If you’re going to gather a panel of Hollywood heavyweights at the same theater that hosts the Oscars telecast, you could do worse than make them comedians, who know how to work the crowd better than anyone.

The panelists at the PaleyFest 2015 event “Salute to Comedy Central” did not disappoint on Saturday, as an enthusiastic audience gathered at Dolby Theatre to watch Grantland TV writer Andy Greenwald conduct an onstage interview with some of the network’s top talent, including Review star Andy Daly, Kroll Show mastermind Nick Kroll, Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key of Key & Peele, Broad City star and co-creator Abbi Jacobson, and the Workaholics themselves Blake Anderson, Anders Holm and Adam DeVine.

“It’s a really cool time to be at Comedy Central,” Kroll told Greenwald, taking a break from pretending to be a militantly right-wing, anti-Obama gun nut to talk seriously. While Kroll Show will end for good following the March 17 airing of its current season’s final episode, Kroll said the decision was amicable. “We just wanted to go out doing our best work,” he continued.

The other panelists concurred with Kroll’s assessment of their employer, and struggled to think of an answer when Greenwald asked for tales of the worst notes they’d ever received. One Comedy Central executive, Peele recalled, once wrote the words, “Is Star Wars a thing people care about?” in response to an entire series of sketches Key and Peele had planned to produce riffing on the iconic franchise. The show went ahead and filmed the scenes anyway and Comedy Central did not try to stop them, even though, based on viewer reactions to the sketches, “I think [the exec] may have been right,” Peele said.

Not surprisingly, the conversation frequently digressed into hilarious bouts of silliness, but Greenwald managed to coax interesting anecdotes from the panelists when they weren’t busy cracking the crowd up. Even after their show was picked up by a major cable network, for instance, the Workaholics stars continued to live in the same rundown house where it is filmed and takes place – and where they had initially shot the viral Internet videos that got them noticed by Comedy Central in the first place – for another three years. “Normal people would move out at that point,” said DeVine, “but we were convinced we were getting cancelled so we just stayed there. It’s weird waking up in your boxers and going to craft services.”

Key admitted that an early title proposed for their show was Key vs. Peele, but was nixed because “we don’t like to promote black on black violence,” while Daly pointed to Fred Willard’s intergalactic death scene as one of Review’s crowning moments. And Jacobson waxed at length about the sap viscosity in a Broad City scene in which her counterpart Ilana Glazer has what can most gently be referred to as a sexual encounter with a tree. “Comedy Central found out about that scene after it aired,” Jacobson professed.

Collectively, the stories pointed to a hands-off Comedy Central approach that has found great success in recent years by letting the individual voices of its talent shine through with as little filter as possible. The writers and performers on the Dolby Theatre stage were evidence of what can happen in an environment of uninhibited creativity: television that is both gut-bustingly funny and wildly unpredictable, each series an utterly singular entity that feels like nothing else that has come before.

“My favorite scenes are the ones that go off the rails organically,” said Key, pointing to his show’s unforgettable “Karim and Jahar” bit in which the scripted joke of two Arab guys ogling women in burkas became something even more intriguing as the duo discovered new depths to their relationship through on-camera riffing. Such moments can happen when talent feels free to follow ideas to the furthest limits of possibility. Every member of Saturday’s panel has that freedom at Comedy Central, and judging by the PaleyFest crowd’s frequent bouts of boisterous cheering, it’s paying off.

“You need to watch all these shows,” Jacobson told the crowd, “because everyone up here is fearless.”

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