Jane Lynch Reveals Her Favorite Line From 'Talladega Nights'

Every comedy set has a governing rule, and on "Talladega Nights" the rule was simple. Best joke wins.

Jane Lynch laid that out for Rich when he asked for a story from the legend of Ricky Bobby. There was a script, Lynch said, but the script was a starting point rather than a cage.

"We had a script but we improvised as well, and it was always the best joke wins," Lynch said. "It doesn't matter if Will said it or who said it. It was very ensemble oriented."

That is a generous way to run a movie set, and Lynch credited the two people at the top for setting the temperature. "That's how Will Ferrell is and that's how Adam McKay is," she said. The result was a room that never felt like a room where anything was at stake.

"It was a lot of fun," Lynch said. "You didn't feel the pressure that we were making a major motion picture."

Which brings us to the part every fan of the movie actually wants to know. Did any of the lines that stuck belong to her?

They did. Lynch pointed to the stretch where the kids are on the road with her and she is stuck picking up trash, trying to impose some civilization on them. The threat she reaches for in that moment came out of something she had read.

"I think I had read somewhere that someone tried to take the radio into the bathtub and electrocuted themselves," Lynch said.

Rich asked the obvious follow-up. That is where the line came from?

"That's where that came from," Lynch confirmed.

The best detail is what happened next, or rather what did not happen next. Nobody circled back to tell her the improvised line had survived the cut. She found out the way the rest of us did.

"I was very happy to see it in there," Lynch said.

There is a small lesson buried in that. Movies people quote two decades later are rarely built entirely on the page. They get built in the gaps, by performers who are relaxed enough to throw something out and trusting enough not to check whether it landed. A set run on best joke wins produces more of those moments than a set run on the shooting script.

"Talladega Nights" has held up because it is full of them. Lynch just confirmed that at least one of the lines people still repeat was hers, improvised in the moment, discovered later in a theater like everybody else.