Downs of “Hacks.”

Downs: On “Broad City,” I had to learn and do parkour. It’s high skill level and high risk. You know, when you jump off buildings and roll around … [leap] off chairs and over fire hydrants. I did it, but not a lot of it ended up onscreen. Just the most comedic moments. I jumped between buildings and they didn’t even put it in!

Lane: When I did “Only Murders in the Building,” they said, “So you have a deaf son and you’re going to have scenes with him in ASL [American Sign Language].” It was challenging. I had a coach and I would work with him. And the wonderful young actor, James Caverly, who is Deaf … he was very supportive. If I had to become fluent, it would’ve taken six months to a year to do it well. But I had an advantage; they said, “Oh, your character is embarrassed by having a deaf son, so he didn’t learn it until later in life. So he’s not that good at it.” But it was a great thing to learn. I loved it.

Grier: I did an episode of a sitcom in which it was assumed, unbeknownst to me, that I was very proficient playing an upright bass. This is not true. I played cello as a child. I had to play this upright bass and as a jazz musician. It was horrible. Your fingers swell and blister and bleed. Of course, I went along with it because that’s what we’re all supposed to do. But by Day 4, my fingers were in great pain. I never mastered it. But I did want to ask them, “Who told you I could play?”

Everett: I did a little trapeze work, but since the knee thing, I can’t anymore … [Laughs]

Lane: This was the independent film about the Wallendas, right?

Everett: The truth is I’ve never had to do anything. Really. I had to rollerblade once in a Moby video, but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to stack up against all this, so maybe we should just move on to the next person. I would do trapeze, though. I’ll do anything. Well, not anything. Can we just edit this part out in post?

Hudson: I’m in love with you.

Walter: In a movie I did where I started out as the nosy neighbor, I found out that I was going to be a cougar assassin and I had to stunt drive a Mustang and shoot a Glock. It was a surprise. Literally. When I got to set, I saw my wardrobe and went, “I think I’m playing a different character than what I auditioned for.” … They put the car on a chain and I got T-boned. I was terrified, but then I was like, “Let’s go again!” That was the most dangerous thing until I had to do a South Philly accent as Melissa, and do it good enough so that South Philly wouldn’t kill me. That was probably more dangerous.

David Alan Grier of “St. Denis Medical.”

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Let’s talk about typecasting. What are the types of roles that frequently come to you, where you’re like “Oh, my God, not again!”

Lane: Oh, not another mysterious drifter.

Hudson: Rom-coms. If I can’t get a job doing anything else, I can get a job doing a romantic comedy. When you have major success in something, you realize the business is just so excited [that] they want you in them all the time. It really has nothing to do with anything other than that. It’s something that I’m very grateful for, but you’re constantly having to fight to do different things. I’d be bored if I was constantly doing the same thing over and over again. But it’s just how the business works. Once you’re in that machine, they just want to keep going until they go to somebody else.

Walter: I can’t tell you how bored I am with being the gorgeous object of men’s desire. I named my first production company Fat Funny Friend … But as a mother of four in Los Angeles, I didn’t really have the luxury of saying, “I want to branch out.” But I did say, “Can I play someone smart?” My father was a NASA physicist. My mother was brilliant. I was over doing things I could do in my sleep, always getting the part of the woman who sticks her head out of the trailer door and goes, “I didn’t kill him, but I ain’t sorry he’s dead!” … It’s like, “Can I play someone who has a college education?” And I did, finally, but it took Quinta to do it.

Grier: I’ve found that the older I’ve gotten, the roles I’m offered have broadened. And I’ve played a variety of really challenging great roles because I’m old now. That’s been a real joy because I didn’t really expect that. I just thought I’d be retired. I did. So it’s been awesome.

Nathan Lane of “Mid-Century Modern.”

Lane: There was an article written about me, it was sort of a career-assessment article. It was a very nice piece, but it referred to me as the greatest stage entertainer of the last decade. And as flattering as it was, I can find a dark cloud in any silver lining. I felt, “Oh, that’s how they see me?” As an “entertainer” because of musicals and things [I did] like “The Birdcage” or “The Lion King.” I’d been an actor for 35 years and I thought, “I have more to offer.” So I wound up doing “The Iceman Cometh” in Chicago … and that would change everything. It was the beginning of a process where I lucked out and got some serious roles in television, and that led to other things. But it was a concerted effort over a period of 10, 15 years, and difficult because everybody wants to put you in a box.

Is it difficult in the industry to make the move between drama and comedy?

Walter: It’s a lifelong consternation to me that there is an idea that if you are known comedically, that’s what you do. We are quite capable of playing all of the things.

Grier: I remember seeing Jackie Gleason in “The Hustler.” I loved it. He was so great. Robin Williams also did serious. I think it’s actually harder when you see serious actors try to be comedians.

Downs: One of the things about making “Hacks” is we wanted to do something that was mixed tone, that it was funny and comedic but also let actors like myself, like Jean, all of these people, have moments. Because to us, the most funny things are right next to the most tragic things.

Hudson: And usually the most classic. When you think about the movies that people know generation after generation, they’re usually the ones that walk the line. And they’re the ones that you just want to go back and watch over and over and over again.

Bridget Everett of “Somebody Somewhere.”

Everett: I haven’t had a lot of experience with being typecast because I’ve been in the clubs for a long time doing cabaret. But on my show, Tim Bagley, who plays Brad … he’s been doing the same characters for I don’t know for how long. So we wrote this part for him, and one of the most rewarding things for me on this show was sitting behind the monitor and watching him get to have the moment he deserved … It’s one of the greatest gifts to me as a creator to have been part of that. It’s a whole thing in my show. We’re all getting this break together. We’ve all struggled to pay our rent well into our 40s. I waited tables into my 40s, but you don’t give up because you love doing it.

I’m sure many of you are recognized in public, but what about being mistaken for somebody else who’s famous?

Grier: I went to a performance of a David Mamet show on Broadway. I went backstage, and this particular day, it was when Broadway was raising money to benefit AIDS. There was a Midwestern couple there with their young son and they saw me, and the house manager said, “This couple, they’re going to give us an extra $1,000 if you take a picture with them. Would you mind?” I’m like, “Yeah, cool.” So I’m posing and the dad goes, “It is our honor to take a picture with you, Mr. LeVar Burton.” Now in that moment, I thought if I say no, people will die. So I looked at them and I went, “You liked me in ‘Roots?’” He said, “We loved you.” Click, we took the picture. I’m not going to be like, “How dare you?!”

Walter: Peg Bundy I got a couple of times. But as soon as I open my mouth, they know who I am. I can hide my hair, but as soon as I talk, I’m made.

Hudson: I’ve had a lot of Drew Barrymore. And then every other Kate. Kate Winslet, Katie Holmes … I’ve gotten all of them.

Walter: Do you correct them?

Hudson: Never. I just say yes and sign it “Cate Blanchett.”

Lisa Ann Walter of “Abbott Elementary.”

I’d love to know who everybody’s comedic inspiration was growing up.

Walter: My dad used to let me stay up and watch “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and “Laugh-In.” I got to see Ruth Buzzi, rest in peace, and Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin. Jo Anne Worley. All these funny women. That’s what made me think, “You can get a job doing this, the thing that I get in trouble for at school?!”

Grier: My comedy hero was Richard Pryor. I was this Black little boy in Detroit, and George Jessel would come on “The Mike Douglas Show” and he might as well have been speaking Russian. I’m like, “How can this be comedy?” Then I saw Richard Pryor, and he was the first comic who I just went, “Well, this guy’s hilarious.”

Downs: I remember one of the first comedies that my dad showed me was “Young Frankenstein.” I remember Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman and Madeline Kahn. All of these women. I was always like, “They’re the funniest ones.”

Hudson: My era growing up was Steve Martin, Martin Short, Albert Brooks, Mel Brooks. But women were, for me, the classics. Lucille Ball.

Walter: There was a time when I was growing up where women really dominated comedy. They were your mom [nods at Hudson, Hawn’s daughter], Whoopi [Goldberg], Bette Midler. The biggest stars of the biggest comedies were women, and then that all went away for a really long time. I think it found its way back with Judd Apatow and then he made “Bridesmaids.”

Hudson: I tried really hard to make edgy comedy and studios wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t. It took Judd to convince the studio system that women are ready. That we can handle rated-R. In the ’70s and ’80s, there was a ton of rated-R comedy with women. But for some reason, it just all of a sudden became like, “Oh, there’s only 1½ demographics for women in comedy.” I always felt like it was an uphill battle trying to get them made. Then I remember when Jenji [Kohan] came in with “Orange Is the New Black.” That was really awesome.

Lane: Above all, it was always Jackie Gleason for me. He was such an influence. He was hilarious, and of course, very broadly funny, but then there was something so sad. It was such pathos with him. … He was this wonderful, serious actor, as well as being Ralph Kramden.

Everett: There’s nobody that taught me more about how to be funny than my mom. She just had this way of being that I have used in my live shows. It’s led to where I am now. She used to wet her pants [laughing] so she had to put towels down on all the chairs in the house. She just didn’t care. That shows you to not care, to go out there. I live in fear, but not when I feel like she’s with me.

Grier: That’s the edge. You’re either going to weep or you’re going to [laugh] until you urinate.

You’d be forgiven if you glanced at the monotonous western “Tornado” and decided that it’s a handsome genre exercise. The movie, which was shot in Scotland and set in 1790s Britain, follows a handful of laconic characters as they chase after each other for the usual formulaic reasons: gold and revenge. Writer/director John Maclean (“Slow West”) reteams with director of photography Robbie Ryan (“Poor Things”) for a typically attractive collaboration, which makes “Tornado” easy enough on the eyes. That helps considerably whenever the action lets up in this dialogue-light chase movie. 

Substantive themes are hinted at throughout, though they’re most clearly (and bluntly) articulated in the movie’s load-bearing dialogue between the title heroine (Kōki), a samurai-sword-wielding teenager, and her father Fujin (Takehiro Hira), a traveling puppeteer. By contrast, Tim Roth and “Slow Horses” star Jack Lowden, playing a father/son duo of scruffy bandits, don’t say much that sticks in one’s mind. 

“Tornado” also features a number of eye-popping images thanks to the filmmakers’ emphatic use of forced perspective. The movie may not deliver enough of what its creators offer, but to paraphrase the great Bugs Bunny during a rare self-justifying apology: So it’s mechanical!

Maclean’s latest—his first feature in ten years—begins mid-chase. The title character flees from vicious robber Sugarman (Roth) and his gang, whose members have Dick Tracy-esque names like Squid Lips (Jack Morris) and Lazy Legs (Douglass Russell). Sugarman’s looking for Tornado and a cache of gold; Sugarman’s son, Little Sugar (Lowden), mostly skulks about and looks for opportunities to prove himself. He finds one in Tornado, though he mostly hangs back and lets his dad and his associates go first. 

Meanwhile, Tornado tries to resume her uneasy day-to-day routine with her father, whose home-spun wisdom falls on deaf ears. Admittedly, it’s hard to take seriously folksy dialogue like, “Learn patience. Know when to move and when to wait.” This might have been more endearing coming from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ talking rat mentor Splinter. It’s less impressive coming from a major supporting character who seems to speak for Maclean, like when Fujin, speaking in character as one of his marionettes during a puppet show, explains why we never really learn why Sugarman and his group do what they do since they’re motivated by “the most evil of all reasons—no reason at all.”

Tornado, the daughter of a Japanese man and an absent European mother, only has a little more on her mind. Sugarman’s pursuit triggers her fight-or-flight instincts, and she has no time for her life-lesson-dispensing father. Tornado also happens to live in changing times, when immigrants are still treated like curious anomalies, and swords will soon be replaced with guns. A number of other qualities and storytelling values remain constant, as Maclean suggests when Fujin explains that puppet show audiences “always cheer when evil is winning.” It’s hard not to agree with Tornado when she snarks back: “Because good is boring.”

Then again, Maclean’s right to emphasize the ScottishBritish countryside, both as an eye-catching backdrop and contextualizing environment, since it often dwarfs his human characters and makes them look small or absurd. Many times, the deep focus of any given static camera setup establishes how far the characters have traveled to get from one in-between place to the next. Other times, it serves to show how close together the characters actually are, since they’re just over there, one straight, semi-symmetrical line of sight apart from each other. So it’s very easy to catch a melancholy mood and therefore to appreciate the movie’s sobering atmosphere, even if we’re still stuck watching sketchy characters trudge after and chip away at each other.

There’s also an unusual tonal clash at the heart of “Tornado,” and it’s as apparent as the movie’s suggestive title: Kōki’s young heroine doesn’t simply represent one identity or mood, as a later line of dialogue explains. Maclean’s dramedy likewise features antic comedy, as in an early pratfall involving weak floorboards and a large, heavy named Kitten (Rory McCann), as well as suggestive images of an indifferent, but stunning autumnal landscape. The lighting and the editing in this movie are appealing enough to make you want to get lost in each carefully composed frame. The wispy dialogue, variable tone, and creeping pace make it harder to care.  

Maclean’s execution frequently makes up for his distracting habit of both over- and underthinking certain key concepts. He and his collaborators still know how to achieve the effects they set out to. So your enjoyment of “Tornado” depends on how much you want to root for thinly drawn characters who don’t look strong enough to carry an entire movie. They can and they can’t, depending on how patient you’re feeling.

At the beginning of “Mountainhead,” written and directed by Jesse Armstrong of “Succession” fame and premiering Saturday on HBO, three multibillionaire tech bros make their way by private plane, helicopter and SUV caravan to join a fourth in a big modernist house on an isolated, snowy mountaintop for a weekend of poker and drugs — “no deals, no meals, no high heels.” One might wish for an avalanche, were there anything higher to fall on them.

Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the world’s richest man — imagine Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg put in a blender, as perhaps you have — commands a social media site with, wait for it, four billion subscribers, and has just released new “content tools” that allow for super high-res “unfalsifiable deep fakes.” As a result, the sectarian world is going up in flames. Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a rival who had poached members of Venis’ team, has an AI algorithm capable of filtering out the bad information which Venis, closing the digital barn door after the cow is out, wants to acquire; but Jeff, for reasons of profit, power and/or ego, is not going to let it go.

Randall (Steve Carell), their gray-haired guru — they call him “Papa Bear,” though Jeff also dubs him “Dark Money Gandalf” — controls a lot of international infrastructure, including military. Preoccupied with his mortality — told by his latest oncologist that his cancer is incurable, he responds, “You are not a very intelligent person” — he’s hoping to upload his consciousness to the grid, a possibility Venis assures him is only five years off as long as he can get his hands on Jeff’s AI. The relatively inoffensive Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose house it is, hopes to expand the meditation app he created, into a lifestyle super app — offering “posture correction, therapy and a brand new color” — with his friends’ investment of “a b-nut,” i.e., a billion dollars. They call him “Souper,” for “soup kitchen,” because he is worth only $521 million. He’s the runt of the litter, and the comedy relief.

For no given reason, they call themselves the Brewsters — perhaps just so they can crow “cock-a-doodle-brew.” They are full of themselves — “The great thing about me,” says Randall, “is that I know everyone and do everything” — and basically insecure.

They rewrite their fundamental nihilism into the belief that their business is good for mankind, whatever the actual human cost. “You’re always going to get some people dead,” Randall says. “Nothing means anything,” Venis says, “and everything’s funny and cool.” (But he does miss his mother and, in a particularly creepy interlude, his baby is brought up the mountain for an uncomfortable minute.) In the only scene to take them out of the house, the four travel to the crest of a mountain, where Hugo writes each man’s net worth in lipstick on his chest, they don hierarchical headgear and shout, “Mountain god accelerator legacy manifestation!” into the valley below, each adding a wish. It is, seemingly, something they have done before.

Randall name-checks philosophers — Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Marcus Aurelius — he misunderstands to his advantage and drops references to the Catiline Conspiracy and the Battle of Actium to make base actions sound important and dignified. He calls the president a “simpleton” — one assumes Armstrong is reflecting on the current one — but for all their power, money and influence, they all lack wisdom. And if recent years have taught us anything, it’s that these things are not mutually exclusive.

Venis thinks the violence engulfing the globe, which cannot touch him, may prove cathartic; Randall is “excited about these atrocities.” They discuss taking over “failing nations” to “show them how it’s done.” (In perhaps the film’s funniest line, Hugo, who has been working on his house, muses, “I don’t know if I want to run Argentina on my own — not on the back of a major construction project.”) They trade in gobbledygook phrases like “AI dooming and decelerationist alarmism,” “compound distillation effect” and “bootstrap to a corporate monarchy, cyber-state it to the singularity, eat the chaos,” which for all I know is just Armstrong quoting things people of this sort have actually said. It seems possible.

As the only one with a sense of humor and a semblance of perspective, Jeff is the most sympathetic of this toxic crew. He tracks the worsening world situation with some empathetic concern, but even though he holds the key to end the madness, he does not seem in a hurry to turn it. (Mostly he is concerned with his girlfriend, who is in Mexico, not so much because of the unrest, but because he fears she’s having sex.) Still, he stands a little apart, to his peril.

The first half of the film proceeds essentially as a play for four characters. Apart from Hugo’s asking for “help with the cold cuts” or inquiring whether everyone’s cool with reusing plates, there is a scarcely a line in which people talk like people; it is all theatrical declaration. To some extent it fits the coldness of the quartet — they hug and hoot and occasionally express a droplet of emotion, but the friendship on which they insist is competitive, transactional and illusory. They are not good company, but for those of us less than impressed by the whole “move fast and break things” thing, or not willing to bow down before ChatGPT and OpenAI or the actual tech billionaires deforming the world, there is some fun in watching them fall apart. In some ways, “Mountainhead” (rhymes with “Fountainhead”) feels as much a public service as an entertainment. So thanks for that, Jesse Armstrong.

When, in the farcical, action-oriented second half, some attempt to execute a … plot, they bumble and argue and push each other to the front. It is an old kind of movie comedy, and works pretty much as intended.