“The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.”
“I don’t do comedy so much although I would like to do a comedy.”
“I’d like to do a romantic comedy.”
“I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it’s been something that I’ve always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.”
“I definitely relate so much to a lot of women in comedy, but I don’t love segregating the genders. I’m just as influenced by male comedians as I am female comedians.”
“I feel like comedy had a boys’-club label when we were starting.”
“I love comedy, but I was just obsessed with ‘SNL’ growing up.”
“I started getting really interested in comedy when I was in middle school.”
“We just sort of thought a Web series would be a cool thing to be able to send to our parents to show them that we were, in fact, actually doing comedy.”
“Man, Amy Ryan. I have geeked out so hard for her – to her face! There aren’t a lot of people that can cross those lines of drama and comedy so seamlessly as Amy Ryan.”
“I do films that I like. I have done comedy, romance, everything, and I always like to do it differently from the previous ones.”
“Writing comedy is a superpower.”
“In zombie horror, the juxtaposition of the calm world of the living and the menace of the undead inspires terror. In zombie comedy, like ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,’ it is played for laughs.”
“’Breaking In’ is a very different office comedy and a caper comedy. Aside from ‘Chuck,’ there is no half-hour comedy that does stuff like that.”
“Hollywood would make a holocaust an animated comedy if people would pay to see it; they don’t care… they just want your money.”
“Anyone in the comedy world knows that Horatio Sanz and Chris Parnell are two of the funniest guys around.”
“I was a huge fan of comedy in high school.”
“When you do comedy, you get impervious to good and bad reviews.”
“I’ll tell you one thing… no doubt about it, my favorite kind of comedy is talking head comedy. I mean, if it were up to me, I’d do a whole entire movie that was just around a dinner table.”
“First off, no one award-wise ever rewards comedy, which is… whatever. I don’t care about that.”
“I am actually talking about possibly adapting ‘The Boys,’ by Garth Ennis, which would not be a comedy, but an action movie with comedy elements to it.”
“We, Will Ferrell and I, were approached by Sequoia, which is a big financing firm up in Palo Alto; they do a lot of Internet stuff, and they came to us and said they had an idea for a comedy site, and Will and I were sorta like, ‘Yeah, we don’t know. It’s the Internet, we’ve seen it come and go.’”
“As far as what makes a viral video, then it’s gotta be something that you’ve either never seen before, a fresh piece of comedy, or something that relates to something topical.”
“The stuff that’s going on is just so over-the-top, with the banking crisis and destroying the Gulf of Mexico, and the outrage hasn’t quite caught up with the people yet. But when it does, I think you’re going to see really virulent anti-authoritarian kind of comedy coming out.”
“First and foremost when you’re doing comedy, you gotta be relevant and applicable to the times that you’re living in. When you try and just do comedy about who is dating who and lifestyle jokes, it gets tiring after a while. It’s hard to be funny in that realm.”
“I would really love to do an action movie. An action comedy would be right in my wheel house. But those are really hard to come by.”
“My comedy is different every time I do it. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
“A lot of critics object to what I do, but I got into comedy to make people laugh, and I’ve always worked hard.”
“I think one of the great things about ‘Bridesmaids’ is that it’s a big studio comedy, but all of the relationships in it are so grounded that you’re watching a real movie.”
“All of my favorite comedy has always been of the grounded variety. Even ‘MacGruber.’ I think that MacGruber is a really grounded character.”
“’The Dictator’ – well, that was just a comedy, and I suppose the morality was incidental. It was just something to try and make people laugh rather than being a serious thing.”
“I’d love to do comedy.”
“Most modern comedy is crap.”
“You’re entering dangerous land when you start theorising about comedy.”
“I love to do comedy.”
“The odd thing is how, I think, the intensity and devotion to my craft and the intensity of certain performances or types of roles I’ve played overshadow the comedic stints that I’ve had. ‘Darjeeling Limited’ is a comedy; The ‘Brothers Bloom’ is a comedy.”
“Comedy is ugly. It’s honest, it’s raw.”
“I like grown up comedy.”
“Standup comedy is inordinately difficult. If doing something else for a living will make you equally happy, choose that instead. I’m serious. Comedy is punishing.”
“There aren’t as many women in my industry in comedy as there should and could and hopefully will be, but it is interesting growing up watching a woman in a male-dominated industry and kind of, like, plowing ahead.”
“People want their actors to do comedy, too. They don’t want any comedians next to the actor. They want one solo hero and want to see everything in him.”
“Well, I think that there’s a value to comedy in and of itself.”
“Well, a lot of politics is communicating with people, and obviously comedy has something to do with that. I’ve been a producer and led people. Also, being a comedian, you’re under pressure.”
“I’ve always liked and appreciated storytellers like Garry Shandling and Bill Cosby – more long-form comedy. So starting in San Francisco, watching all these great comics – Patton Oswalt, Dave Chappelle – you get to see them a bunch, and you go, ‘Wow, this is where I need to be.’”
“Usually, comedy shows only influence other comedy shows. ‘M*A*S*H’ is one of the few comedies that influenced dramatic shows as well.”
“I’d have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is like that. That’s my fave genre, if I had to pick one.”
“You can’t always go by the book, even in comedy.”
“I did standup comedy. I opened once for Jay Leno.”
“I think one of the big things about comedy is the ability for the audience to identify.”
“I really enjoyed multicamera comedy. You film in front of a live audience, and it’s kind of the best of both worlds. It’s like doing a one-act play every week, but if you screw your lines up, you get to do it over.”
“I think multicamera comedy is a much-maligned American art form.”
“I don’t like this young crudeness now which is supposed to be comedy on Friday nights.”
“It’s always been said that comedy comes mostly out of the dark side anyway.”
“Hollywood comedy has gotten really silly and absurd, and I like that.”
“I experimented with my own one-man show a couple of years ago in Aspen when HBO used to have their comedy festival there. I called it ‘A History of Me.’”
“I don’t want to offend people and I don’t want to be mean, but social commentary and comedy for me are part and parcel. I think the greatest social activists are comedians.”
“I, sort of, got into comedy accidentally, and it got bigger than I wanted it to.”
“When I started out, I tried out all my stuff on national television. There were no comedy clubs, but even if there were, I don’t think I would have gone to them. I used to do stuff in the bathroom, and then I’d drive down to NBC and do it on ‘The Golddiggers’ with Dean Martin.”
“We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.”
“If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy. That’s the comedy that I like.”
“I’ve never done a period piece or a comedy, and that could be something truly different for me.”
“If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.”
“I always have considered Michael Keaton to be a phenomenal actor because he navigates drama and comedy.”
“It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.”
“Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.”
“The idea of a musical comedy was something we had had in mind for many years, but the project ‘Igudesman & Joo: A Little Nightmare Music’ has a history that goes back five years. I can say that this is the most successful project that we have ever done.”
“Being an outsider helps breed comedy.”
“’Rubberneck’ has nothing to do with comedy, nor does it follow comedic people.”
“I love doing comedy. It’s a lot of fun.”
“A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it’s also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.”
“My first summer in college, I interned for Arena Stage in D.C. and taught a disastrous class on standup comedy to middle schoolers at the Arena Stage camp. I had never taught anything before, and needless to say, I quickly lost control of the class.”
“It’s not that Millennials don’t believe some things are serious. We’ll make ‘It Gets Better’ videos or perform comedy for disaster relief. But sum up our lives in a phrase? The Importance of Never Being Too Earnest.”
“Although no one explicitly wants a president who could have a reliable fall back career in stand-up comedy, everyone shudders at the thought of a Rutherford B. Hayes or John Kerry.”
“You can’t do comedy with a beard.”
“I’m fascinated by comedy.”
“It seems easier to make a career out of comedy now than it was in the 1980s.”
“I have this fantasy of relaxing and doing nothing. But I’m obviously very passionate about stand-up comedy. I mean, I keep doing it. So I must be really into it.”
“Comedy has so much to do with honesty, and women can be more open about their emotions.”
“Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.”
“Women, a lot of the time, are so much funnier than men, but they just choose not to do comedy for a living.”
“Some people do specials, like, when they’ve only been doing comedy for three years or something. Which is fine! But I’m kind of old fashioned, and I knew that I didn’t want to do one too early.”
“I always really loved comedy. It’s the only thing I was ever good at.”
“On American TV, there just aren’t a lot of female leads in comedy, especially at the peak of all the Judd Apatow stuff.”
“I was in something called ‘Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace’ which was a real cult comedy; it’s sort of a spoof horror sort of thing, and it only ever had one series, but I liked the fact that it only had one series because it’s kind of got this little gemlike quality to it that there were only ever six episodes.”
“I’m gradually working through my obsessions, and maybe, when they’re all free and clear, I’ll write a comedy. But I’m not there yet.”
“I enjoy doing drama, and I enjoy doing comedy equally.”
“I feel like any time John Oliver is added to something, the comedy is instantly there. He’s so funny.”
“I’d love to do acting, but it’d definitely have to be comedy. I can’t do serious. It’s completely beyond me.”
“I never think of a project as just being comedy or just being drama – even with ‘Masters of Sex.’ I like being sort of messy, like life is.”
“I’ve always been a figure skater and ballet dancer. I love physical comedy, and any chance that I get to do that… that is so me.”
“I have found that so many directors and producers in the room say nothing, and this can be deadly. It’s very difficult to audition for comedy in the vacuum of a small room, but it’s the only way most do it.”
“I moved to Chicago when I was 28, and I wasn’t completely idealistic about going to Second City and making a living from comedy, but I knew it would be great for the resume.”
“It’s safe to say I’m a comedy nerd. I listen to so many podcasts. I just love to laugh.”
“I do mostly comedy, and it tends to be a subtler comedy. But I think that probably lends itself well to commercials.”
“Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.”
“I never wanted to be a model. I never wanted to be a serious actress. I started off doing comedy. I did a stand-up comedy camp at the Laugh Factory, and I started out on Nickelodeon.”
“In a romantic comedy, it’s usually a good idea to have people who can’t stand the fact that they are attracted to each other.”
“’Smart Funny & Black’ came about because I felt that black comedians were being considered as only capable of a certain type of comedy – sort of physical, kind of silly – and I felt like we are not a monolith, and our comedy isn’t, either.”
“I have planted my flag in my comedy being useful for social change.”
“For a lot of comics who aren’t as silly or physical but more intellectual, we get looked at as ‘alt comics.’ No, I’m still a black comic, and there are black people who want to hear my type of black comedy, but that space hasn’t been built out for us.”
“I am a stage actor. I do mostly improv comedy. The only national television stuff is ‘Archer’ and’ Frisky Dingo.’”
“I’ve always wanted to work in comedy.”
“I love working in television and in comedy, so whenever there’s an opportunity to work on a TV sitcom, I’m like, ‘Yes please!’”
“Ideally, I’d love to do a comedy just because, work-wise, it’d be a lot of fun.”
“Indian actors, because of the format of our stories, need to be good actors, and be able to perform emotional sequences, do a bit of comedy, dance and singing, action, because all of this forms just one film. In many ways I’d say there are greater demands on Indian actors than there are on Hollywood.”
“It goes without saying that before its culture and literature can continue to evolve, Latvia first must endure the political comedy of creating a stable, functioning and unthreatened democracy.”
“Because I’ve done so many hour dramas, people tend to think of you as more of a dramatic actor and don’t see you as doing comedy.”
“I wanted to do something in the style of a comedy of manners.”
“I was trying to be a clinical psychologist for years. But I kept getting stuck in comedy.”
“When you’re doing sketch comedy and you’re pregnant, it’s like wearing a giant sombrero in every sketch.”
“I’d say any good set or any comedy that I’ve worked on, that’s worked, has been comedians pitching ideas back and forth to each other. A lot of like, ‘What if you say this? What about this?’”
“I don’t watch a lot of comedy. For relaxation and escape, I watch shows about how people survive bear attacks. Or old episodes of ‘Law and Order,’ the Benjamin Bratt/Jerry Orbach era.”
“I like a certain style of show, I like a certain pace, I like a rhythm, I like a lot of comedy in with my drama.”
“I always loved comedy but I didn’t start formally until I was in college.”
“People ask me if I have comedy writers, and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
“One of the great upsides about comedy is that you’re dealing with really lovely, fun material.”
“I would like to get back to making people laugh. Before drama school, I did nothing but comedy.”
“You can (be a middle-aged comic) if you work very hard at it, because comedy is really hard.”
“With every movie, I try to do something different, whether it’s action, comedy or drama.”
“I get frustrated by the fact that comics go on stage with some kind of agenda beyond comedy – I’m not sure it should be about that.”
“I’ve been lucky enough to play many different roles from darker characters to family orientated shows to comedy.”
“It’s very difficult to make comedy work; I think it’s a very underrated genre.”
“Universal Orlando may have the new Harry Potter Wizarding World, but Disney World has the Hari Puttar Experience, based on the Bollywood movie, ‘Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors.’”
“One of my favorite comedy performances of all time is Charles Grodin in ‘Midnight Run,’ and in a lot of things he’s done. I think he’s hilarious as the straight man, playing it real.”
“I came out to L.A. in ’78 to be a musician. I didn’t get into comedy until the mid-Eighties.”
“I always had a tremendous amount of rage about the business, and I thought turning that into comedy was healthy.”
“When did I start comedy? I came out of the womb and did 10 minutes.”
“Why did God have to make Mo’Nique a good actress? What was God thinking when he decided to give Mo’Nique acting chops. Now we have to endure Mo’Nique comedy specials.”
“The Comedy Bar is an intimate club, which I prefer. I refuse to play theatres, because large empty spaces make me nervous, and I don’t enjoy the echo. I’m no sell out. Literally.”
“In the ’90s, comedy was at a very low point, but these days, you’ve got people like Hannibal Burress, Ron Funches, Maria Bamford – people who can play any club, anywhere.”
“From 1987 to 1992, I was on the road for 40 weeks a year playing comedy clubs, and that was during the ‘comedy boom.’”
“After making several tragic movies in a row, I was looking to do a comedy, and one without cynicism.”
“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”
“With our hectic lives, a dose of comedy is a must.”
“If I am comfortable, I say what I want to. But yes, while doing a comedy show, I am slightly reserved as a person. Since it’s scripted, it’s not a problem. I can manage.”
“Comedy is the toughest. If it goes little bit here and there, and your partner doesn’t cover up for you, then everything can go wrong.”
“I have done ‘Gutar-Gu,’ which was a silent comedy show.”
“I started doing comedy in a church.”
“Half-brights consider it comedy gold to congratulate anyone they dislike for ‘winning the Kentucky Derby!’ The only thing more bracingly original to not-smart people is: ‘Stay classy!’”
“Comedy is hard. Any idiot can have an opinion.”
“I’ve always wanted to be in comedy… growing up with Asian parents and not seeing yourself represented in media – it was always just a daydream.”
“My comedy does not come from a place of deep cynicism, and I tend to play characters who are naive in some way.”
“I love being a part of a romantic comedy. I’ve done a lot of comedies but haven’t always had a ton of romance in them.”
“It would be a lot of fun to play some comedy.”
“I love comedy, and I always wanted to go that way, but I felt so passionate about drama.”
“You have to be so honest in comedy.”
“My teacher at RADA said I was going to have trouble when I left because I wasn’t an obvious juvenile lead, although I could do both comedy and drama. But I understood enough to know that my career was going to be a marathon, not a sprint.”
“It’s important on a comedy to have a fun loving set.”
“Comedy is second nature for me.”
“That’s the worst way you can hear about comedy material: from a third person’s blog story that they wrote when they were upset.”
“My areas of expertise are acting, comedy, radio jockeying.”
“A great horror film works as a communal experience more than almost anything else, except for maybe a comedy. That’s something that I’ve experienced, just taking this movie around and watching it with audiences.”
“Comedy is funny when it comes from truth, and that’s always the rule of them. It’s about how far you can push that boundary.”
“There’s a certain truism that you can’t be self-conscious in comedy.”
“My deepest fear about doing TV, especially about doing a network comedy, was what if it felt too surface-y? What if it felt too jokey?”
“I don’t have to fear that if I do more comedy I’m not going to get to do everything I want. I’ll get to do my ‘Yentl.’”
“Our everyday lives exist with comedy and tragedy next to each other.”
“I think comedy is one of the hardest things to pull off. You either have timing or you don’t, and that’s something I don’t have for sure.”
“With comedy, don’t try to be funny. That’s really helped me. Just say the lines as you would say them, interact with other characters, and try to make it as real as possible. It will come out funny.”
“Eddie Murphy was the Michael Jordan of comedy. He had a full range of abilities.”
“Because it’s uncensored cable, I think we’ll be able to do the kind of sketch comedy that really hasn’t been seen before. We can actually finish jokes.”
“When you do a movie as opposed to a TV show, it’s always tempting to think everything has to be big and exaggerated and spectacular. And in fact, a lot of the funniest comedy films have been very intimate.”
“The last thing I want to do is use my comedy as a partisan tool or as a method for preaching.”
“Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can’t know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.”
“Vegas means comedy, tragedy, happiness and sadness all at the same time.”
“Historically, a successful life in comedy is a dream that’s as equally pondered and unpursued as being an astronaut.”
“To tell you the truth, I always wanted to be a sketch comedian and a comedy actor.”
“I got into comedy so I could stay out all night.”
“I love doing comedy.”
“I just finished ‘Butter’ for Weinstein, a comedy with this incredible cast – Hugh Jackman, Olivia Wilde, Alicia Silverstone – all-star cast and it was a fun set to be on. I’ve gotten really lucky to get all these down-to-earth cast members. ‘Butter’ is about butter carving in Iowa.”
“Comedy is something that I’m definitely looking to get into. I had a little taste of it and I do intend on going to classes for it because I think it’s a different muscle, and it’s hard to find female comedians.”
“I did a lot of theatre when I started out. It was the Lyceum, the Citz, the Tron and the Traverse. I came to London and did the Royal Court, the National, ‘King Lear’ at the Manchester Royal Exchange. I did little bits of comedy, like ‘Rab C Nesbitt,’ but I wasn’t predominantly about comedy.”
“I really like comedy because it is really fun to be in – even though you are playing it straight.”
“’Scary Movie’ was a different type of comedy than I’m used to. I’ve mostly done sitcoms, so working with David Zucker, who wrote the film and who directed the last two ‘Scary Movie’s and ‘Airplane’ and ‘Naked Gun,’ was a lot of help.”
“I don’t think I’m a funny person in general. I have had to learn comedy.”
“When I was doing comedy in New York, before I was in movies, I was never known as the deadpan actress. I was just a comedienne.”
“Especially when you deal with comedy, you have got to be really honest because it’s the honesty and the spontaneity that causes people to chuckle, that catches people.”
“I think comedy is more my instinct and more what I’m geared towards.”
“Rob and I both have this strange sense of comedy which always involves us being the butt of our own jokes.”
“When I tour, it’s like, well, like a food tour as much as a comedy tour. I try to eat at all the weird places, the obscure barbecue joints, burger places. There are a few spots in L.A. that I’m obsessed with – one of them is the Taco Zone taco truck on Alvarado. There are secret off-menu items that are amazing.”
“Stand-up comedy is a raunchy profession.”
“Some comedians will tour and do these classic bits all the time. But now with YouTube and Comedy Central, people see your stuff, and they don’t want to hear you do that again.”
“London seems to be a town with a lot of comedy fans and people that really enjoy stand-up.”
“I’m kind of obsessed with food. I like to eat. When I tour, it’s like, well, like a food tour as much as a comedy tour.”
“’The Office’ is less a comedy than so many other ‘comedies’ that have been on the air. It’s really about the balance between what is real and what is comic.”
“I’d love to be in a feature film, and I don’t just mean in a starring role – it could be a small part. And I would like to act in television, to do comedy and drama.”
“New York is looked at as the grad school of comedy.”
“Instead of letting anxiety run you, try voicing it. Voice it in your comedy. Voice it in a script. Just voice it, and it’ll help you release it.”
“I’ve always been a comedy nerd, and ‘Partners in Crime’ was probably more influential for me than anything else because it was not only standup, but Robert Townsend had those short films.”
“Every podcast network has a different culture as far as I can tell. How they run things at Nerdist is totally different than how they run things at Earwolf is totally different than All Things Comedy or Maximum Fun or Feral Audio. And it’s different if it’s independent.”
“In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She’s a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.”
“Michael Jackson wanted to be in Men in Black II. He told me he had seen the first Men in Black in Paris and had stayed behind and sat there and wept. I had to explain to him that it was a comedy.”
“I want to see better quality of comedy on TV.”
“I suddenly realized that comedy, for me, was just being honest, and playing it for real. I’ve seen so many wonderful actors who turn into creatures from another planet when they’re told they are supposed to be playing comedy.”
“Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don’t really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.”
“Comedy is my choice, as it’s what I’ve always enjoyed doing.”
“I think if actors don’t think of themselves as funny in real life they think they can’t do comedy.”
“Comedy will always be central to what I do, it’s just an instinct for me, but I am a writer and always have been.”
“Dan Aykroyd is a comedy icon and one of my idols of all time, but I also know that he’s an incredibly great actor.”
“I think there’s nothing better than a comedy that also is not afraid to have those heartfelt moments.”
“Here’s the thing about Jews in Hollywood. Not to stereotype, but the Jews I know here are the funniest, most self-deprecating people I know. And it’s rare to find a Jew that is actually offended by comedy about them.”
“Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It’s harder.”
“But comedy I’d love to do as much as humanly possible.”
“Everyone was doing alternative comedy. I thought I’d distinguish myself by just telling jokes, with differing degrees of success.”
“I’m a huge fan of French comedy. The French play comedy in a slightly different way than we do: they play it with a sort of realism that we don’t necessarily often do ourselves.”
“It’s my theory that comedy is going to die out in the year 6000.”
“Comedy’s about things the way they are. It’s about the world as it is, not the world as we would like it to be, and science is the same, really.”
“Comedy is my proper job. It’s what I should be doing, and when I do other bits like my science series, I miss it.”
“I’m really spectacularly thick in all areas of my life except comedy and science. I’m crap at everything else.”
“I love the basic comedy of growing a moustache.”
“I don’t think you get a lot of comedians who are homeopaths. Comedy is essentially about not being hoodwinked.”
“I don’t devalue comedy as compared to drama. Not one bit.”
“I grew up wanting to make movies, and along the way I suddenly found that I had a career doing comedy.”
“I want to be able to play trailer-bound fatties in a Judd Apatow comedy.”
“Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail.”
“For comedy, timing is key.”
“I’d consider myself a flailing comedy writer.”
“My comedy routines have always been about the health of the nation.”
“My comedy comes from pain. I can’t stand to see someone hurting.”
“The one thing about comedy, making it become a part of you, the audience loves it, because you become part of them.”
“The success of my comedy has been not being afraid to touch on subject matters or issues that everyone else is politically scared of.”
“I’m not ashamed to tell the truth about what happened in my family. I think that’s what makes my comedy different.”
“Comedy has been so good to me.”
“Comedy always pushes some buttons, because it wouldn’t be comedy if it didn’t.”
“Honestly, one of the reasons I wanted to do a comedy next was that I just kept thinking, ‘I don’t want to chase the next ‘Breaking Bad,’ because honestly, there may never be one.’ I couldn’t imagine any other drama comparing. And I just wanted to laugh.”
“Doing drama is, in a sense, easier. In doing comedy, if you don’t get that laugh, there’s something wrong.”
“Not by any means do I think that I’m The Rock or Mark Wahlberg. I understand that I’m not like them, being a leading guy, but I’m a great comedy sidekick, and, who knows, I can be in the X-Men or something.”
“The male image has been so pulled down by situation comedy in the last 15 years, it is frightening. I don’t like what has happened to the American male.”
“I was in NYC during 9/11; it happened on a Tuesday, I was on stage Thursday. It was a small crowd, but it took about 10 days and comedy clubs were packed.”
“You start in bars and then restaurants, then you want to get into comedy clubs where you feature, then you headline, and once you sell out clubs you’re into theaters. I’ve been able to get there, and it’s cool to do that.”
“What I do is not regional comedy, and it is not based in the southern area.”
“I remember seeing ‘Spinal Tap’ at a young age and being like, ‘That’s how you perform comedy.’”
“I moved out to L.A. to be a filmmaker or director. I didn’t even think about doing comedy or even acting. I wanted to be like Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, but I wasn’t going to a lot of comedy.”
“I love comedy, but it’s dramas that stick with me.”
“To be honest, I don’t know how comedy works.”
“Comedy is incredibly hard. You have to be loose. You have to be not afraid to fail.”
“The landscape is television has changed so much, because there are so many outlets, that the odds of getting a zeitgeisty hit – you know how ‘American Idol’ seems to appeal to every human being on the planet? Doing that in comedy nowadays is very, very hard.”
“Golf was my first glimpse of comedy. I was a caddy when I was a kid. I was on the golf course rather than being in lessons, but I can play better now than I could then.”
“With While You Were Sleeping, it was so much fun and such a Cinderella story, that I didn’t want to do another romantic comedy. I wanted to do the opposite.”
“I still do my comedy and my performance stuff and my acting so it’s not all-consuming. But I do find myself drawing more and more these days.”
“’Parental Guidance’ combines comedy and pathos in the best way.”
“No disrespect to Sweden: I didn’t think of them as the comedy universe.”
“’Billy on the Street’ is a persona. It’s crafted; it has writers. It’s a mixture of performance art and comedy.”
“I always want to lead with comedy but hopefully be able to sneak my message through at the same time.”
“The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.”
“I think the comedy clubs tend to homogenize the acts a little bit, because they force them to be palatable in way too many environments.”
“Postmodern comedy doesn’t work well with very old audiences, because it’s making fun of the comedy they enjoy.”
“I try and write satire that’s well-intentioned. But those intentions have to be hidden. It can’t be completely clear, and that’s what makes it comedy.”
“I was definitely not the kid that just wanted to be famous for no reason whatsoever and then happened to find comedy. Fame and all that stuff have always been slightly terrifying to me, and it makes me very anxious.”
“Comedy should be a source of positivity. I don’t want to bully people, and I don’t want people to come to my show to feel terrible about something. So I’m actually very open to having a conversation about what I should or shouldn’t say.”
“I chose to do comedy instead of going to college.”
“I think because of the Internet I was able to study comedy from quite a young age and watch a lot of comedy.”
“Not enough comedy makes you feel something.”
“I don’t worship comedy; at the end of the day, I don’t fall to the altar of comedy unquestioningly.”
“I like to inject a bit of production value and flair to comedy, or at least to my little corner of comedy.”
“I worked in accounting for two and a half years, realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and decided I was just going to give comedy a try.”
“People are meant to be certain places, and I think I’m meant to be on a sound stage doing situation comedy.”
“Well I was much too practical to presume to have a career in comedy.”
“There are some actresses that can’t do comedy; it’s too heavy-handed.”
“There was a sea of change in comedy in the late 1950s and ’60s. We were dealing with vignettes as opposed to jokes. We were more socially aware.”
“The first time I heard Richard Pryor, I knew he would be a major force in the world of comedy.”
“I didn’t know I was cool, but I was very flattered that some of the younger comedy writers came up to talk to me at the Emmys. I found that gratifying.”
“There’s timing in drama. You have to have a sense of rhythm. But the real thing that lends yourself to drama as opposed to comedy is a sense from the audience of whether there’s more to it than you can see.”
“All people are sad clowns. That’s the key to comedy – and it’s a buffer against reality.”
“I love writing comedy and being a part of it, but as a visual, physical presence in a story, I probably am more impactful in drama. It’s not really a tribute to my dexterity and wide-ranging talent so much as it is a person finally getting to where they should’ve been from the start.”
“I’m hypersensitive to negativity and duplicity, and I want to push it away by writing comedy. Maybe that hypersensitivity comes across and allows me to play dastardly, multi-layered people.”
“I always wrote risque comedy and crude comedy.”
“My experience – and it might be just the kind of comedy that I do, which is usually sketch comedy – is that there’s a lot more texture and subplot in drama than in comedy.”
“Drama is more focused, and it reveals itself to you, whereas comedy is just right there when you first read it.”
“Now people want what the movie was about, which is violent comedy. And that’s really what The Aristocrats is based on – what will a family do out of desperation.”
“I think when you dissect a joke too much, you have ruined whatever there is in comedy.”
“25, 30 years ago, that meant something, they were making some money. And they were doing all sorts of comedy, screaming at the audience, basically crowd control. And then there was the whole urban comedy scene.”
“I had enough therapy to know when I broke it down, it became clearer to me: Yes, comedy was kind of a cleansing thing for me to do.”
“I want to do drama, light comedy, the whole range.”
“Too much comedy is filthy these days. There’s nothing they won’t say. I like Jimmy Carr, but I don’t like the language he uses. I don’t understand why he feels it necessary; I find it extremely offensive.”
“I have done all kinds of roles – comedy, action, romance, and thrillers. Just name the genre, and I’ve done it.”
“Good films will run, and people will watch it irrespective of whether it is suspense or a comedy.”
“I am not considering shifting my image from action to comedy or romantic comedy. I have done or am doing films which are action-oriented: comedy roles and romantic-comedy roles.”
“In comedy, though, it’s good to get feedback from the audience about what they find funny.”
“I started doing comedy when I was a teenager with Tom Kenny, who is the voice of SpongeBob. I don’t want to name drop, but, I’ve known him since I was 6.”
“I started out making fun of comedy. Then I became the thing I was making fun of.”
“I have an aversion to comedy where everybody speaks in punchlines.”
“I started doing stand-up when I was 15 and doing Letterman when I was 20. So I’ve been doing stand-up comedy and clubs for over 30 years. That’s a long time.”
“I’m always amazed that people are interested in comedy.”
“People go, ‘Oh, Trump must be good for comedy,’ and I go, ‘Ehhh.’”
“Even when I was a kid – I was really young – I was drawn to comedy.”
“Part of my reason for ‘Session 9’ was to break out, to destroy the illusion of me as ‘Mr. Romantic Comedy Guy.’”
“I think you’re born with a comedy gene, and you can’t teach timing, and you can’t teach satire, pathos.”
“I like comedy.”
“For a comedy to work, magic has to happen.”
“Comedy is music.”
“I’ve never heard of a comedy that hasn’t had reshoots, especially for the ending of a movie in a comedy.”
“I definitely am a huge lover of comedy, and it’s only through doing so many comedies that I’ve realised how much of an influence they’ve been on me.”
“I don’t want to do the same thing all the time, and I was thrilled to bits to do a BBC comedy. It’s the home of British comedy.”
“It’s a young man’s game – standup comedy.”
“I first started as an actor, but there was no money in it, which is why I drifted into comedy.”
“I want to see Bob Dylan do sketch comedy. I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan.”
“I’m always doing comedy and will never hit up a 9-to-5 desk job.”
“I see myself as a performer and that applies to a Greek drama or a modern comedy.”
“I always approach comedy roles pretending they aren’t funny.”
“You can channel a lot within a comic framework, and I think ‘The Guard’ had a lot going on outside of the comedy, which is satisfying.”
“If you are writing comedy and try to please everybody, you’ll please nobody.”
“I can only write what makes me laugh, and what makes me laugh is the comedy I grew up on.”
“I miss the comedy of the ’70s and ’80s, like ‘Only Fools And Horses’ and ‘Fawlty Towers,’ so I’m glad I’m put in that category.”
“When I played Imunique on ‘Love That Girl,’ that was on the other side of comedy – loud and out there.”
“The ‘Muppets’ were a very big part of my childhood, and ‘Flight of the Conchords’ definitely has elements of the ‘Muppets’ in it, specifically the way we mixed music and comedy.”
“At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I’m acting with.”
“I’ve always been an actor. I’ve always approached all my comedy as an actor.”
“I think comedy is incredibly discriminated against. It is one of the most enjoyed yet most condescended art forms in the world. It’s the same thing with hip-hop.”
“One of the things I was taught was how you deal with language. It’s important, very important in comedy.”
“I’m a laugher and a lover of comedy.”
“I want to do comedy, I want to do horror, I want to do all these other things.”
“Comedy is only as stupid as you are smart.”
“It’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy: the great comedy that comes from great pain.”
“I don’t like swearing on the air. As a matter of fact, I’m not a prude, but… I watch HBO and some of the comedy stuff, and I’m constantly asking myself, ‘Why have we gone there?’ It seems like it’s unfortunate. It’s so cheap. It’s so easy.”
“I wanted to be a vet before I got into comedy, but then once I found out how much gore goes into that job, I wanted nothing to do with it.”
“I didn’t want to write sketch comedy after ‘Mr. Show.’ I felt like, after ‘Mr. Show’, why would you want to go work at any of the other places that existed then?”
“I’m doing a pilot for Comedy Central with the band Steel Panther. They’re faux heavy metal. They started as kind of a tribute band out here, or a cover band, and they’re funny guys, and they just sort of morphed into their own thing.”
“I’m really eager to go back and do some theater. I would love to do some more comedy as well because I think that’s really the hardest thing to do; it’s what I grew up doing, and I would love to go back and do that. I did a lot of theater growing up – musical theater.”
“I would never say no to comedy.”
“You know, stand-up comedy is where I pretty much started out.”
“Playing Chelsea on ‘The Suite Life of Zack and Cody’ really helped with my over-the-top comedy.”
“Comedy is so hard to do, so it was very cool to do dead pan humor.”
“I see parody as another form of comedy.”
“Is it spoken word? Kinda, but that’s a weird area. Is it comedy? Well, it’s funny but no, it’s not comedy.”
“I don’t really like comedy.”
“I want to entertain people, whether it be with a comedy, a drama or a movie. An idea’s an idea.”
“I’ve always felt that in a comedy script the stage directions should also have a comedic value.”
“Comedy is surprise. Comedy is not something that you can, necessarily, do twice.”
“All comedy does that. Every comedian I can think of – Larry David, Seinfeld, Mel Brooks, Chris Rock – that’s where the best comedy comes from, from stereotypes.”
“’Monkey Island 2′ was a huge game for me. It kind of taught me all about comedy.”
“Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy.”
“’50/50′ is a comedy. I shouldn’t say it’s a buddy comedy because it’s not farcical, and it’s based on a true story, but it’s viewing that experience through a very truthful lens of humour.”
“You never heard of a comedy team that didn’t fight, did you?”
“Between us and the writers, it was comedy hour the whole time. We could hardly get through it.”
“When we first started, everything was animated, everything was comedy, and there was really nothing that was longer than about two minutes, because that’s all audiences would watch.”
“I wanted a half-hour, single-camera comedy with a great lead where I could be No. 2 or 3 on the call sheet, and it was going to get on the air. Those were my criteria, and they sent me ‘Cougar Town.’ I read it and loved it.”
“I think that in any role you have, whether TV or film, it’s hard to do comedy and drama within one story.”
“I’d previously done ‘Expelled,’ and that was more on the comedy side, so I really wanted to challenge myself and see if I could actually do a drama.”
“My sister would write plays, and I would act in them and perform them for my parents. They were on the comedy side, very much inspired by ‘The Amanda Show.’”
“You can get away with making some extremely bold statements by Trojan Horsing them into a narrative via comedy.”
“When I knew I wanted to write a novel that would be a twist on a conventional romantic comedy, I re-watched ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ as well as the other two films in the indomitable Ephron trifecta – ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ and ‘You’ve Got Mail.’”
“I certainly love doing comedy and feel most comfortable near it.”
“I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that – you don’t even know if you’re failing in drama, but you do know when you’re failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don’t hear anybody laughing, you know that you’ve failed.”
“I started out with comedy in college, but had my major in Recreation Administration – which meant I wasn’t going to get a real job – so I started doing a little standup.”
“I don’t think Latino; I think like me. If that happens to be Latino, then I guess that’s me. But it doesn’t affect my comedy in any way.”
“The beauty of comedy is, when people come to a comedy club, there is a certain veil of reality suspended.”
“When the comedy community turned on me, I had a lot of reflecting to do.”
“When somebody says that a comic steals jokes, it’s the ultimate betrayal of comedy.”
“I know that if any other comedian came up to me questioning something I did or said, it would be literally settled in a heartbeat. I love comedy. I give to comedy. I don’t take from comedy.”
“It’s a pleasure to be doing a show for Comedy Central. Traditional networks would cast me as the head of a household with 16 children, which I find extremely offensive because there are 18 kids in my family.”
“I think I’ve definitely found a niche working in comedy, but dramatic films are what brought me here. After I saw ‘Titanic’ in the theater, I got the bug.”
“After doing comedy for a while and knowing how hard it is to do physical comedy right, I learned how incredibly talented the Three Stooges really were after re-watching old episodes. They still stand up!”
“I love doing comedy – I get a laugh out of it, it’s not so serious.”
“I love doing comedy.”
“Comedy is tragedy – plus time.”
“I think the hardest thing to do in the world, show-business-wise, is write comedy.”
“My preference is for people who can do sketch comedy or situational comedy, where it’s not a joke, but it’s telling a story.”
“I wanted to be on Broadway, but in musical comedy.”
“I was this extremely dramatic actress. And then, suddenly, I was doing comedy.”
“’Taxi’ made a big difference because it got me into comedy.”
“I think it’s nourishing to do both comedy and drama.”
“I was taught by a lot of great comedy writers to go for the reality in a role, and the comedy will come through.”
“I’ve seen too many comics who got their own shows and were undone because they worked for an executive producer who didn’t understand their comedy or their sensibility.”
“I’ve now done virtually everything there is to do in TV presenting: I’ve done sport shows, comedy shows, and I’m now doing music, which is great for me.”
“I feel like I came in comedy’s side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways.”
“My real name is Scott Thompson. I could have gone by that name, but when I started doing comedy I thought I needed to go by something that has a little more of a hook.”
“Before I got addicted to comedy, I was seriously thinking about playing tennis full time. I joined the tennis team and played with a lot of professionals.”
“I was imagining films in my head and trying to gather friends together to make movies since I was a kid. I tried to do comedy skits and a horror film.”
“I was drafted and went to Korea where I had an opportunity to create a production team that did dramatic and comedy shows. I had also done a little disc jockeying.”
“I guess funny people are attracted to funny people, and then you get comedy marriages.”
“Instead of going into politics, I decided to go into comedy, which is the second most daunting career path for a woman.”
“It’s certainly strange to do sketch comedy with cue cards at midnight in a skyscraper as opposed to in a basement with your friends.”
“Molly Shannon, for example, is someone I’ve always really looked up to, because her comedy is so physical and wild and unembarrassed and brave.”
“I want to see a ton more comedy for women.”
“I think the key to working with my husband is that collaboration in comedy is best.”
“The alternative comedy scene is actually pretty small, I guess.”
“Comedy has changed with the times, thank God – slowly, oh my lord, slowly – but it has.”
“Part of being a mother – part of the comedy of it, anyway – is what happens to your body.”
“Unfortunately, it’s the new normal to get divorced – and divorced with children is its own soil rich with land mines. There’s a lot of comedy but a lot of heartache, too.”
“I went from an unemployed actor’s life to doing stand-up comedy, and that was fortuitous. It’s not the usual way the crow flies, going from being in a TV sketch show to playing one of Shakespeare’s finest characters, but, hey, that’s the way it has happened.”
“Writing comedy is an exposing thing because you’re putting yourself on the line with every joke you write, and although you can’t second-guess an audience, if you want to be successful, you have to write stuff people like.”
“In ‘Pictures from an Institution,’ Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.”
“I like comedy a lot, and dramatics show how I can really act. Because a lot of people can do comedy – I’m not saying it’s easy, but dramatics are very hard.”
“My drama instructor suggested I try comedy. I was resistant at first because I considered myself a serious actor, but of course I fell in love with it.”
“I like to play the comic relief or parts that aren’t necessarily comedic but that I can find the comedy in.”
“We’re going to continue to focus on family comedies because that is something that our audience really comes to ABC for. But at the same time, we’re going to push the boundaries of what a family comedy actually means.”
“Jimmy Kimmel has proven to be a preeminent voice in comedy, with 15 seasons of ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ under his belt and successfully tackling the herculean task of hosting both the Emmys and the Oscars in the same season.”
“The more you try to look sexy, the lamer it is, so you just have to commit to the comedy.”
“Misery is the stuff of comedy, if one can just live long enough to get over it.”
“I’m trying my hand at writing. I’m writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.”
“I actually imagined ‘Thunderbolts’ as a straight-up comedy book in a lot of ways, like a very dark comedy book, whereas ‘Red Lanterns’ is more of a cosmic saga that has some jokes every once in a while.”
“I wanna do some more goofy comedy stuff; I really enjoyed doing ‘A Touch of Cloth.’”
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
“All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.”
“If you want to laugh, see a comedy. If you want to cry, see a drama, and if you want suspense, see a thriller.”
“As far as stand-up comedy, I got into the business later than most, yeah.”
“Comedy has bits, has jokes, has stories, and it has characters.”
“My background is part of my comedy. Your experiences are where the jokes come from.”
“I wasn’t drawn to comedy: it was drawn to me – from fighting in school to going to jail, then joining the military and getting into Hollywood.”
“If the ‘Chappelle’s Show’ had stayed on, I seriously doubt I would have developed this fast as a stand-up comedian. I probably would never have taken stand-up comedy really seriously.”
“I was doing a lot of drama until I took the comedy role in the series ‘Car 54, Where Are You?,’ and I’ve been tagged as a comedian ever since.”
“When I started out, I wanted to be a serious actor. I never thought I’d get into comedy.”
“I could have carried on in comedy. But my life was dark.”
“Our first gig was a battle of the bands. We did 45 minutes of comedy and never played a note – and we won!”
“To do a comedy team, it requires so much extracurricular stuff, so much compromise, so much intuitiveness to know what the other guy is doing. That’s why it’s so hard to do it.”
“I think comedy has to come from your authentic point of view.”
“I want to educate people and deliver news that isn’t just surrounded by Charlie Sheen. I’d like to be able to do the serious stuff in conjunction with the comedy.”
“When I was working with Barry Sonnenfeld, I’d watch him set up a shot and talk to him about what he was seeing and what it was to shoot comedy. He told me that a lot of times with comedy, it’s not just about getting the joke, but getting a reaction to the joke. That’s the laugh – it’s somebody’s else’s reaction to the joke.”
“Let’s not call physical comedy falling down and pratfalls. All humor is physical, no matter how you dish it out. It’s timing, like a dancer or an athlete would have.”
“The best comedy I ever did was when people didn’t know who I was.”
“I did comedy and parody television in the ’70s. I was a liberal Democrat, and it was a very heady year.”
“’30 Rock’ is the holy grail of comedy in my opinion.”
“I enjoy doing everything, comedy and drama. I just look for the characters really and what they offer.”
“If you have any sense, if you’re any good at comedy, you come to Austin.”
“The goal is doing stand-up on TV somewhere, which is what I’m working on. Something on latenight or Comedy Central, but – I dunno, something. It could happen, it could not happen.”
“I get to do comedy for a living.”
“I think there’s too many gay jokes in comedy and not enough honest explorations of sexuality.”
“I have no desire to get on a soapbox or be preachy. I don’t think comedy needs to be ‘brave’ or ‘important.’”
“As far as comedy goes, I’m endlessly inspired by Jo Firestone.”
“American television constantly tries to co-op British comedy and create their own version of it. Most of the time it doesn’t work; obviously, in the case of ‘The Office,’ it did. But a lot of times, it doesn’t really work.”
“Comedy has sort of been my life-long obsession. I literally obsessed over comedy. I really didn’t play sports – for me it was just comedy, computers and chess club; those were my big things.”
“Some people learn comedy, and some people just are comedy.”
“Comedy club audiences pay up to $25 per person and another fistful of cash to cover a two-drink minimum, so when they don’t like something, they let you know – with silence.”
“The goal of almost every comic is to find a comedy voice – a specific point of view that an audience can latch onto.”
“With stand-up, there’s a little bit of an exaggerated reality because things have to be manipulated to create comedy, to create jokes.”
“It sounds gross to say that I like myself more. But not everyone likes themselves that much. Especially in the comedy world.”
“British comedy fans go crazy.”
“I’m not a big comedy show-watcher, but I love Ricky Gervais’ stuff and Sacha Baron Cohen’s things. But I’m not an expert on them. I’ve seen them once.”
“In Australia, I’m built up as this comedy hero, which was never my intention.”
“I believe people leave a theater bonding with characters. Story is the vessel that carries character. Comedy is a very important component of expressing character.”
“When I’m doing a drama, I like to find the comedy; when I’m doing a comedy, I like to find the heart and drama.”
“How precise you need to be when you’re in a comedy, and the honesty you need and to have those two things meet up and have the execution just right, I always found very difficult.”
“I honestly think comedy is probably the hardest stuff to do.”
“The main thing about doing a comedy is that you spend most of your days really happy and laughing.”
“Comedy writing is taking the brief thought and going with it.”
“In comedy it helps if there’s a friendly atmosphere on the set.”
“I do enjoy doing action quite clearly, but I also really like doing comedy.”
“Critics think we try to make bad films. They think we want to spend five months of our lives making something bad. We always go out with the best of intentions, whether it’s fluffy comedy or a drama.”
“There’s something so naked about being on stage as a musician. I think about that even with standup comedy or something – like, ‘This is it, this is what I got.’”
“The only way physical comedy works is if you don’t see it coming. And the harder the fall, the funnier it is. You have to really take some shots, and I’ve walked away with some bumps and bruises.”
“I’m still fighting really hard to get any role I get. If it’s comedy, I go for the laughs. And if it’s drama, I try to tell the truth, and try to play the real stakes of whatever scenario the character’s in.”
“Who knew Rob Lowe was funny? On ‘Parks and Rec,’ we’ve got some of the funniest comedy writers, some of the funniest comedians in the world working there. And if anything, we don’t just effuse to one another and be like, ‘Oh, Rob Lowe’s really funny,’ if he wasn’t.”
“I primarily have had my career in comedy, and that is something that I have never been too concerned about because I know there is really no room for vanity in comedy. Comedy comes from pain and it is a lot easier to empathize with somebody who is out of shape.”
“When I started out in comedy, it was common knowledge that it took about 10 years to get good. And that was okay because it took you about 9 years to get on television.”
“By the time I was 7 or 8, I wanted to be a comedy writer.”
“A comedy club is a place where you work out material, you’re trying material.”
“Most parts in comedy, they’re not really written for men. They’re written for, like, these boy-men.”
“I’ll go back to comedy clubs when they get a real no-camera policy, the same way they did with smoking.”
“Comedy is a group activity, a verbal orgy.”
“If I find a comedy club where no one’s camera works, I’ll go.”
“It takes intelligence to make real comedy, and it takes a reality base to create all that little stuff I like to do that makes you giggle inside.”
“Georgia was a great place to live, but I wanted to get out because I knew the opportunities for what I was doing – stand-up comedy and eventually acting – were in Los Angeles.”
“Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept.”
“I am so happy that I married a comedy writer. He’s never not without a joke. No matter where we are.”
“The only thing I would unequivocally say is that I have never had any interest in romantic comedy I just couldn’t do it. I think I’d be terrible.”
“It’d be fun to do a comedy with someone like Sandra Bullock.”
“When I was little, I had this old video camera, and I set it up, and I would pretend that I was on comedy shows and soap operas and things like that.”
“It is really hard to do comedy; it takes a lot of energy and focus. It’s rather like music: It’s a lot of hitting notes precisely.”
“Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.”
“In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.”
“Peter Sellers is my great comedy hero.”
“What’s interesting about Laurel and Hardy is that in most comedy teams, there’s a straight man, and then there’s the funny guy. And with Laurel and Hardy, they’re both the funny guy.”
“It’s dangerous talking about comedy; it gets to be very tedious and presumptuous.”
“If you don’t like the people, you’re just doing a sketch. Which, in most cases, is comedy minus some emotional backbone.”
“I find it really appalling when people talk about comedy.”
“Comedy is the most difficult thing to do. Easily the most difficult.”
“There is certainly a higher percentage of wit in British comedy than in American comedy. What always tickles me is the way in which people try to use their intellect to get themselves out of tricky situations but never quite manage to do so – much to their enormous embarrassment.”
“Animation is awesome because there’s a really bold type of comedy you can get away with that you couldn’t get away with in live action: a broader, campier style.”
“You have antiheroes in dramas, like Tony Soprano. But it’s a little bit harder in comedy. You don’t see it quite as much.”
“Yeah, well I’ve always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre and that’s really where my training is. As an actor, that’s my training.”
“People think that my favorite roles to do are villains, but I find comedy to be the most challenging and rewarding.”
“I became an actor by accident. I suppose I figured since I was in musical comedy from the time I was a teenager, I suppose I figured that I’d always been in that world to some extent.”
“My background is in musical comedy. I didn’t know I was going to be an actor. But all my points of reference have to do with musical comedy and in being kind of a showoff.”
“I’ve always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre, and that’s really where my training is.”
“Comedy is unusual people in real situations; farce is real people in unusual situations.”
“Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.”
“Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business.”
“There’s a lot of comedy in Intermission but it’s got this depth. It’s not comedy for comedy’s sake – it’s informed by something else. I like stuff like that.”
“I do find myself surprised by the comedy shows that seem to have the same joke week in week out.”
“I’ve done a lot of drama in my career, but I’m actually more comfortable doing comedy.”
“Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.”
“I feel more comfortable in drama. Comedy is a high-wire act. I find it stressful. It’s a precision science in a way.”
“I’ve played at the Comedy Studio. I never did as an undergrad, but I have in recent years, whenever I’ve gone back to anything at Harvard, I’ve tried to go there and do some sets.”
“Before I went to a meeting at the ‘Harvard Lampoon,’ I had no idea that there was even a comedy magazine at Harvard, let alone that you could write comedy potentially for a living.”
“Whatever I did, I always gravitated toward trying to be funny. If I was with friends, we were joking around. If I wrote for the newspaper, it would be a humor column. If I acted, I wanted to do comedy.”
“Comedy is such a personal thing. Everybody can cry at the same thing, but it’s a lot harder to get everyone to laugh at the same thing.”
“Those early days of comedy are when you get addicted to it.”
“My favorite movies were ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and stuff that had a more classic comedy type feel, that more slapsticky stuff. It’s the comedy I’ve gravitated towards.”
“I love and enjoy vocal performance, but I also have a huge passion for comedy and improv.”
“Miranda’s my character; I created her! But there’s a lot of comedy I want to bring to the world that isn’t just Miranda.”
“A good comedy’s very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.”
“Even in the depths of dreadful situations, there’s usually something rather comic, or something you can laugh about afterwards, at least. So, I do look for the comedy in those things.”
“I think comedy and satire are the strongest ways to deal with very serious themes and very painful themes.”
“People have always asked, ‘Do you prefer comedy or drama?’ And my answer is, ‘Both, at the same time.’”
“It’s a great counter to doing the soap because it’s a comedy. It’s real physical comedy.”
“As an entertainer, a comedy guy, whatever, you’re never gonna be truly 100-percent happy with anything.”
“I remember ‘The Cosby Show,’ but that was something completely different. Comedy. There was a lightness to it and a sort of unrealistic perfection.”
“I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what the Velvet Underground was to music – it’s like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.”
“Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then.”
“For me, comedy should have a certain amount of joy in it. It should be about attacking the powerful – the politicians, the Trumps, the blowhards – going after them. We shouldn’t be attacking the vulnerable.”
“I think comedy comes more from a low sense of self-esteem, and I certainly have that.”
“Comedy doesn’t always have to come from a dark place.”
“I’m a big believer in comedy writers. I’ve always defended the honor of all comedy writers. It’s extremely difficult, but I’ve always felt that comedy writers far more easily can move toward drama than vice versa.”
“I love comedy. I love the absurdity of it. I love the kind of intelligence that’s required to be dumb in comedy.”
“Being a screenwriter for a comedy, you’re writing for characters in them in their voice. I could write anyone.”
“Comedy, unlike drama, demands surprise. You can’t quietly and thoughtfully enjoy a comedy.”
“In my opinion, where comedy sequels tend to go bad is that they get sillier and lighter.”
“I want to do comedy films, serious films – I admire the actors who fly under the radar but get loads done, pop up in a lot of good films.”
“Even in comedy, you have to be real. It’s all about being real. It’s how real can you be? That’s the challenge. How much are you willing to take on for your character?”
“Coming up with comedy is hard, man. Those bits aren’t easy to think of!”
“Comedy chose me.”
“My main goal is to connect with the crowd. I leave room for improv. Whatever happens, happens. When I bring my band with me, it turns into the Craig Robinson comedy dance party.”
“I’m a performer. I do comedy and music, and I blend them together. My band is ‘Nasty Delicious!’.”
“My father tried to discourage me from going into comedy, mainly because he felt like it wasn’t promising. It was pie in the sky.”
“I never wanted to do just one thing. There’s even other things in comedy that I want to do. For me, it’s always been that I have to have the vision first.”
“I hadn’t gotten a chance to do a lot of comedy, so ‘Hart of Dixie’ was a great place where I got a chance to do that and play.”
“What I love about the Coen brothers – what everyone loves – is that they sort of toe the line of a truly dark comedy.”
“It’s a director’s job to tell a story and he’s very well versed in telling stories with a bit of comedy in them and keeping the pace of the movie right and that’s exactly what he did. He was observant of a world he didn’t understand but he told a wonderful story.”
“A lot of the stuff that I’ve done has been more drama and less comedy. I’ve had some opportunities to do some comedy, and I’ve often wanted to do that because it fits with me very comfortably because I talk too much, and I’m always saying the wrong thing all the time.”
“The first rule of comedy should be, you must be very lazy. Whoever works should be immediately removed.”
“That is the problem with comedy in India. Spoofing sells. Come up with original comedy about the hilarious nation we are, with funny accents and odd rituals, and we get into trouble.”
“’School for Wives’ is Moliere’s first step toward grand comedy, but he still has one foot in commedia.”
“I love doing improv. I love comedy. I have always felt this way, even when I was really young.”
“I’m too self-serious for a comedy.”
“My uncle Shawn used to stay with us when we were really young, and I used to come downstairs and see him break dancing on this piece of a cardboard. I probably always thought they were cool since then. I never knew his comedy, but I used to always see him break dancing. And he was terrible at it.”
“When I was a kid, I would make kung fu movies with the kids in the neighborhood, and I would be the guy behind the camera directing everybody, but they were all very silly little shorts and comedy bits.”
“I love ’30 Rock.’ It’s one of my favorite shows. It’s certainly the gold standard of comedy writing.”
“I think women are different, and I think having them in the room is crucial to a family comedy, ensemble comedy, television comedy, where half the eyeballs on your show are women.”
“Comedy is not easy to begin with, but comedy that also dances with drama – it’s so hard.”
“I’ve never really loved mean comedy.”
“I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.”
“I remember doing a comedy show with Jim Carrey once, and he was out there with his foot behind his neck and rubbing his face with it.”
“It’s harder and harder to make a well-done romantic comedy these days because the conventions have been so played out.”
“When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.”
“I was doing comedy in laundry mats in 1992, literally where I would bring a little gorilla amp and a lapel mike and just start performing.”
“I can do more than just stand-up comedy, and the only way I’ll be able to show that is if I do it myself. Because nobody trusts that I can do it.”
“I did stand-up comedy for seventeen years. I need to explore other things.”
“I work with a lot of kids. Every year, for the past fifteen years, I work at Comedy Camp where I work with a lot of kids.”
“I had the humble beginnings. I was doing comedy in laundry mats in 1992, literally where I would bring a little gorilla amp and a lapel mike and just start performing.”
“I’ve always read books and loved human behavior since I was ten or twelve years old. Maybe even that’s why I wanted to do comedy.”
“When I was filming ‘Premium Rush’ in N.Y.C., I flew to L.A. to have a few general meetings. I sat down with Peter Cramer at Universal Studios and spoke about my life and career, and being that I’m such a goof, we spoke about how I really wanted to do a comedy next.”
“The number one rule of comedy acting is ‘don’t try to be funny.’ Act as seriously as possible.”
“If we were making a cop comedy about bad cops or cops who were comically bad at the jobs, then the jokes would be more hijinks and more like slapstick.”
“Loads of stuff that I’ve done has always had a hint of comedy. I did this show called ‘Psychoville’ that’s a horror-comedy. Because I just think that’s what life’s like.”
“I love comedy. I don’t think there’s enough comedy on stage.”
“The people running Silicon Valley are not making the show because they want to do a satire of Silicon Valley. They are just comedy writers, and they want to make a funny show.”
“I would like to work in both comedy and drama.”
“I’d love to do a really juicy drama that’s just really real. On the comedy side, I’d love to do something like ’21 Jump Street.’ I cannot stop watching that movie. Really funny, really extreme comedies are definitely my favorite.”
“If something is a comedy for the sake of just comedy’s sake and it doesn’t have a good message, I don’t have an interest in being part of it. If something is just serious and scary with no good message, I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“I don’t tend to watch too many American comedies. I love British comedy.”
“I’m a long-time fan of Rob Long, and his books are hugely re-readable, detailing the ins and outs of being a Hollywood comedy writer with a past success but with everything to prove.”
“I started to realize that comedy is what I really wanted to do, but I didn’t want to do stand-up.”
“Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible.”
“With comedy I can search for the profound.”
“I don’t come from a comedy background or a stand-up background, but I think that sometimes there’s a misconception that an actor who works primarily in comedy is a comedian. There’s nothing wrong with being a comedian, but I’m absolutely not that. I can’t think of anything more terrifying than doing stand-up!”
“I’m not a comedian, I’m not a stand-up and I don’t come from a comedy background. I am an actor, but I’ve had a very fortunate foray into comedy, and it seems to have become a bit of a strength, and you can’t complain when you become known for something.”
“Adversity creates comedy.”
“I’m a stand-up comic. Anything else I do besides that is a plus, but stand-up comedy is what I do, it’s what I’ve been doing and it’s what I’m going to keep doing.”
“If I can make a teacher’s salary doing comedy, I think that’s better than being a teacher.”
“Comedy is a very approval-oriented field.”
“Comedy is a shared experience, and I think it’s great to open that to a wide demographic.”
“I think that everyone would agree that something that Marvel has done brilliantly is weave comedy into all of their action movies.”
“Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.”
“You have to be careful what you say in front of comedy writers because they will absolutely make fun of it in the next episode.”
“I love comedy because I can laugh at myself. I don’t take myself too seriously.”
“I’ve just written this six-part sketch comedy series, which I’ve never done before. And I don’t know how to pitch it. Am I supposed to just pick up a camera and put stuff on YouTube? Is that how it works?”
“When I was growing up, I had more comedy albums than musical ones. George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor – those were my main men.”
“I really like comedy. There’s always a choice, when you’re writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.”
“As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy.”
“Where my comedy really solidified was when Bush was elected. I couldn’t understand how craven and crass he was, and how dumb other people were for electing him.”
“I sat there in awe that some guy overseas, trying to protect our interests, was using a silly comedy as a survival tool. My brain had an explosion. I was really moved by that.”
“On the comedy side of what I love as a filmmaker are Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, and Eddie Murphy; those are my favorites.”
“I watch comedy on TV, and it’s too cutty for me. I get a little jarred, and it succeeds. It’s not like it’s not working, and I look at certain things, and it has the cutting… it’s not like I’d make terribly different cuts, but for some reason, it moves too fast for me.”
“I’m always trying to perfect the romantic comedy, though.”
“Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn’t present it as evil but a collection of banalities.”
“For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that’s longer than most marriages.”
“I’m just trying to give the best human expression that I can to any particular genre, which could be comedy, could be drama, could be horror, could be thriller.”
“The Hayemaker is a dangerous fellow who, when the bell rings, is on a seek and destroy mission, by any means necessary. No playing around. No comedy. It’s just straight-up business.”
“There’s only one podcast subject that can give Donald Trump a run for his money when it comes to vulgarity, excess, and base comedy, and that’s football.”
“Some of the vintage comedy on Radio 4 Extra wasn’t very funny to begin with, whereas some things just get funnier regardless of the changes in public attitudes over the years.”
“Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that’s usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.”
“The first series of ‘Open All Hours’ came and went without much fanfare because the BBC, in its almighty wisdom, put it out on BBC2, reasoning that it was ‘a gentle comedy’, better suited to the calms of the second channel than to the noisier, choppier waters of the first.”
“That’s humour – doing what funny people have done since comedy began without being edgy and pushing boundaries.”
“Comedy is a funny business, which you have to take seriously.”
“Classic comedy is classic comedy, and it will go on for years.”
“Don’t get me started on BBC salaries. We were never the big league. Situation comedy has always been the poor relation in the television entertainment business.”
“I love bouncing between different genres. And comedy, obviously, is something I enjoy doing the most and I’ve had the most success with. But I’m open to all jobs and all genres.”
“As a director, just to be able to jump in to do something that’s different, and to explore comedy and be challenged by that, is great. Some directors never get that opportunity.”
“Dramas are incredibly compelling. I feel like ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a drama, but because it’s funny, people market it as a comedy.”
“Comedy. I think that’s something I’d really like to do.”
“I don’t really dissect comedy. Nothing kills off humor more than overanalyzing it.”
“When I talk to Steve Martin, he’s joyful when he talks about comedy.”
“The odd thing about comedy is that the more personal you are, the larger the audience.”
“Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.”
“Deep inside, I am desperate to do comedy.”
“Acting-wise, I haven’t done a lot of comedy, so I would love to work with Jane Lynch. I think she’s hilarious.”
“I’ve always tended to write comedy, but I’d hate to just write some kind of sitcom or a lighthearted series of jokes and slapstick. I wanted to talk about some deeper things within the comedy.”
“I would recommend that anyone who wants to do comedy on TV to do radio first.”
“I was depressed as a child. I found it hard to make friends. My favourite thing was locking myself in the bathroom and practising comedy routines.”
“I don’t think comedy is necessarily an attack. It’s finding humour in life. I don’t think if you’re making a joke about something you’re automatically demeaning it.”
“It’s so hard to make a comedy pilot and have a cool idea.”
“When I watch a comedy that’s just hitting you over the head with jokes constantly, some really hit, but if they miss, you’re like, ‘Eh.’”
“I would say that fifty percent of my show is killer comedy.”
“The person I have admired the most in comedy terms would be Eric Morecambe, who is my total hero.”
“The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same – dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits – the repetition through the ages is comedy.”
“When I was in college I did a lot of comedy.”
“Before the whole Disney realm had undergone this huge revamping, as a kid, I always saw myself doing these dramatic indie parts. And then I fell in love with doing comedy and doing kid shows and really working for kids.”
“I love comedy, but I feel like I need to keep doing drama when I can.”
“Keenser is a smart alien. I try to bring a little bit of comedy into it, but he’s a great thinker.”
“Ultimately, I just decided stand-up comedy is a huge commitment, and if you want to be the best, you have to give it one hundred per cent.”
“I don’t like doing things by halves, and I realised you can’t do stand-up comedy part-time.”
“Most people haven’t seen my dramatic work, but I did 10 years of theater before I ever became a comic. I’m just better known for comedy.”
“When I came on the scene, there was The Nualas, who were doing character comedy, but there weren’t any other women doing stand-up because Michelle Read had gone more into theatre.”
“As a kid, I was always inspired by the comedy of Carol Burnett. I loved Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon’s ‘Mama’s Family’.”
“I started being a comedy fan when I was, I’m going to guess, like 5 or 6 years old.”
“To me, comedy is a game.”
“I wasn’t even a big comedy nerd. A lot of the comedians I know – a lot of my friends are comedians – they knew a lot about comedy growing up.”
“It seems that two of the most basic forms of comedy are jokes and stories. And, of course, they are not mutually exclusive.”
“Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.”
“I guess you get pigeon-holed in Hollywood, but I’m ok with that because I’ve been able to do a lot. I started in the theater, then I went to stand-up comedy, and then when I went into the movies to do comedy and drama and big movies and small movies.”
“You try to – you want to fly on both sides of the political fence because that’s where the – where the comedy is.”
“Every actor thinks he can do comedy, and it’s not true.”
“The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.”
“And if you can offer an explanation as to why it doesn’t work then you’ve got to the whole root of comedy.”
“I’d love to be able to do a comedy like ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ I’m not a very serious person. Really, I’m very silly.”
“I’m a comedy snob, and I never want anything that I do to get old.”
“At times we were criticized for doing too much slapstick. I don’t believe in mild comedy, and neither does Lucy.”
“An actor who is good at comedy can also be very good at drama, but not necessarily vice versa.”
“One of my biggest problems with comedy was that I did not understand some of the jokes.”
“I always say, ‘Thank goodness ‘Wimpy Kid’ was a comedy because my singing in that was more humorous than professional.’”
“That’s also why comedy and horror are my two favorite genres of film to write, because you get these outbursts of emotion from people, laughter and shock, and it’s really thrilling, and I like to be thrilled.”
“I had to choose, I’d be so sad. They are flip sides of the same coin. I love both comedy and drama.”
“I’m not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.”
“Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.”
“There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?”
“Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it’s painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it’s extremely painful.”
“Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy.”
“I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn’t include someone the size of the Hindenburg.”
“I do miss the rhythms of comedy. And I’ve never been able to perform very well without an audience. The sitcoms I’ve done had them. It was like doing a little play.”
“I learned everything that I know about comedy and about show business and a lot about life from Carl.”
“Oh, well, my first love is comedy or singing and dancing.”
“I did a ‘Golden Girls’ once, which shot in front of an audience, and that went well. I had a good time. But I need an audience, for comedy at least.”
“Drama or comedy programming is still the surest way for advertisers to reach a mass audience. Once that changes, all bets are off.”
“I am very good at comedy off screen. I wish I could translate it so that you could get to see how mad I am.”
“Comedy is far more difficult, as it involves improvisation and impromptu acting, and as an actor, that came as a welcome break for me.”
“I’m a huge fan of comedy. I write material whenever I can.”
“The radio was my big influence. Comedy came from the instinctual feel I had for language.”
“Stand-up comedy is not for the faint-hearted or the thin-skinned.”
“How I’ve fed my kids over the years is by doing stand-up comedy in clubs.”
“I find it pressurising coming to the Voodoo Rooms to do my hour of comedy.”
“Edinburgh is the most pressurised environment to do comedy. You get an hour. There’s no compere. You’d better be on the money straight away; you’ve got journalists in.”
“Sometimes I wonder how I got into comedy at all.”
“When you do comedy, you can’t please the world, although I’d like to think that most of my audiences were on my side.”
“I’ve never gone to comedy clubs.”
“I was always the guy who made jokes and ribbed people at parties. After I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts I got sidetracked into clubs and started doing comedy.”
“When I was a younger guy doing comedy, it was a big struggle. Promoters canceled me out of clubs left and right when I called somebody a dummy or a yo-yo. Then they realized I was different.”
“But I just think I was lucky enough to figure out early on that I wanted to do comedy, so that’s what I put all my effort into.”
“I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been in theater, films, television, radio, tragedy, comedy, farce – I’ve been in a musical and in music halls, in pantomime. I was once ringmaster in a circus.”
“Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”
“I wasn’t exactly uncomfortable when I did my first comedy. I was just very aware of the risks; if you do a comedy that sucks, and you suck in it, then you won’t get a chance to do it again.”
“I was really more interested in dramatic work, but I thought, ‘Well, I guess I could do comedy.’”
“My dream role is Richard Pryor, no question about that. I’m a big Richard Pryor fan. I’ve always been intrigued about the darkness behind his comedy; that would always be a dream role for me.”
“There’s a fraudulent root element of comedy in that we say things night after night as though they are rolling effortlessly from the brain and off the tongue, when in fact they are crafted over weeks and months and years.”
“I think it’s probably much easier to do political comedy from a two-party point of view, in that the majority have some sense of what it means to be one or the other.”
“I had no musical or athletic ability, and I wasn’t particularly good looking. Comedy was something I could do for attention.”
“I believe that everyone should be treated as an individual. Women should be treated equally in the right to vote, sure. But if I’m paying to see a comedy, then I just want to see who’s funniest, with everyone treated equally.”
“The Internet has done nothing but good for comedy all around. Comedians no longer have to rely on TV execs and club owners deciding if they are funny or not.”
“Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.”
“Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.”
“I am a big fan of the TV series ‘Taxi’ which combined comedy and pathos better than any other show I’ve seen.”
“’Cloud 9′ is an action/romantic comedy that focuses on the competitive world of snowboarding. We have glamorised it to so that all the players are on the cover of magazines, have all the interviews, and be on the television: so it is very high stakes.”
“Dealing with sketch comedy and buddy teams like Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby – I just loved buddy comedies.”
“I love comedy; I’m super passionate about it, and thank God it’s super in right now to have female empowered comedies.”
“Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with.”
“I just liked stand-up comedy so much. I used to memorize Bill Cosby albums and other people’s albums, George Carlin, Flip Wilson.”
“I used to go to the Cleveland Comedy Club all the time. If there was a comic I liked, I’d go see him two or three times that week. Bob Saget was one of those guys.”
“TV is easier: it’s all planned out for you and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over.”
“Journalism is straying into entertainment. The lines between serious news segments, news entertainment, and news comedy are blurring.”
“Nothing like a great comedy. I love to laugh!”
“My whole life, growing up, I always wanted to be in comedy. I never felt comfortable doing the ‘teen hunk’ thing.”
“Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me.”
“I started in action, and then I went to comedy school.”
“My favorite genre is definitely romantic comedy. I love ‘When Harry Met Sally.’”
“I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I’ll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.”
“The older I’ve gotten, the more the need to exert comedy no matter how tragic a character I may be portraying because they are essentials for presenting truth.”
“I had envisioned doing comedy since childhood. For sure.”
“I always found that drama, really good drama, has a lot of comedy in it.”
“I mean, sometimes… a comedian becomes an actor, and they just don’t deliver, because the bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of acting is to be truthful, and they get that mixed up sometimes, or don’t even notice that that’s the thing.”
“I wanted to be less well-known in comedy.”
“I felt audiences are happier to take comedy people who play darker people because there’s a link between the psychosis of comedy and the psychosis of being a twisted character.”
“Well, comedy is a great weapon of attack. It’s not a great weapon of support.”
“Comedy is a great weapon of attack. It’s not a great weapon of support.”
“Editing and post-production is so important with comedy.”
“I used to do a lot of comedy. I don’t know what happened. I think it’s my face.”
“Ultimately, when I go back to the stage, I want to be able to do everything. I want to be able to do music and comedy and all that stuff; that’s what all this stuff is leading to.”
“For 120 minutes, ‘Birdman’ floats from comedy to surrealism to high drama to quiet brilliance. I felt so inspired by watching this movie. It reaches for the sky and never comes back down to earth.”
“I don’t know what it must be like to be a writer in general, but to be a comedy writer, it’s got to be something – it’s a very special kind of talent.”
“I am a big fan of the old Howard Hawks films from the 30s and 40s, I was a big Hepburn and Tracey fan for a while and Woody Allen films that are a very different kind of romantic comedy.”
“I’ve been in the director’s chair for ‘Battlestar Galactica’ since its first season. I directed the only comedy that’s ever been done in Galactica history.”
“There is nothing that is so serious that you can’t also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.”
“Romantic comedy has come to mean a couple of moderately talented actors placed in implausible situations obliged to go through a set of paces that are all too familiar, the end result being neither romantic nor comedic.”
“I always say, ‘If you can’t give a reason for the banana peel being in the alley, then don’t have the comic slide over it.’ Do you understand what I mean? First explain how the banana peel got there quickly. And then there’s a reason for all the comedy.”
“When I’m playing comedy, it is such a crap shoot of what will work and what won’t.”
“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
“For me, comedy is a day-to-day report on the human condition. It’s what’s happening right now. I get maybe 20 minutes of my act straight from the newspaper.”
“To listen to your own silence is the key to comedy.”
“I’m not interested in being the damsel in distress; I want someone who has her own storyline and her own mission – not a woman who, to use a comedy term, is just there to provide the feed line to someone else’s joke.”
“I would love to do a dramatic comedy. All of that, it all interests me. At some point I want to do my ‘Monster,’ like Charlize Theron, so I’m buckling up for that.”
“I love physical comedy. I love Oscar Wilde, I love Shakespeare comedies, I love improv.”
“I think comedy has to be very fearless, or it just gets bland.”
“I’m not a particularly shiny, happy person. I’m fairly cynical, and that’s what draws me to comedy.”
“I love comedy. It’s something that I think Marvel does so well, and it’s one of the reasons I love Marvel so much is the quips that you get: that kind of underlying everything and cutting through the very heavy emotional stuff.”
“The striking thing about ‘New Girl’ is that under all the comedy, there’s something about the emotions and reactions that feels very real – much more real than other sitcoms. Like – maybe everybody is sort of laid bare in different ways.”
“I’m the first one who sees every romantic comedy in theaters.”
“I did a film called ‘Puccini for Beginners,’ which was a romantic comedy, and I always wanted to do more, but I kept doing drama.”
“There’s obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.”
“I wrote comedy sketches in college.”
“I’ve never had prejudice against me because of being a woman in comedy, I’ve never felt any sort of unfairness because of that – but I do think it is naive to think that it doesn’t exist.”
“I joined an improv comedy group. Ours was named ‘Quick Fire!’ with an exclamation point. It was when I auditioned for that team and got on it and felt like… I’ll just say I felt like I was good at it.”
“There’s a great deal of echoing going on in ‘Old School.’ Mr. Piven, who played the upstart outsider in the 1994 campus comedy ‘PCU,’ has crossed over into playing the stiff martinet.”
“’Va Savoir’ is a lovable comedy about love that looks upon life as drama and uses the world of the theater as a staging device.”
“The pleasantly crude ‘Hall Pass’ reminds us of what’s been missing from movies: Those squirm-inducing moments in comedy that produce enough discomfort that, at points, what we’re watching is half a heartbeat away from a horror film.”
“The Comedy of Emasculation that Judd Apatow and his disciples have made into a separate economy was invented by the Farrelly brothers, ‘Kingpin’ being the strongest version of that.”
“It is fun to see a comedy in which every single joke hasn’t been packed into the trailer.”
“Tarantino thinks the Bing is a great room for comedy.”
“I never thought I’d end up doing comedy, but actually, it’s been something I’ve really relished the challenge of and ended up doing quite a bit of.”
“Even the most tragic moments can have moments of comedy.”
“I went to theater school, and then comedy… just happened.”
“I’d love to do comedy. And I think I have pretty good sense of comic timing, so I’d really like to try that.”
“I like very dry humor. I don’t like things that are over the top. I like subtlety. I like things that are nonchalant. I like characters that are sort of monotone and based in dark comedy.”
“Please, please, please – I would love to do some comedy. Once you have a reputation for one thing – in my case, crying and dying – you are typecast.”
“I think my strongest suit is comedy. I certainly have limits in other areas.”
“Comedy’s my first love. I love that so much. You play comedy in drama, too. The difference between genres doesn’t really change the method of acting.”
“I always loved acting and improv and sketch comedy and theater, which I did at a local youth theater.”
“Comedy was my sport. It taught me how to roll with the punches. Failure is the exact same as success when it comes to comedy because it just keeps coming. It never stops.”
“I am not doing comedy because the genre is successful. If that was the case, I would have done a run-of-the-mill comedy film. I set my own trends. I like to give something new and different to my audiences. I want to do the kind of comedy that has been missing till now.”
“Dan Curry is the funniest guy in the world. I can sit in a room with him for hours, and he’s just cracking me up constantly. And Kitao is the next Terry Gilliam. A lot of comedy directors are just comedic writers, but they don’t have any sense of aesthetic or visual vocabulary.”
“It’s funny – almost every comedian that I started out with moved to L.A., except for my two friends Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer. And my two friends that are doing the best in comedy, the most successful friends I have, are Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer.”
“From ‘Chappelle’s Show’ to ‘Tosh.0,’ there’s so much race comedy. It’s overdone.”
“I don’t really know how music and comedy are similar. I try never to dissect it theoretically or academically.”
“’The Simpsons’ is like Charlie Parker or Marlon Brando or Richard Pryor: Comedy couldn’t go back to the way it was after ‘The Simpsons’ came out.”
“I would never say never to returning to comedy.”
“I grew up in Iowa, and the improv comedy club Comedy-Sportz across the river in Illinois held auditions. They took me even though I was only 16 – you really had to be 18, but they never checked me for ID.”
“Life is a comedy when watching and a tragedy when experiencing. I try and share anything I have.”
“Together with script writers Sid Green and Dick Hills, we worked on the comedy ideas for this series.”
“We need more female voices to come out there and do comedy.”
“Sometimes comedy can be, like, negative and just the worst parts of ourselves coming out.”
“My inspiration to do comedy came from many places. Saturday mornings, I would watch Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis movies. I later got into watching stand-ups like Eddie Murphy, who was my main inspiration.”
“Nobody should try to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside.”
“I play these sort of comical instruments I invented, like the electric rake and the electric plunger. I do a lot of almost stand-up comedy material. Just the juxtaposition of the different styles in itself sometimes is funny. Like, I do sort of an acoustic version of ‘Purple Haze’ that has some bluegrass licks in it.”
“I can’t do comedy that is cutting and vicious. If I knew I’d said something that was going to make someone feel bad, well, that supersedes everything.”
“I would love to work with Sir Anthony Hopkins. How and why that would happen in a comedy I’m not sure – why he would be dragged over to my side, or I’d be be dragged over to his side.”
“Comedy clubs were something that came to pass in the ’80s, but toward the end of that, in the early ’90s, people started doing comedy again in alternative spaces.”
“I am interested in complex characters who are difficult and have numerous sides. But I would love to do a comedy role – something maybe ‘Monty Python’-esque.”
“It’s not easy to direct in another language, especially comedy.”
“Strangely, Dante’s Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.”
“There aren’t a lot of roles in comedy for women of a certain age to play, especially with a 22-year-old.”
“My favorite actors are Jim Carrey and Chris Farley, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams. Robin Williams is the best – to be able to do all that comedy but also be heartbreaking.”
“I would love to do a romantic comedy.”
“I think comedy and horror are very similar in that there’s a very direct intention. So you’re trying to be funny, or you’re trying to be creepy, and that literalness – I take to that.”
“People who I’ve worked with are always like, ‘Why aren’t you doing comedy? You’re funny!’ because they’ve only seen the one side. I did do the comedy ‘Whatever Works,’ with Woody Allen and Larry David.”
“I would like to look funny on screen, doing comedy.”
“I think comedy is one of the hardest things to do.”
“I never like to be the same, whether it be comedy or drama, funny or serious.”
“In studio films, everything has to be boxed in, everybody needs to know beforehand – this is comedy, this is sci-fi, this is drama – and what’s the point of independent film if you don’t get to experiment?”
“’Lakshya’ is a different genre of movie. While ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ could be categorised as a romantic comedy, this is a war drama.”
“I actually love doing comedy!”
“I tell fans who ask me why I’m not doing comedy anymore that I’m a different person. I’ve grown and I’ve matured. I’ve made a transition to where I really want to be.”
“I like comedy.”
“I worked with the Groundlings, doing sketch comedy and improv at a theater here in L.A. It was my hobby, but I took classes and stayed passionate about it because it’s what I wanted to do. It just fit. It takes a while before you can actually make money at it. I worked for years.”
“I do comedy at a lot of colleges, and at the end of those shows, I take time to be a little more real with audiences. I try to inspire them to follow their dreams. When I was that age, it was incredible to hear stuff like that.”
“Unless it’s a flat-out farce, an actor can’t play comedy on film.”
“In reality, there are tons of unrepresented voices that we don’t see in comedy.”
“Fox does the NFL a lot like they program the rest of the network. There’s sort of a locker room sense of humor that prevails. With ESPN, it’s more like a pat-you-on-the-back kind of comedy. I mean, they’ll all get on each other a little bit, but it’s never mean-spirited.”
“When you talk about a character on a situation comedy, it’s not just the actor. It’s the writers, too.”
“We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.”
“Even when I go do comedy stuff live, I can still feel the drummer in me about to go onstage.”
“I feel really lucky to get to do comedy, and music, at all. I want to do as much as I can.”
“Hopefully there will be a day when all comedy is all robots.”
“I started comedy in, like, 1998.”
“The move into adult comedy wasn’t so much moving away from ‘The Wonder Years’ as expanding myself as a director.”
“My first improv was Second City in Chicago. Before that, I worked at – with a partner, doing comedy sketches.”
“Comedy always came easier for me. But I would have loved to have been an action hero.”
“Comedy is harder, because if there’s no laughs, it’s pretty bad. But drama, if there’s no reaction, you can say, ‘Well, it’s not their cup of tea. Maybe it’s too heavy for the audience.’”
“I always loved comedy growing up – Bob Hope, Red Skelton and Danny Kaye.”
“I have always been more relaxed around comedy.”
“I guess the essence of my comedy is to get into a very abnormal situation but act like it’s normal.”
“My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I’m finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audiences share, is a powerful thing.”
“Maybe 10 times a year I’ll do a corporate date, but no casinos or no nightclubs or no comedy clubs.”
“Comedy is my passion. I’m going to do this until I drop.”
“I’m a comedian who happens to be Latino. What’s the difference? The difference is, my special will air on Comedy Central, not Telemundo.”
“I like to do comedy. It’s my real passion. I want to make people laugh.”
“Comedy in America is very serious. Either they laugh, or they don’t.”
“If you are not on TV, you don’t really exist. I want to bring my comedy to the world and tell my story to a bigger audience.”
“Americans don’t like puns and plays on words, which is totally opposite in the comedy world to France or even Italy and Germany.”
“In a comedy, after the day is done, you can figure out ways of how to make it even funnier for the next day. In dramas, it’s very different – the mindset that you’re in.”
“In Mexico, audiences want to see a big discussion around a film – what we expect from Hollywood films worldwide is more of an entertaining show. ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ was a road movie and comedy, but it had a very strong political connotation that sparked a discussion in Mexico that is still going on.”
“Comedy requires a lot of energy.”
“I like to spoof the original Gothic classics, so there is also good dose of comedy in the ‘Parasol Protectorate’ – giggling readers are good.”
“I actually started in comedy, but then after ‘Deadwood’ I started concentrating on the dramas more. But then I just got tired for raping and killing and figured, ‘It’s time to do another comedy.’”
“Without comedy as a defense mechanism I wouldn’t be able to survive.”
“A lot of times evil – or, in the case of comedy, stupid – is more interesting than the hero.”
“My comedy isn’t going to solve problems; I’m not that deep.”
“There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It’s a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy.”
“I’d like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn’t know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy.”
“Mel Brooks is one of the few authentic geniuses working in comedy in America today.”
“I’m so excited about ‘Identity Thief’. It’s such a good comedy, and I’m excited for people to go out and see it!”
“I wanted to do a comedy. I’d been actively looking for a comedy. I wanted to do one that was different. Nothing against them, but I wasn’t interested in just your normal sitcom, boy meets girl.”
“’You Gotta Have Heart’ is one of the most ridiculously perfect, amazing musical comedy songs ever.”
“In life, there’s a ying and a yang and a balance. And when you don’t have balance, you have comedy.”
“Freddie Prinze was my idol, and he died, and there is not much of his stuff to look at. But now, your comedy can live on forever.”
“There is no essential difference between the material of comedy and tragedy. All depends on the point of view of the dramatist, which, by clever emphasis, he tries to make the point of view of his audience.”
“Only recently – about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy – have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that ‘as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.’”
“I’m a huge comedy nerd. I have been forever.”
“There is always something I gain from watching a movie, whether it’s a silly romantic comedy or an art film.”
“Comedy historians take note: this Gottfried character doesn’t have the best eye for detail – and, for a Jew, he doesn’t have the best eye for retail, either.”
“People have many theories about comedy, but being just plain funny is the one most important thing.”
“Nothing can help my comedy.”
“I changed the face of comedy. I used to be funny.”
“Comedy is very controlling – you are making people laugh.”
“I’d say I’ve gone to grad school for comedy being on ‘Community.’”
“I think ‘Glee’ was a freshman comedy, and I think whenever it’s your debut season, you get compared a lot to the other shows, regardless if there’s any sort of overlap in content or tone or anything, just because you came out in the same year.”
“I wasn’t necessarily looking to do comedy on TV, but I don’t think it’s an accident that I ended up on ‘Community.’”
“Acting by yourself is pretty darn hard, especially having to do physical comedy.”
“I am a big comedy fan, having been in ‘Coupling.’”
“Sometimes on a tour bus, we watch comedy when it’s slow.”
“One of the things that makes any good entertainment, whether it’s a play, drama, comedy, television, film, whatever, is that you feel a certain amount of spontaneity.”
“I think comedy is drama, often. It’s hard to have comedy over a period of time – commercials are one thing, but over a period of time – comedy and tragedy go hand in hand.”
“I’ve a track record of successful comedy films spread over more than a decade.”
“I’ve built a comedy brand for myself that is, one, really satisfying and fulfilling personally and, two, has been able to cultivate this young female audience that’s hungry for knowledge, information, and entertainment.”
“If anything, being a female has afforded me opportunities on YouTube that I necessarily didn’t have in doing traditional comedy and auditioning in TV and film and that whole world.”
“I had started in the comedy world in a more traditional way. I was auditioning for TV, film, and commercials while I was making these Web videos from my house.”
“A lot of romantic comedies are just light romantic dramas, or the comedy comes off second-best.”
“I was not a successful TV comedy writer.”
“I was a failed actor but I still wanted to show off, so I ended up doing live comedy.”
“Comedy has to be so much cleaner than drama. You can’t layer it in the way you can a dramatic performance. Which is why it’s more difficult than drama – you don’t have so many tricks.”
“I’m not a big fan of comedy roasts because most of the time I find them to be really mean, but once in a while, you’ll hear something perfectly worded and well-crafted.”
“One day I woke up, had an early mid-life crisis, and decided it all had to change. I went and did Logan Murray’s comedy course for 11 weeks and then started sneakily doing open-spot gigs, and that was it.”
“Comedy brings out this rage in people: they get furious when they don’t like something. I have some lovely hardcore fans.”
“I’ve never disguised the fact that I wasn’t happy in teaching. But the reason was that I wanted to do comedy. I would have been a very unhappy security guard or a very unhappy greengrocer.”
“I got to the stage where I physically couldn’t carry on unless I gave comedy a go: it was necessity.”
“When I was in college, I would go out, and I would go to these open mic nights at Stitches and Nick’s Comedy Stop, so I was going to classes during the day, and then at night, I would be signing up on the lists.”
“Growing up with Bronx Irish parents during an era of protests against the status quo, I was especially committed to doing the opposite of what I was told to do. Forty-four years later, I am left with only one means of making a living: comedy.”
“Same job, whether it’s comedy or drama. Regardless of the weight of the role, I feel like the job is always kind of the same. Who is this person? What’s this guy here, and how is he playing with this thing, and what’s he trying to say? And what’s the volley with all these other people around him?”
“I can’t seem to escape comedy. Whenever I sit down and try to write something serious, it just doesn’t work.”
“I’d like to think I have a strange affinity for the embarrassing. Not sure what that says about me. But I like the awkward, uncomfortable comedy.”
“What is scary to me is silly to somebody else. CG isn’t scary to me. It’s like comedy – comedy and horror are quite similar, in that there’ll always be somebody who’ll say, ‘I don’t think that was funny.’ And it’s the same with things that are meant to be scary.”
“The dark comedies tend to be in a non-releasable area. There can be romantic comedies. There can be dramas. But there’s no ‘dark comedy’ inbox for the advertising.”
“I had wanted to do a comedy.”
“My foray into comedy was to avoid getting a job.”
“I’m not opposed to putting myself in danger for meaningless comedy.”
“I wasn’t classically trained as an actor; I wasn’t pursuing standup comedy. I really came into it through the back door. And there was a benefit to that, I think, because I wasn’t pressing; I wasn’t pushing.”
“Comedy can be harder because if you aren’t making the audience laugh, they’re going to turn on you quicker. They’ll go along with mediocre drama more than they’ll go along with mediocre comedy.”
“I was a huge fan of comedy and movies and TV growing up, and I was able to memorize and mimic a lot of things, not realizing that that meant I probably wanted to be an actor. I just really, really amused myself and my friends with memorizing entire George Carlin or Steve Martin albums.”
“You know, I was a huge fan of comedy and movies and TV growing up, and I was able to memorize and mimic a lot of things, not realizing that that meant I probably wanted to be an actor.”
“It makes me mad to hear these popular orchestras make a jammed-up comedy of a song like ‘Wreck on the Highway.’ It ain’t a funny song.”
“The thing about comedy is it gives you a platform to expose your own shortcomings, so it becomes a public display of weirdness.”
“Comedy is basically self-deprecation.”
“I remember ‘Def Comedy Jam’ being a big deal and kids talking about it in school, but it was never, ‘I want to do that.’”
“My first time on TV doing stand-up, I actually did this show in Holland called ‘The Comedy Factory’ hosted by Jorgen Raymann. It was in 2006 in Holland. It was amazing. I had only been doing stand-up for four years, and I booked that gig through the Just For Laughs Montreal festival, and they flew me out and put me up.”
“’Power’ is a very special film for me and is one of the finest films of my career. I have played a character that I have never done before. My role has a lot of comedy.”
“The words we use have weight. Whether it’s in a conversation with a friend or something said publicly on stage or broadcast. And as performers, we know that because that’s why we choose the words we use – that’s the whole point of comedy.”
“January 14, 2000, was my first time on stage, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I got discovered nationally in Seattle by the now-defunct HBO Comedy Festival, and that led to an appearance on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ and a path to a professional comedy career.”
“I can’t imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.”
“As a director on ‘The Office,’ there’s a tremendous weight that comes with directing features. I was being asked to direct a show that had already won an Emmy for Best Comedy. Steve Carell and the cast had already won the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards.”
“Ernie Hudson was new to the comedy world, and being the fourth Ghostbuster, he would have ideas, and he would talk to Ivan Reitman, and Ivan would kind of put him off. I could see how disappointed he was.”
“It seems that, culturally, young people function more in groups. They know each other through digital media. All the young comedy people who work in TV are really used to working at the table with lots of writers around. They’re comfortable in the group; they don’t assert their own egos over everyone else.”
“There’s all sorts of terrible things that happen around the world. And comedy’s one of those few things where you can discuss those things.”
“Aditi is a comedy superstar over in India. She’s only one of three female English-speaking comedians in India.”
“I think the way comedy is represented on screen is it’s either all fart jokes – and it’s just laughter for the sake of laughter – or it’s one of those things where it’s just kind of very preachy, very heavy-handed.”
“’Stand-Up Planet’ was Anthony Bourdain-meets-stand-up comedy.”
“Comedy is very disarming. It’s a way to talk about things and still be light-hearted. And when it’s done really well, you never see the strings, whereas when you watch an infomercial or a politician speaking, a lot of times you can see the strings, you can see what agenda they’re trying to push.”
“In high school, I didn’t know what comedy was, but I was involved in speech and debate and public speaking.”
“I grew up in a pretty strict household in the sense that we just didn’t have cable, so I wasn’t familiar with what stand-up comedy was. I remember telling my friends that I thought stand-up comedy was like the thing that happened before the episode of ‘Seinfeld.’”
“The Carells are huge fans of comedy. To get in there and see how sick and twisted their mind is is fun to do.”
“I really like to do comedy, and I did comedy the first 2 years after I graduated college, so I really love it and appreciate it.”
“Me and my roommate wrote and directed a little short comedy called ‘The Elevator.’”
“You’re at the top of your game if you do comedy.”
“I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.”
“I am into comedy.”
“If we can’t have comedy books written about aspects of womanhood without going into a panic attack about it, then we haven’t got very far at being equal.”
“Comedy tends to come out of things which are quite painful and serious.”
“I don’t want to get stuck in romantic comedy.”
“’Not Another Happy Ending’ is a romantic comedy starring Karen Gillan and Stanley Weber. It is about these two characters and their relationships.”
“If I had to perform in a comedy club I would bomb; I would be trying too hard.”
“Comedy isn’t just timing; it’s about rooting out the funny in the real. You just bend reality to the left a little.”
“I’ve done romantic comedy, and I don’t get to flex that muscle often.”
“’Damadamm!’ is a sweet comedy, and there is always room for watching a feel-good entertainer on Diwali.”
“In a lot of comedy shows, there’s a safety net where you don’t assume anything of real consequence will happen.”
“Sometimes I’m doing a big movie, or sometimes I’m doing a TV show, but as an actor, it’s almost the same thing for me. If I’m doing action, or comedy, or something more heartfelt, it’s a different approach, but it’s all acting for me.”
“Feature films seem geared toward very large budgets, action, broad comedy. That seems to dominate all year where it used to be relegated to summer.”
“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”
“Trump’s hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift.”
“With ‘J’, at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn’t reneging on it; I just didn’t want to do it.”
“’Saturday Night Live’ was actually started with a show that Lorne Michaels and I did at a summer camp called Timberlane in Ontario when we were 14 and 15. We would do an improvisational show with music, comedy and acting.”
“In the mid-1970s, there was this huge boom of stand-up comedy throughout North America. I went to see a show at a club called Yuk-Yuks, in Toronto, and I was just fascinated. I ended up coming back for amateur hour on a Monday at midnight and got up there without any thought as to what might come of it.”
“I love doing comedy.”
“As it is, I have a limited range as an actor – light comedy. I have never been a fan of romantic comedies, and yet that is what I have ended up mostly doing.”
“Comedy is probably a way of dealing with anxiety. Sometimes it’s a way of dealing with pain.”
“I get more satisfaction out of comedy stuff. I’m a laugh tart. I make no secret of that fact.”
“As an actor, I would love to do an out and out comedy.”
“I would love to do a biopic or a situational comedy.”
“People ask me whether I see ‘Star Wars’ as a comedy or a tragedy, but it’s really neither – it’s partly a history, like ‘Henry V,’ and partly a fantasy, like ‘The Tempest.’”
“The best comedy is where you attack the strong, not the weak.”
“I decided I would go to NYU so I could get into the comedy world and have legit housing, and my parents would not have trusted investing in a straight-up comedy career.”
“I drink Peet’s Coffee, and they’re a very authentic company. They don’t try to be something that they’re not, and I think that’s reflective in my comedy as well.”
“My comedy is a bit cartoonlike, if I really think about it.”
“I’ve been entertaining men with my comedy for many, many years, and I don’t plan on stopping.”
“I’m a huge sketch comedy fan, and I think my love of sketch is reflected in my stand-up in that I do a lot of vignettes and voices and characters.”
“I was a big fan of sketch comedy and cartoons growing up.”
“I’m a big fan of Albert Brooks, Nichols and May. I’d like to follow in their footsteps and do comedy films.”
“Listen, I’m a big fan of everything on NBC. When I think of comedy on TV, I really think of NBC.”
“I love ‘Monty Python,’ ‘Black Adder,’ ‘Fawlty Towers.’ I’m a huge fan of British comedy.”
“I love Monty Python, Black Adder, Fawlty Towers. I’m a huge fan of British comedy.”
“This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.”
“If work isn’t rooted in comedy, people will turn from it, or they’ll use it like soap opera.”
“Then my first film was something called Cannibal Girls, which sounds like a horror movie but was actually kind of a goofy comedy with horror elements. Like a horror spoof.”
“I never like to do parodies. I never do. It’s just not my style of comedy.”
“In a comedy it helps enhance things that were already there.”
“Well my biggest dream is to be in a romantic comedy.”
“Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself – with a smile.”
“I’m trying to be the Jay-Z of comedy one day. I don’t know if there’s any comedy moguls out there, but I would love to be the first comedy mogul.”
“I loved Peter Sellers. I thought he was the perfect mix of physical comedy with out-of-the-box humor. I loved his tone; I loved his physicality; I loved everything about what he was doing as a comedic actor.”
“When I first started doing comedy years ago, I used to be the biggest Michael Richards fan. I used to love this dude. He was on a TV show called ‘Fridays,’ and man, he was tall and lanky – and I was tall and lanky. I love physical comedy, and he was a physical comedian, and I said, ‘Man, I love this guy.’”
“Some of the best dramatic actors have started in comedy.”
“I’m afraid one thing – I don’t like heights. Heights bug me out. I’m not cool with heights. I refuse to do a comedy show 12 stories up. I’m fearless about everything else.”
“One of my favorite things about ‘Star Trek’ wasn’t just the overt banter but the humor in that show about the relationships between the main characters and their reactions to the situations they would face; there was a lot of comedy in that show without ever breaking its reality.”
“You know, we’ve got to this place, where you go to a movie for one particular surgical fix. So, it’s like, I want the pulse-pounding action, or the insane falling-off-my-seat comedy, or the devastating, heart-breaking drama.”
“When I was a kid, among the other embarrassing things I would do, and there’s a list of stupid things, but I would make these dumb comedy tapes. I would often make prank phone calls, but I would also do it with friends.”
“I’m not a fan of any genre but am a fan of movies that are intelligent and/or funny. That goes across all genres: a horror movie, a zombie movie, alien invaders, chick flick, or raunchy comedy. If it’s well done, I’m a fan.”
“I wasn’t a comic book aficionado at all when I was a kid, but my cousin Weed was. Every time we went to visit him on the farm, he had two really fun things: comedy albums and comic books.”
“I don’t want to play earnest. I’d rather play somebody who’s kind of sleazy. It’s much more fun, especially in a comedy. You don’t want to be some earnest guy who’s just trying to do the right thing but can’t. I want to be doing the wrong thing intentionally.”
“I was so keen to become a comedian that actually doing the comedy itself almost came second.”
“It’s something that has informed quite a lot of my comedy – that idea of someone who is always trying to get in there with the right crowd, always trying to be a certain type of person and never managing it.”
“Comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. A talent in one area might also lead to a predisposition in the other.”
“It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.”
“I have been fortunate to be able to have a career playing comedy and drama. And it’s awfully hard – it’s like apples and pears to compare the two.”
“In general, I think comedy is more difficult to write, to direct, and to act successfully.”
“I’m in a sketch comedy group in school and I also do stand-up.”
“I did a gig at a comedy club in Bournemouth where they served a buffet while the acts were on. There was the clang of people carving turkey during the set. If you put comedy and turkey side by side, turkey always wins.”
“I can’t pretend that I’m a great student of the art of comedy because anybody that becomes philosophical about humour doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“My comedy doesn’t come from any calculations and studies.”
“I kind of want to be in a comedy movie, or maybe something like ‘Star Wars.’”
“Comedy is one of the toughest genres. It is so essential to get the timing right, failing which the humour can fall flat.”
“I enjoy doing comedy.”
“In comedy, if you don’t have the right tuning with your co-actor, the humour can fall flat.”
“I would like to do comedy. I can be a bit of a Jim Carrey. I was always the class clown.”
“I do more comedy, actually. I don’t do the classic novelas.”
“Perhaps I’ve been perceived more as a romantic comedy actor, but overall, I enjoy acting in any shape or form.”
“I do love situational comedy, clowning, and slapstick; I approach that with a lot of respect. The goofier you are, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be funnier.”
“I feel like L.A. is more of a showcase, and Chicago is a pure comedy scene where you’re doing comedy for comedy. You’re doing comedy actually for the audience that’s there.”
“YouTube is the vlogs and my life, then Instagram is comedy skits and pictures that I take. Twitter’s text, and Instagram Stories is even more behind-the-scenes vlog stuff. I’m always posting.”
“I learned physical comedy to a degree that most child actors never will. I really just became a student of it – became obsessed with it, to be quite honest.”
“There’s no excuse for panel games, other TV comedy shows, or even live bills to be made up mainly of men.”
“The Rock was one of my favourite comedy characters growing up, and I still think he is. Mainly because he took himself so seriously by being ridiculous and a buffoon all the time but always took the high status.”
“I sort of attract people who are interested in my comedy for being able to talk about whatever I want to talk about and not being ashamed of who I am and not hiding it.”
“It feels bad to play a bad guy. I did George W. Bush for years, and I hated him. But you have to give full voice to the villains. You have to have really convincing villains, or it’s not worth anything as drama or comedy.”
“I think one of the perks of getting to do comedy is the ability to hang out with the funniest people in the world.”
“In England, ‘The Muppet Show’ is very much seen as an English thing. So for us in the U.K., it is one of the treasures of the history of children’s TV and of comedy, basically.”
“I’ve always thought that Lewis Carroll himself had a certain comedy tinge to him. He was a guy who was a satirist. He really was a social commentator in many ways and was trying to satirize Victorian society.”
“Doing comedy is still in my veins; that’s my first love.”
“I value comedy. I value somebody who can be funny.”
“I love it if comedy reflects real life because to me it’s more reassuring that we’ll get through.”
“I saw ‘Annie Hall’ with a group of people working in comedy and television. We were all stunned. Stunned. It was like watching a spaceship land. That something that funny could also be that beautiful.”
“’Wayne’s World’ is my all time favorite comedy. I used to watch it on VHS on repeat with my brother when I was ten years old.”
“It so fascinates me how we always laugh when somebody falls on a banana peel, how comedy and injury are often so interwoven. I’ve always been a sucker for that.”
“’Gremlins’ is essential ’80s comedy scary viewing.”
“’Monk’ planted the seed that a procedural could have character and be quirky and have comedy.”
“The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.”
“Comedy has to be done en clair. You can’t blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.”
“I’m a big movie fan, and I want to make movies in every genre. I want to make my romantic comedy one day.”
“Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with ‘Hardly Working’ and ‘Cracking Up.’”
“Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom – it doesn’t have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations – but that doesn’t explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.”
“And what could be a hotter ticket than the improbable triumph of ‘The Book of Mormon,’ the musical-comedy moon shot of the season? Its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, of Comedy Central’s ‘South Park,’ are the most unlikely Rodgers and Hammerstein team ever to bowl a thundering strike.”
“Historically, Hollywood comedy has arrived in skinny envelopes. From fence post Buster Keaton to herky-jerky Jerry Lewis to wiry nerve-bundle Woody Allen to hung-loose Richard Pryor to whippy contortionist Jim Carrey, its comics and clowns have tended to be sliced thin and bendable.”
“There’s a film I did called ‘Front of the Class’, about a teacher who had Tourette’s. That was a beautiful blend of drama and comedy. There’s some great moments of levity in the script.”
“I’ve always loved doing comedy.”
“I would love to do more family comedy.”
“Comedy is one area that it’s – it’s all around me in my house.”
“I did sketch comedy for years. I’ve always enjoyed it.”
“I used to love comic books, and I love American comedy, and neither are afraid to tackle big themes.”
“I think comedy I’ve learned is really just about relaxing and trusting yourself and allowing yourself to fail.”
“Honestly, it’s hard to learn about comedy from comedians. Comedy is not something that you necessarily learn or can imitate. You’re funny or you’re not, and you hope what you’re doing is funny.”
“I love doing comedy. Absolutely love it. After ‘Wedding Crashers,’ people suddenly realized that it was something I could do.”
“’Bridesmaids’ was phenomenal. It deserves every accolade it’s gotten, and it’s exciting for every woman in comedy.”
“I just love the geeky comedy boys! Those are the guys I go for.”
“There is an overarching comedy community, and then there are little comedy community pockets, almost like the way L.A. is structured. You have this grand scope of what Los Angeles is, but within that, there are all of these multi-functioning cities and neighborhoods.”
“I watch a lot of drama because I do associate comedy with work.”
“I love doing comedy. But sometimes, that exists at sort of the mid-level to the high-comedy level of craziness, and I don’t necessarily get to plumb the depths of kind of serious acting as often.”
“I’d love to do a comedy. I’m terrified of comedy. I don’t think I’m funny, but I guess that’s why it’s so thrilling.”
“Comedy works best when people recognise themselves.”
“I love smart comedy.”
“Comedy lives on in the web and TV, but nobody’s pressing comedy albums anymore.”
“People like Bill Murray are incredible at what they do and are definitely my flavour. Although Will Ferrell, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais are also incredible actors. In their comedy, they make these stupid people feel so real. These guys are really setting the bar very high, and I learn as much from them about acting as I do about comedy.”
“I really like dramas that have a tone of comedy in them or the opposite, and those are done by people like Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman but also Spike Jonze and David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers.”
“A straight factor is important in any comedy, because you need something to tee it up and also to ground it.”
“I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality.”
“I guess there’s nothing funny about a guy who looks conservative and has it all together, but it’s satisfying to see a conservative guy crumbling inside, and I think a lot of American comedy has cottoned on to that.”
“I wanted to be Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro or Al Pacino. I thought I was going to be a dramatic actor, but comedy sort of started out first, and I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll find some more drama later on in my career.’”
“I really appreciate comedy a lot.”
“On the whole, a director who make the set a comfortable place to work is really important, whether it’s a comedy or drama.”
“Physical comedy is my favorite thing in the world to do.”
“British comedy – which has been a big inspiration to me for many years – is very different to Australian comedy and different again to American comedy.”
“As long as Fox News continues to exist, you’ve got comedy.”
“You can find comedy anywhere.”
“What’s fun about comedy is you’re pushing things a little further than you would in a drama; you’re pushing reality a little bit more.”
“A good comedy with a purpose behind it is exhilarating.”
“I would love to do comedy.”
“I try to be smart with my comedy. Generally, it devolves into bathroom humour. I describe my comedy as, ‘I have the best intentions, but usually it fails.’”
“From the onset of the ‘Live-Read’ series, we wanted to hit all the major writers and Woody Allen is simply one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. He has ability to match pathos and comedy and drama and then turn it all on a dime. If you’re going to make a series based on dialogue, you can’t find much better than Woody Allen.”
“Comedy and horror are cousins; they’re related. They both come from storytellers who want to specifically affect the audience and elicit specific reactions during the movie.”
“Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.”
“I think, through comedy, sometimes we’re allowed to discuss things that you’d never be able to talk about in a drama.”
“One of the pitfalls of a romantic comedy is that you know how it’s going to end.”
“Action comedy, if you can get it right, it is, for me, a particularly brilliant genre. It really is.”
“At least in making an action film, there’s always going to be someone who wants to see a car chase. Even if a lot of the people don’t like it, there will be a lot of people that do. But bad comedy is just garbage.”
“Comedy is not my first go-to sort of genre.”
“I’ve never been a shirt-off, pants-off kind of comedy guy.”
“That’s what I love about sketch comedy: a sketch is five minutes, then it goes dark, and there’s the potential for something else.”
“I was never the class clown, and I’ve no idea where the comedy came from.”
“I started to develop my comedy skills when I became resident singer at the Boggery Folk Club in Solihull. My career blossomed from there, and I became a big draw on the folk-club circuit.”
“So my humor, I’d say, comes from a mixture of lowbrow comedy shows and highbrow theater. It’s an interesting mix.”
“I don’t like soft villains in comedy films.”
“I have always felt a comedy’s story is undercut if you have a villain who is not really menacing.”
“If you’re not doing something or saying something in comedy, the camera is going to go somewhere else.”
“Like hitting a baseball, comedy is very much about timing. To some degree, you either ‘got it or you don’t.’”
“I’m obsessed with ‘The Americans.’ It’s one of my favorite shows. I also love ‘Baskets’ – low-brow, high-art comedy.”
“The best way to ruin a comedy is to throw a lot of money at it.”
“Comedy did a lot of things for me. I mean, ‘SNL’? Not too bad. Not too shabby with this comedy thing. I have really worked on my comedy and really upped it some notches.”
“My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate, which had a commentary track that wasn’t even the filmmakers, it was a professor, some film criticism guy who just happen to be this amazing commentator who went off into the whole theory of comedy.”
“I love doing drama as much as I love doing comedy.”
“If it’s a drama or comedy, it doesn’t matter to me. I just want to like the writing.”
“I’d really been wanting to do a television series. I was looking for a comedy.”
“Comedy is all about rhythm and context, and there’s all types of comedies, and it’s about finding that right brand, that consistency in tone.”
“I always knew I wanted to make movies since I was around eleven. I never thought of it as wanting to do straight-up comedy. Even now, I don’t see things in terms of genre.”
“I know, when I was in film school, some of my films were silly, but a lot of them were more dramatic. I don’t think I intentionally set out to do comedy stuff. I guess that’s a consequence of coming up working with David O. Russell and skewing toward those sensibilities.”
“I love John Irving’s stuff. It’s that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It’s really terrific.”
“It’s interesting to explore the darker side, but the hero piece is interesting as well. It’s like choosing between comedy or drama. I like to do both.”
“Comedy is hard to do. All the cliches about it are true.”
“I love comedy. God has given me this platform.”
“I never analyze stuff with comedy because it’s boring. It makes you stop being funny. Just be who you are and do what you do, and you’re either funny or you’re not.”
“First off, I don’t do self-deprecation comedy based on being fat. I would always talk about it honestly. Secondly, I don’t care how much I weigh.”
“I take comedy very seriously, and I feel very competitive.”
“There are no subtleties in a war zone. I think that’s why comedy does so well there. It goes right for the gut. So those punch lines start penetrating the bullet-proof vests.”
“I’m not hurting anybody. Comedy’s all about innuendo. I’m putting it out there just like anybody else.”
“I think of everything as comedy, but I don’t think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There’s always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.”
“I am a huge believer – I always have been – in the power of comedy. That comedy will break hatred and will bring understanding.”
“Comedy’s all math, figuring out the timing.”
“In real life I’m very low-key. A wallflower. One of the reasons I went into comedy and acting was that I was sick of being shy.”
“At first, there was a separation of clubs and sketch comedy. Now there’s all kinds of comedy, making us one big happy family.”
“What they call ‘alt-comedy’ now is basically what comedy was like in the ’80s. People tried different things, and everybody went to the clubs; there was no other place. Then somehow, the clubs became infiltrated by Dice Clay and Carrot Top types.”
“The women doing comedy do not even think of themselves as ‘female’ comedians.”
“A TV touchstone for me is ‘The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.’ That series was whimsical and smart and had the mix of comedy and drama that I now trade in – but with a dash of magical realism. I wanted to be Molly Dodd, but more than that, I wanted to be Jay Tarses, who created the show.”
“I’m a really gifted physical comedienne. I write and produce a lot of sketch comedy.”
“I have such a girl-crush on Reese Witherspoon. I would love to do a comedy with her.”
“In comedy, something may be more absurd, but you have to believe just as much as you do when you’re doing drama.”
“It proved to me, though, that comedy is so much harder.”
“Especially while television I think is going through some growing pains or is in need of – I think current comedy is a bit, uh, not happening, you know?”
“I studied theater in college, and I really wanted to be an actress and play a lot of different roles. Then I made landing on a television comedy my main focus.”
“I love going to the movie theatre, seeing live comedy, and going to amusement parks.”
“People who do comedy are always underrated because they make it look so easy.”
“It’s always been a dream of mine to be in a Woody Allen comedy.”
“The minute I started doing comedy, the doors opened.”
“I don’t think my career would be as good if I were a serious actress. Comedy is less age-conscious.”
“My favorite genre of movies growing up was the romantic comedy.”
“And you can’t hide in a comedy scene either. You have to give in to the scene and commit.”
“I think it is a bit harder for women starting in comedy.”
“I like watching comedy shows. I only watch comedy or action.”
“I want to see good-quality comedy shows, not the slapstick ones or where people imitate others.”
“The comedy I like the best is comedy I can’t do, stuff that doesn’t touch my arena.”
“I wanted to be in Jim Carrey comedy movies before I met him. I wanted to be a comedian on Stage 19, yukking it up.”
“I think, from a really early age, I just wanted to be an actress. And I ended up doing comedy because it was the thing that kind of, like, came out of my nature the most easily. But, I’ve always wanted to do as many different kinds of performances – whatever I could.”
“Comedy can be a little brutal, but not in a satisfying way.”
“’Saturday Night Live’ will always be this amazing, powerful behemoth, but it’s also not the only thing happening in comedy anymore.”
“It takes a while to realize that just because you’re a stand-up comedian and you do comedy, you’re not going to be good at all comedy.”
“Comedy, drama, Westerns, sci-fi… it’s all fine if the story’s compelling and the character is interesting to me. I do like action a lot.”
“We always have a little comedy. It’s the Marvel secret sauce. I think it’s what helps Marvel resonate with the audience, that, yes, we’re in the joke, too.”
“A comic book and a straight drama all have the same elements. If you’re playing tragedy, you have to be aware of the comedy; if you’re playing comedy, you have to be aware of the tragedy. If you’re playing comic book, you have to be aware of the reality.”
“I was always worried with comedy – what if I came to work and I wasn’t in a funny mood? That hasn’t been an issue.”
“So much comedy comes out of an earnest, deeply rooted need for one thing or another, trying to get it and caring so much that you lose your sense of self-awareness.”
“I started pursuing stand-up comedy in 12th grade.”
“You can’t teach standup comedy. You can teach someone how to formulate a joke, but making it funny is different.”
“I’ve always navigated my way around the comedy writing rooms because I didn’t want to cater to this side and that side; I just wanted to be liked by everybody.”
“I love comedy, but more than that, I love comedy that has a message and that has some stakes.”
“You don’t expect to be touched by comedy. But when it happens, it’s beautiful.”
“I see myself touring internationally – everywhere, every theater, every arena – and putting out stand-up comedy specials until I can’t even stand no more. Even then, I’ll probably do my comedy special in a hospital bed.”
“I probably wouldn’t have pursued comedy further if my friends didn’t tell me that my getting kicked off the stage was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.”
“I’ve always loved the idea of the rookie cop vs. the grizzled veteran. A lot of comedy can be mined from that.”
“I was raised watching sitcoms, and I love long-form comedy.”
“Eddie Murphy did ’48 Hrs.’ because that was the only movie offered to him. And he killed it. Bill Cosby did ‘I Spy’ because that was the TV show he was offered. But now, there are networks dedicated to comedy, and the Internet… it’s so easy for comedians to not do things that aren’t true to them.”
“My ego and my vanities have nothing to do with comedy.”
“The connection between pathos and broad comedy is very tight. But you do far more work in a comedy scene than you do in a straight scene. It’s much harder.”
“I have some very personal feelings about politics, but I don’t get into it because I do comedy already.”
“There’s nothing more dramatic than the comedy I’ve done. Because the comedy I’ve done is to get to the audience, get them to feel it, or they won’t laugh.”
“You can’t hold comedy back, because it needs to be exposed.”
“Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.”
“You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.”
“It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.”
“Creative comedy is like growing geraniums in a mine field.”
“I’ve always done comedy, and I’ve always wanted to do a dramatic role. I wanted to be a sheriff.”
“But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine.”
“I remember before I did ‘Boston Public,’ I couldn’t get seen for drama. Once I’d done ‘Boston Public,’ I couldn’t get seen for a comedy.”
“Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.”
“’The David Letterman Show’ is a show of comedy.”
“The very first time I did standup, I went to an open mike on the Lower East Side at a place that doesn’t exist anymore. And it was one of those open mikes that wasn’t really just for comedy.”
“When I do comedy, I lose all inhibition and introspection. I no longer care.”
“I’ve never gotten to do romantic comedy like most of the girls. Maybe because I’m fit, people assume that I’m not funny?”
“I’d like to start writing scripts. I think I’d probably be inclined to write a very dark comedy or a tragic romance. As a kid, I used to write really dark stuff.”
“I would like to explore comedy more. It’s not something that I’ve done a lot of. Obviously, I’m very at home in drama. I like everything.”
“I would like to explore comedy, I want to do more theatre, and I definitely want a future in film.”
“I would like to explore comedy, I want to do more theatre, and I definitely want a future in film. I love science-fiction.”
“The thing with physical comedy is that you have to actually try to do the thing you’re trying to do – you can’t fake it.”
“A lot of comedy on television has a reserve to it, and it’s a little too cool for school.”
“I don’t think comedy is something you learn. I think it’s something that’s either there or it’s not.”
“I first fell in love with comedy when I’d visit my granny as a kid. Trips to her house meant staying up late drinking Coca-Cola and watching ‘Saturday Night Live’.”
“There’s truth in comedy, and that resonates with people of all races.”
“The popularity of ‘2 Dope Queens’ just showed there was like a hunger for new stories because we have alternative comics on our show that wouldn’t normally be featured on, like, a white guy’s comedy show.”
“I had a flair for comedy and could give a sustained performance.”
“I love Stewart Lee’s ‘Comedy Vehicle’ on BBC2. The guy is a genius.”
“We are in desperate need of a well-done romantic lesbian comedy.”
“I am very interested in that fine line between fiction and reality and between comedy and tragedy – and pushing the line as much as possible.”
“I always knew I wanted to do comedy. I like making people laugh.”
“When I was nine, we’d take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we’d take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.”
“The understatement is the English contribution to comedy.”
“I feel like, at times, I’ve been seen as the dirty stepchild of Australian comedy. I think there’s a few people out there that are pissed off that I made it big overseas.”
“I probably get a bit more backlash in Australia than I do in America, to be honest. I was never invited to the Melbourne Comedy Festival because I was too gross, things like that. Which never happened in any other country.”
“Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don’t think in terms of comic dialogue.”
“I will say you could always look at ‘Looney Tunes’ and learn about writing. I think you can learn a lot about the beats of comedy. I think you can find out about awkward pauses, because I think they did those well.”
“I’d always been quite wary of doing a romantic comedy. They all seem the same to me.”
“More people are going out to comedy shows than they were before.”
“The bigger the audience, the better with comedy.”
“As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.”
“I don’t hold any candle for drama versus comedy.”
“You look across the board at comedy quiz shows, and they are mainly hosted by men.”
“The problem with comedy audiences – it’s like the Coliseum – when they see someone struggling, they don’t feel altruistic towards them. They feel slightly repulsed by it.”
“Madness isn’t altogether a bad thing in comedy.”
“Suffice to say, many women find their first appearance on a comedy panel show to be their last. Second chances seem to be given less often to the female of the species.”
“Everyone in comedy thinks if you go to the U.S. you become a global star but, unfortunately, I’ve always been a bit anti-American – so I never did.”
“I pay a bit more than lip-service to health: I don’t eat chips or pre-prepared food, and it might be a comedy sacrilege to admit I do like vegetables, fruit and salad and stuff.”
“Comedy is not the first choice in Vegas for entertainment.”
“With Comedy Central, they produced it and did everything – I just had to walk up there and tell the jokes – whereas with Netflix, I was heavily, creatively involved, from the logo to the lighting of the room to selecting the venue to selling the tickets and promoting it.”
“Something about Floridians, man – they are good to me. I’m glad my comedy translates to them.”
“I could be the Greta Garbo of comedy, very secluded, but Garbo had a man who was beyond rich to support her.”
“Comedy is a very rough beat. It’s no holds barred, as it should be.”
“If I can do a romantic comedy with women, that’s Everest to me.”
“I used to dream about presenting a comedy show and also about directing films.”
“Improv seemed to replace stand-up, which was very big before that. Stand-up comedy was real hot in the late ’80s and through the ’90s.”
“There’s just something about youth and comedy that go together. Maybe it’s that foolishness, that silliness that you can get away with when you’re younger, that you can’t get away with when you’re older.”
“You can’t get all of your news from Jon Stewart, especially since it’s a comedy show.”
“I grew up watching Letterman, ‘Seinfeld,’ ‘SNL,’ and Monty Python movies. But nothing made me want to get into comedy more than when ‘Mr. Show’ started airing.”
“I think it might be interesting to give an Emmy to an outstanding background performance in either a comedy or drama series.”
“I worked in Trenton, and then I got sidetracked into comedy and then onto ‘SNL.’ And then into being a live performer – what I do now; virtually that’s what I am: I’m a live entertainer.”
“So many times I’ve done a CD, and then the week after I record it, I’ve got this new tagline that’s killer. And it makes the whole bit better. It happens all the time. But that’s just the process of comedy.”
“Comedy is really not like any other art form in that it’s very specialized and varied in it’s content, but generic in it’s title.”
“But it’s hard for a chick to do comedy. It’s not as open for them.”
“We shot ‘CBGB’ in Savannah, and then I took another project there afterwards called ‘Killing Winston Jones.’ It’s a dark comedy with Richard Dreyfuss, Danny Glover, Jon Heder, Danny Masterson and Aly Michalka. It’s a great cast and a beautiful film.”
“I don’t like to bad-mouth other shows, but I was very disturbed after seeing ‘Starlight Express.’ It had very little to do with musical comedy as I know it. It had to do with sound and spectacle and records and technology and amplification.”
“Yes, I would say my comedy is grunge, evidenced by the fact my jokes have put an end to big-hair glam comedy.”
“The #MeToo movement is insanely serious, and there’s no comedy to be mined out of that.”
“I’d like to play a mixture of Lucille Ball meets Murphy Brown meets Glenn Close on ‘Damages,’ to keep a little bit of the darkness in there. I like dark comedy a lot.”
“I just showed up at the Comedy Store. You keep showing up, and you keep showing up, and eventually, somebody notices.”
“If I see an audition for a show or a movie, I’ll send a tape in. I attack it. The whole time, I’m booking comedy, so no matter what, I always got that coming in. I’m always working on my craft.”
“I hate comedy. I don’t even like comedy at all.”
“Rock n’ roll is at a standstill, I think – and comedy is taking its place as something exciting.”
“I want to do a romantic comedy that nobody thought I could do. And then do a comedy with Dan Aykroyd that is totally different from ‘The Blues Brothers.’ I’m a comic actor, but I’m an actor, too.”
“So much of male heterosexual comedy can be steeped in a gay panic. A lot of juvenile comedy is predicated on that.”
“I don’t deliberately go into comedy or go into indies, but I do deliberately try to keep changing tact, because I think that is the key to longevity in a career.”
“Here’s the thing, with comedy – and I learned this from Will Ferrell – you can’t be ashamed. If you’re doing comedy, you have to fully commit to the joke. Shame is not part of it. If you act shy or uncomfortable about your body, that makes the audience shy and uncomfortable. And in a comedy you just want them to loosen up and laugh.”
“There’s so much joy in doing comedy work, and that’s one of the reasons I like to do it – because it’s just a hilarious day at work.”
“One of the things I like about comedy in general is that it affords Asian Americans the opportunity to not be noble.”
“I need my comedy to offend. That’s my personal views.”
“I have an affinity for comedy because I like to watch them. It’s an honor to make comedies because I love being able to pop something into the DVD player and laugh. I love doing it.”
“Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.”
“I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.”
“Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?”
“When you’ve been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don’t know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it’s going to be.”
“I got into musical comedy because of Shakespeare, not because of singing. They needed someone to understudy Richard Burton. I was also going to musical auditions because the agent I had insisted I go to them.”
“Acting can be pretty challenging. I can’t say making a romantic comedy is challenging, but to do anything well, you have to put yourself into it.”
“I had always been heavily influenced by stand-up. I was in a comedy team called Red Johnny And The Round Guy.”
“I’d like to come back because I really miss doing situation comedy.”
“Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.”
“Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.”
“This to me is the secret comedy of all author interviews, down through the ages, even the good ones in the ‘Paris Review’ and places. They’re all acting. It’s like watching a person in a play.”
“For me, ‘Arrested Development’ is the cornerstone of recent television comedy. It’s so incredibly flawless and perfect.”
“I’m really not feeling one way or the other with comedy or drama, I’m just sort of doing projects that I’ve been finding really fun to be a part of.”
“Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble.”
“Directors, like actors, get typecast. And because I’ve had great success with comedy and horror and TV shows, that’s basically what I’m kind of offered.”
“It was just at the end of the golden era of BBC comedy, which was fantastic.”
“I feel I don’t get credit enough for it, the pioneering I did in comedy.”
“It’s a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.”
“What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.”
“People have expectations from you – and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That’s how you get laughs in comedy, and that’s how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.”
“I work very hard on motivating everything I do as an actor. Explosive moments have to be completely motivated; whether they’re explosive comedy or explosive horror, they have to come organically out of a scene and an interaction with another actor.”
“Comedy is very, very hard to achieve.”
“I’ve turned arrogance into an artform, where it’s so absurd that it becomes comedy. But I’ve never done anything to hurt anybody or steal from anyone.”
“People who can dance and sing are often very good at comedy.”
“Comedy has to do with holding and releasing tension; it’s very technical. It’s more technical than drama.”
“I just watched a ton of comedy and saw a ton of different styles, and eventually you think, ‘Oh, yeah, I could be like that.’”
“I did sketch comedy, but I never did improv. So I’ve just tried to learn as I go.”
“I’ve always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy.”
“People really have come for a dialogue when they go to a stand-up show in the U.K. They say, ‘I understand that you have now finished your little comedy monologue; now I have something to say regarding what I’ve just heard.”
“Stand-up comedy seems like a terrifying thing. Objectively. Before anyone has done it, it seems like one of the most frightening things you could conceive, and there’s just no shortcut – you just have to do it.”
“I’ve always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy. And I guess I’ve always liked to channel some kind of personal element to that.”
“There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents. Like when a driver has parked his car crookedly and then wonders why he has the bad luck of being hit.”
“The days are long. I’m not complaining, but it’s a lot of work doing a single-camera comedy.”
“It blows my mind that you get Shakespeare where the ‘low’ comedy characters have got Northern or Welsh accents.”
“There is that stereotype of a nerd with the high pants and pocket protector and that kind of thing. That can sustain comedy for maybe a movie – hence the ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ franchise – but not for hopefully years on the air. It’s a sight gag, not a story.”
“A lot of stand-up comedy guys, when they get a little famous, just give up their stand-up career, and it cancels out the thing that set them apart.”
“I also want to return to doing stand-up. I’ve become frightened of live audiences. This is a really telling sign that I need to go back on the comedy circuit again.”
“Comedy’s so subjective, and if someone comes to watch, doesn’t get it, doesn’t find it funny, then fine.”
“Some comics are in it for what they can get out of it. Others are in it for a love of comedy. I think those that are in it for a genuine love of comedy find each other within the circuit and become friends.”
“I like a naturalism to my dialogue and my comedy. I would rather have a few jokes sail by that might be more subtle than have every single joke hit hard. I would rather the comedy come out of character as opposed to feeling forced. Even if you’re giving some laughs up for it.”
“When you’re going for a big studio comedy, the joke tally better be pretty high, and you better have some big comedy set pieces. That was one of the issues when I was trying to get ‘Swingers’ made for the first time, which is that there weren’t any broad comedy set pieces.”
“I’m sort of known in the comedy community as ‘Smooth Sailing,’ just ’cause everything always goes great. I’ve always had success at every turn.”
“A boring speech can be just a boring speech. But a speech with a joke that falls flat is awful. I hate it. That’s why I think it’s easier to hate a comedy. If a drama doesn’t land, it’s boring; if a joke doesn’t land – you hate that.”
“It’s always been a dream of mine to write comedy and be creative.”
“The whole – it’s the economy’s bad. It’s bad for everybody. I have my own comedy club. I opened it three years ago in a horrible economy. I created jobs. And we just started breaking even after a year and a half, barely. For that entire time, I have had to pay the difference of what we owe in rent and taxes and everything out of my own pocket.”
“I didn’t take anything from anyone – first of all. Second of all, I opened a comedy club with money that I saved over 25 years. I created jobs.”
“I think comedy can be a way of sugar-coating a pill that needs to be taken, and whatever I complain about onstage, I hope I justify the negativity by using humour to make the point.”
“There’s a lot of similarities, I think, between a thriller and a comedy because it’s all about tension. It’s about building tension and setups and payoffs and misdirections and surprising people and sort of pushing the boundary.”
“A whole generation was raised to learn about comedy from ‘The Simpsons.’ To get to be in a booth with Homer and Marge and be in Springfield – it was unimaginable the emotions that I felt.”
“I’ve played a lot of bad guys over the years, a lot of hardcore guys. At the same time, I’ve done a lot of comedy.”
“Comedy is like horror – you have to shock something in the viewer’s system to make them feel it.”
“I am huge fan of Australian comedy. ‘Strictly Ballroom’ is one of my favorite movies. Definitely the British Commonwealth’s sensibility is where I draw a lot of my influences.”
“Certain shows, when it’s all comedy, it’s like when you eat something that’s too sweet and it just tastes gross. You need that salted caramel.”
“Bands on tour are very good cultivators of what’s the avant-garde of comedy.”
“I’m not a big ‘scripted comedy’ person necessarily. I’m open for wherever comedy can be found.”
“With comedy, I’ve always had a pretty good sense of what I like and how to execute it well, but drama has its own rules.”
“I feel like comedy is where I’m most at ease, but I also have an allergy to silly jokes.”
“I’ve done for the most part pretty much what I intended – I ended up doing comedy, writing and painting. I’ve had a ball. And as I get older, I just become an older kid.”
“My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.”
“I like to play different types roles, but I’d like to do a comedy next.”
“I grew up a geek. I added comedy to it midway through high school.”
“It’s a no-win situation with politics; it’s always going to be stressful. I’m more into the comedy of life.”
“Nobody wants to see sketch comedy that’s the same sketch they’ve seen time and time again, or that’s just a rehash of that thing.”
“Comedy takes a very specific technique, specific skills.”
“I went to drama school for four years at Carnegie Mellon, conservatory training before television comedy. I was doing Shakespeare and Chekov plays. It’s about delivering on the promise of a $100,000 education and taking the shackles off and trying the hand at my craft. I’m thrilled with what I’ve seen so far.”
“My idol growing up was Charlie Chaplin. I was obsessed with him. I mean, while other kids were watching Jim Carrey and the likes in the ’90s, I was watching Charlie Chaplin films, because I was a bit of a geek. I became obsessed with this idea of physical comedy.”
“If you can have heart as well as the comedy, it takes you a lot further. I think that that’s what we were trying to do with ‘Gigi.’”
“I try to be kind, and I try to reflect that in my comedy, but I’m also incredibly bad at being mean. I can’t pull it off effectively, so I always end up reverting back to politeness.”
“I like comedy that’s very specific and isn’t afraid to lose people through its specificity.”
“I love ‘Another Round.’ It’s Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton’s podcast that’s through BuzzFeed, and they’re real funny and really themselves. And I like it because it’s very funny, but it’s outside the realm of comedians talking about comedy.”
“My comedy isn’t clean; it’s just friendly. So I get asked to do a lot of clean shows. It’s like, ‘Oh, I have a clean vibe, but I say gross, weird stuff.’ It’s just, it’s very gentle the way I say it. It’s not upsetting or jarring to people, because I’m not very aggressive.”
“Comedy and music are so similar because it’s all about timing.”
“Comedy is so hard; it’s so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it.”
“That’s the easiest job you can have in TV comedy, being the guy who just delivers the funny.”
“’Fast Times At Ridgemont High’ is one of my favorite movies; it’s a film that’s a human comedy, it’s a drama, and the characters all, in a way, fit the teenage archetypes, but they don’t become stereotypes because each of the actors brought their own presence and their own personality to the screen.”
“I plan someday to do a one-man show based solely on the e-mails of Bellamy Young. And people will think I’ve written a brilliant comedy myself when, in fact, all the text will be directly from Bellamy.”
“There’s a reason Tony Stark makes fun of ‘Thor,’ and mentions ‘Shakespeare’ in the park in ‘The Avengers.’ It’s great to play high drama and comedy alongside a modern story.”
“I like horror; I like comedy; I like drama; I like action; I like female heroes.”
“I love a good romantic comedy.”
“More than any other setting – more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel – I’ll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy, tragedy and intrigue.”
“I enjoy both comedy and drama, and have had memorable experiences in both film and T.V.”
“I think some people’s comedy IQ’s aren’t as high as other people’s, so they don’t really know what’s going on. Or they think they know what’s going on, but they don’t really.”
“Stand-up comedy is the most relaxing thing I do. If I want to unwind and de-stress, I go out and do stand-up, often several shows in a night.”
“I’ve been doing stand-up just about every night since I started in 1989. It’s my home base. But I’m into doing comedy in all mediums, platforms and situations.”
“If you are doing stand-up comedy, you have to be confident in what you are doing. That doesn’t mean just because you are confident you are funny.”
“Up until ‘Bridesmaids’, the general consensus was that women preferred comedy a bit softer.”
“People like the comedy more when they care about the characters.”
“The ’80s was a great decade for comedy.”
“I like very straight comedy.”
“I’m not really crazy about broad comedy. I like very possible, real situations that you might have found yourself in.”
“Comedy is all about having a point of view, and it’s also about power.”
“Comedy is the most palliative way to make a point. People are more willing to listen if they can laugh.”
“I like being able to donate my comedy to charity. I’m not a billionaire, and I can’t write checks.”
“The more life experience you have, the more comedy you can write.”
“I think it’s natural if you’re doing a lot of comedy to do a lot of drama, because you have to figure out the real version of the joke.”
“A lot of my comedy is to do with being angry, then finding a way to channel that.”
“I watch a lot of U.S. comedy, shows such as ‘Eastbound & Down’ and ‘Veep.’ I love Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her character in that show.”
“The secret of comedy is don’t grow up. That’s why some comedians are a nightmare, because they never grow up.”
“People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We’re not like Ricky Gervais’s hyper-real cringe comedy. We’re at the other end of the scale, but there’s room for the sillier stuff, too.”
“I’m always trying to do anything between comedy and horror.”
“I can’t do jokes. I’ve always come from left field and tried to subvert conventional comedy. I started as a rebellion against that – albeit a very soft and surreal rebellion. It’s escapist.”
“Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps, and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance.”
“My dad wanted to be a musician, so when I started playing guitar, he was like, ‘Go for it.’ That is what I did for ages; I was in bands. And then I went to university and got into comedy somehow.”
“With something that’s not based just in comedy, you can be a bit weirder in a slightly realistic way.”
“Comedy is ridiculously hard. And if the rhythm is not right, if the music or the line is not right, it’s not funny.”
“We like drama. Even in our comedy, we like drama.”
“I hate being mean. I watch those roasts on Comedy Central and they make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”
“I think comedy’s something you can’t learn. It’s an instinct, which makes it rather elusive.”
“I have been lucky enough to work in all kinds of comedy. I prefer working with other people. I could never do stand-up.”
“I actually gravitate toward comedy a lot when it comes to what I’m watching, but maybe that’s because I’ve been on such dark work the last four or five years.”
“My secret to comedy is don’t offend anybody. Don’t offend anybody ever. That’s my secret.”
“Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.”
“I made ‘Going Greek’, which was a very sort of crappy fraternity comedy that I did back in 2000.”
“I’m very attracted to comedy I don’t see coming.”
“I’m drawn to the funny brand of comedy.”
“I love going back and forth from drama to comedy. I love switching it around and showing people that I can do both.”
“’Last Man Standing’ is overall a lot of comedy. And I love doing that.”
“I would have to say that I have to concentrate more when I’m doing comedy. There are so many details that make up any character, but developing a character for a dramatic role seems to come more naturally.”
“If my career path takes me elsewhere, that’s great. But comedy is my forte.”
“People expect comedy from me but I am not just a stand-up comedian anymore. I act on stage, host ‘Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa’ and also conduct interviews on my show. I have grown as a person and an artiste.”
“I would love to do some more comedy. I would love to do some silliness. I would love to do some characters that have greater vulnerability.”
“Comedy’s really subjective, you know.”
“Comedy’s really subjective, you know; that’s why it’s so hard.”
“I like doing comedy.”
“I was offered a lot of romantic and comedy films.”
“I have no problem in doing comedy, as I am happily consolidating my image of a comic actor.”
“I think comedy is a genre that has a lot of potential. It is a very content-driven film genre.”
“I consider a CD or a comedy collection as a record of what I’ve been doing, and I try to wrap it up and start new material.”
“I think comedy is funnier when it’s real.”
“What I like about Rebel’s style of comedy is she never plays the victim… she’s never been fazed by her shape; it’s just the way it is. She would mock her appearance whatever she looked like.”
“Getting recognized on the street is fine, but I never really wanted to be famous. I just wanted to have mastered the art of sketch comedy.”
“There was just a lot of comedy on the TV in the house, and my parents are both very funny.”
“It’s hard to write a comedy sketch.”
“Comedy has become, I think, a very important branch of public intellectualism. But it still ain’t Washington.”
“My mom watches really obscure stuff on IFC. She’s a real comedy fan. She knows everything that’s going on.”
“I thought ‘Garfunkel and Oates’ would be too confusing, but it ended up being confusing in the best of ways because the first time we played a comedy club, it was because they thought we were the real Garfunkel and Oates.”
“I’ve done comedy most of my career, which I love, but I wanted to expand.”
“You do develop a taste as an actress: Chekhov, Ayckbourn: it’s the combination of comedy and human drama. I would never want to do anything without comedy.”
“Stand-up comedy is not a man’s job. It’s an alpha job: To be the only person in a room with a microphone who’s allowed to talk.”
“I’ve always been attracted to comedy that was really close to the line and made people a little uncomfortable, because that’s where progress comes from.”
“I feel like my comedy voice is to take the news and everything that’s happening and put a funny spin on it or to pick out the things I find funny about it.”
“I started doing little amateur nights at the comedy club that was right next to the restaurant that I waitressed in when I was in university. I was probably 22 years old. I didn’t do it with any intention of making a career out of it; I had just always valued comedy.”
“I was lucky to develop in the U.K. because I find comedy – in addition to being caustic – it’s quite literary over here, and alternative comedy isn’t so alternative.”
“The beautiful thing about comedy in the U.K. is that it has a clever twist to it, and when you really break it down, the joke isn’t filthy at all: it’s clever.”
“I got into comedy at exactly the right moment.”
“Growing up, I loved comedy even before I knew that you could be a stand-up comedian.”
“I’m always blown away by stand-ups. I’m blown away by people like that who are craftspeople at comedy.”
“I try to give all my characters a sense of humor, so I guess I feel like I have done comedy, but maybe I’m better known for drama.”
“Drama comes more naturally to me. It’s the comedy you really have to delve into.”
“I’m also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It’s going to be a spoof of Biography.”
“To give up my job as a temp and actually make a living doing comedy, it was staggering.”
“I’m a female in comedy, so of course I want there to be more women on ‘SNL’, and women of color.”
“I really want to do comedy.”
“What I really want to do is comedy. I would love to do some guest star spots on some single-camera comedies.”
“I have plenty of dream roles because there is so much I want to do, but my dream year would be to be in a single-camera comedy and then, on my hiatus, film a little low-budget indie drama. That would be a dream 12-month period. A dream role depends on having good material and working with people that I can learn from.”
“I’m doing comedy development at National Lampoon.”
“I love doing horror with comedy twists and I think it’s a really fun genre.”
“I didn’t set out to write some female-empowering movie; I just wanted to write a funny college comedy.”
“Comedy is in my bones.”
“My first love is doing my own comedy stuff.”
“I just want to keep doing my comedy work because that’s what I do. I made a name for myself playing other characters.”
“If you look at any successful skit comedy show, ever, there is that format of introducing you to the player in the beginning, and then going on to see those sketches.”
“You can not have comedy unless people are behaving badly. You can’t have it.”
“We didn’t know anything about comedy duos – Abbot and Costello, Martin and Lewis – we didn’t know anything about that. Kim Fields showed us a tape of Martin and Lewis and their old shows and they come through the curtain so we started doing research on them.”
“I would love to get into feature films; I’m willing to do an action flick, I’m willing to do a romantic comedy.”
“Comedy has always been more challenging for me than drama.”
“I’m not temperamentally into high comedy. I’m not a Noel Coward kind of girl.”
“You have to know you are in a comedy. You have to know that you are actually allowing the audience to participate on some level. When you go dark and mean it, then you don’t let them in.”
“Comedy was always an escape for me; I just happened to be a doctor.”
“I think everyone’s different but in comedy, I try to do my scene to make the director and the other actors laugh. If I can make them laugh and we have the same sensibility, then I’m on the right page.”
“I think critics tend to think that comedy is freakin’ math. Like, this is the Pythagorean Theorem. They’re not sophisticated enough to know that comedy is fluid, that it evolves, and these organic evolutions are what you have to embrace.”
“About half the scripts sent to me feature characters I just can’t identify with, particularly one-dimensional businessmen or, if it’s a comedy, some absurd 10-year-old Japanese stereotype, some role related to IT or business… There’s no point in getting mad about it; it’s just the way things are.”
“I support the homies, like Mike Jay and Hannibal Buress. And I listen to Comedy Central Radio in the car.”
“I’ve always loved pure, silly slapstick comedy. It always makes me laugh.”
“A really good comedy, I think, is played as if it was real, and it’s the circumstances that make it amusing. And I think that the – the inverse or the reverse is true for drama.”
“People need to be peppered or even outraged occasionally. Our national comedy and drama is packed with earthy familiarity and honest vulgarity. Clean vulgarity can be very shocking and that, in my view, gives greater involvement.”
“In WWE, a gay person is usually portrayed like some sort of comedy act to be mocked and laughed at. The world’s not like that anymore.”
“Diplomats willing to sit for an interview usually prefer the terra firma of CNN over the whoopee cushion of Comedy Central.”
“People wouldn’t hire me for comedies. They would say, ‘Oh, he doesn’t do comedy,’ and now it’s really all I do.”
“I consider myself a serious musician. Doing a comedy show does not take away from that in any way.”
“Stand-up comedy is mine: it’s my entity; it’s my brand; I own it. I do it when I want to do it.”
“In comedy, my strengths are improvisation.”
“Comedy’s about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you’re saying.”
“I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.”
“Comedy Central was a great network, but ‘Chappelle’s Show’ took it to a completely different level. Other shows got bigger because so many viewers were watching the ‘Chappelle’ reruns. For BET, the ‘Real Husbands of Hollywood’ has that same potential.”
“For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.”
“I don’t think comedy will ever die.”
“Every few months I’ll pop into a comedy club or go to Vegas.”
“When you have satire, it has to be real. No matter how outrageous the comedy becomes, you have to believe in the characters.”
“To me, families are fascinating. I choose to explore it through comedy and through comic situations.”
“Yes, they allowed us to play around a lot because, like we said, the director’s such a good comedy director.”
“It was football I enjoyed most. When I moved to L.A. to become a stand-up comedian, I thought it might be a good comedy hook to also be the punter for USFL club The L.A. Express, so I started practicing for the tryouts. Luckily, my stand-up took off, and I didn’t need to do it.”
“I love comedy and did a lot of comedy in college. I was in an improv comedy group with my friends.”
“I loved comedy, but I never saw myself as a sitcom guy. I envisioned myself doing an hour drama or doing movies.”
“The one thing that I’m really obsessed with is multi-camera comedy. It is a form that is unique to network television.”
“After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.”
“This hiatus coming up I’m looking at a comedy because I need the balance.”
“I feel that the work that I have done in the comedy arena, is priceless in terms of what I learned, timing, everything that these incredibly talented performers were generous enough in teaching me.”
“I like comedy, I love it very much, I love laughing.”
“I’d love to get into comedy and test out new genres of film.”
“I do comedy in my room by myself, so it’s so different to see how that all works and get the behind the scenes on how they do the gory stuff.”
“’Fresh Meat’ is the first comedy thing I’ve ever done.”
“I hadn’t done comedy before ‘Fresh Meat’ – I hadn’t really been seen that way, and then ‘Fresh Meat’ came out, and suddenly a lot more comedy scripts were coming my way, which was really great.”
“I like comedy a lot. I love comedy. It’s so much fun, but it’s hard, too.”
“I enjoy doing both comedy and drama, as long as I’m not doing something continuously.”
“Doing comedy takes much lesser toll on you as a person. The overall exertion is not as much as a serious film like ‘Pink.’”
“About 25 years ago, I was in an apartment, and next door, they put on the radio, so I struck the wall with my fist, but they did not put the radio down. I took a tool and banged until I made a hole through the wall. It was like a comedy movie.”
“My favorite genre is comedy.”
“My style can’t be held within a pixel medium. Like, it needs to be performed in a living, breathing space. People need to have all their senses ready to take on my comedy, and unfortunately, TV alienates at least their sense of touch, taste, smell.”
“Most of the people I know in comedy are not weird or messed up.”
“I would never bring a kid to a comedy show myself, but I have noticed that I can’t stop other people from bringing their kids.”
“People always call me a comedian. And I don’t really see myself like that. I guess I just consider myself an actor who does comedy. But who wants to do other things as well.”
“Mean comedy is not really something that I personally gravitate towards or something that I do.”
“I don’t know about the romantic comedy route, although never say never.”
“I didn’t realize I wanted to write about D.C. until after 2000. Even though I was a comedy writer, I stayed away from that subject on purpose. It took attaining some distance and perspective.”
“I love the satire and skewering of comedy writing.”
“In actuality, ‘Sammy’s House’ can and should be read as an entirely fictional comedy set in a fascinating political world.”
“I’d love to do some comedy. Particularly French comedy, which I know sounds like a contradiction in terms.”
“Comedy is not an easy genre.”
“Doing comedy was liberating in a way.”
“’Veerey Ki Wedding’ is a comedy of errors in more ways than one. It’s one of those basic, perky comedies. We’re not trying to give out a message or anything.”
“I think comedy is something I enjoy, so it comes effortlessly.”
“I’ve been bouncing around from comedy to drama and TV and film.”
“I would say I try to make my comedy really personal. I try to tell stories that happened to me, experiences from my life.”
“When I was studying comedy in Chicago, it wasn’t long after 9/11. There were a lot Middle Eastern comedians who were doing bits about hailing cabs and being terrorists. So the first two years, I didn’t do any of that because I wanted to separate myself from those guys. But race is a big part of who I am, and it should be a big part of my comedy.”
“The entire New York comedy scene has moved to L.A. – it’s bled the New York comedy scene dry.”
“’Bunk’ is a comedy game show where, each week, three of my favorite comedians compete in a series of bizarre and meaningless challenges all for my entertainment. Ethan T. Berlin and Eric Bryant created ‘Bunk.’”
“I don’t find that I subscribe or believe in many rules about what comedy is and what makes it funny.”
“I just always wrote songs as a side hobby. So it was sort of a natural thing to write comedy songs. But when I started writing songs, I wrote very serious songs. Or things that a 13-14 year-old would think are very serious issues.”
“Nobody mountain bikes anymore – or ever did – in comedy, so I have to go by myself.”
“In 2007, I had on-paper success. I got to go to that Aspen comedy festival, which was pretty exclusive, I guess. Then I did Carson Daly. That was enough validation.”
“When I started acting, my whole focus and intention was to work as a stage actor in a company where you’re asked to different roles – do a comedy, do a tragedy, etc. I haven’t had any reservations about jumping from one type of genre to another.”
“’What About Bob’ is my all-time favorite, and I think I’ve always been prone to comedy.”
“I’m interested not just in projects that I’ll be starring in, but producing film and TV that’s really quality and great for adults; and when I say ‘great for adults,’ it doesn’t mean without humor, because I’m also interested in doing comedy.”
“I think that for the most part, when I started doing comedy, it had become very commercialized.”
“It’s that I wasn’t suited to do the kind of comedy that these people were coming to hear – mainstream comedy.”
“Comedy is not funny. Comedy is hard work and timing and lots and lots of rehearsals.”
“I don’t have that kind of Southern experience of the fire-and-brimstone preacher type of thing. Certainly not in my comedy.”
“I didn’t get into comedy to talk about violent death all the time.”
“I always approach every role through a lens of comedy.”
“I feel like comedy is important, and I think political satire can be really important.”
“I still want to do a romantic comedy or a western or a gritty independent film… there’s so much that I still want to do.”
“I love comedy. Comedy is one of my favourite things to do.”
“When I do theatre in New York, I typically only get cast in comedy.”
“In theater, one of the biggest problems when you’re rehearsing comedy over and over again is that you stop laughing at each other.”
“I’d love to do comedy.”
“I love TV. I think I’d do a half-hour single-camera comedy.”
“The connective tissue between storytelling, advice, and comedy is passion.”
“Comedy is my first love; that’s my main goal in life – to keep doing comedy.”
“Doing ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!,’ you have to play at the top of your abilities, so it is so fun to get that opportunity. I’ve grown a lot as a performer just working with those guys.”
“When you have a writing partner and you’re writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.”
“I love comedy, and I think that’s sort of what comes naturally to me.”
“The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.”
“I’m a pretty funny guy, and I would love to do a comedy with a bunch of funny guys – movie-star guys, where they could help me through it.”
“How about a good comedy? ‘Raising Arizona.’ Remains the funniest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I think romantic comedy, when done right, is my favorite genre. It’s just a genre that’s very human.”
“I never sort of thought of myself as a comedy writer, by nature.”
“Marissa is one of the fan favorites of ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’ for everyone throughout the years.”
“Generally speaking, cancer – not that funny of a thing. When you hear about it, you don’t go, ‘Oh, hilarious!’… But within that – comedy, tragedy, hand-in-hand.”
“In something like ‘Frank,’ which is a comedy, albeit a strange and emotional one, you can absolutely put in deleted scenes, and we did because they were just funny and great, but they weren’t necessary in the overall structure.”
“I played an artist in a comedy called ‘Rooster.’ It was a zany film by Glen Larson, a friend who produced several successful television series including ‘Magnum PI.’”
“The first time I ever got up on a stage, I did a comedy poem. I don’t know how I got there in the first place because I was very, very shy.”
“When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.”
“When I was young, my dad always let me listen to comedy albums.”
“I always knew about comedy; I always loved comedy.”
“I like more grounded comedy. I enjoy broad comedies also, but I like Shirley MacLaine.”
“I don’t understand why people think it’s harder to do drama than it is to do comedy.”
“I’m not really interested in doing a traditional romantic comedy where everything ties up neatly.”
“I like that kind of ‘straight-faced’ comedy. I like to be straight-faced and outrageous.”
“I don’t have any interest in being in Warner Brothers’ newest comedy if it’s going to suck but still be a box office hit and make me famous. I want to do things that are cool and that I can be proud of.”
“What I’ve found in my career is that 70 to 75 percent of comics are nice and have some sense of social skills, but there are those who end up in comedy because they don’t know how to socialize. I don’t want to deal with that group.”
“One of the interesting things about comedy is it’s tension release, and nothing creates tension faster than anger.”
“Every role that I have taken on has demanded some kind of emotional range. I really, really would love to do a comedy, but that opportunity really hasn’t opened up.”
“If I apply myself to rap, I’m gonna be the best rapper alive. If I apply myself to comedy, I’m going to be the funniest guy alive.”
“A part of me wants to rely less and less on comedic visuals and make more substantial standalone music. And get a sitcom on TV where I can let my comedy do the talking there.”
“I was doing Facebook comedy videos; then I moved over to Instagram, and then I hopped on Twitter. That is where I really was a master. That was the first place where I could go viral.”
“My comedy grows as I grow as a person.”
“I’m a student of Comedy Central. It launched careers: Wanda Sykes and even Kevin Hart. The first time I was introduced to him, he was on Comedy Central. It puts you on the map… Hollywood knows now.”
“I was the first South Asian female to do comedy videos on YouTube. But at the same time, all races face their barriers, and I’ve learned through YouTube, if it’s not race, it will be sexism, if it’s not sexism, it will be homophobia. It will always be something, and all voices should be heard.”
“I like to describe my stuff as observational comedy.”
“I’d love to dive into a comedy.”
“As someone who’s been doing a lot of classical theater recently, I loved the idea of getting to run around in Steven Alan, and not be in a corset and a wig, and not have a dialect, and get to be in a 90-minute play with no intermission, and get to do real comedy.”
“I would like to do maybe a smaller romantic comedy.”
“My comedy is different than a lot of people’s.”
“I think I’m interested in these kinds of character dramas, psychological dramas, domestic dramas, whatever you want to call them – comedy dramas.”
“Insult comedy has been around forever. I can make fun of people, and they won’t get mad at me.”
“I don’t sell myself. I’ve never explained my comedy to people who don’t get it. Never complain. Never explain.”
“It used to be that in media, Johnny Carson used to be the most important person when he would invite you over to sit on the couch after your comedy skit. Now it’s whatever Howard Stern says goes.”
“I feel that if I retire today, I’ve done enough. I’ve achieved everything in comedy… I feel I don’t need anything else. It’s already built.”
“I’ve played every comedy club and every theatre across the country for the last 25 years and seen a lot of audience members from different ethnic persuasions.”
“I lasted seven years as a journalist, and I’ve been doing comedy for twenty years.”
“I kind of knew inside that I wanted to try comedy, but it was a mystery. How do you start? So when I hit 30 and I had done everything I wanted to do in journalism, so I went to a comedy class. I figured I’d learn how to do five minutes and see how it feels.”
“None of my comedy depended on looks. I never did tons of fat jokes.”
“I want to do action, romantic comedy, and I love drama.”
“Comedy is not something that a person can fake or learn how to do.”
“I really like doing television shows, and I anticipated doing a comedy, because that’s the place I feel the most comfortable – those are the risks I want to take.”
“Comedy is not commercial; it is risky, because what is funny in one place isn’t always funny somewhere else.”
“I’m hearing from fans about how they got out of an abusive relationship. That’s why I tell people you’ve got to watch ‘The Real.’ We are about comedy and inspiration, but personal moments come up, and people are moved by it.”
“I did all this standup comedy in college, and from that point on, I tried to develop myself and get my name back out there.”
“I’ve seen Don Rickles up at the Montreal Comedy Festival. Don Rickles was doing jokes in a wheelchair, and he was headlining a show. Do you think they would let a woman do that?”
“I’ll see something, and I’ll go, ‘Oh, wow, that’s interesting,’ because really, comedy comes from the truth.”
“Being a female comic and getting a Comedy Central special is an honor because not a lot of women get that.”
“I tend to be everybody’s best friend, and it kind of goes over into my comedy.”
“There are things in low comedy that make people uncomfortable, and there are things in high comedy that make people bored.”
“I think that Canadians have an incredible reverence for authority and regard for authority, and I think one of the healthy ways that it’s challenged is through questioning it, through the polite hostility of comedy.”
“Tearing up a picture of the Pope comes under the heading of a Comedy Killer. It kind of breaks the spirit of the evening.”
“I’m always very fearful when academics get ahold of comedy. Comedy is such a clear thing – people laugh, or they don’t laugh. It’s involuntary. I’m not saying it can’t be scrutinized, it’s just that they take the enjoyment out of it.”
“I love doing comedy. I did comedy for seven years on ‘The King of Queens.’”
“I was 10th of 11 kids in an alcoholic, abusive, poor family. We all want things that we can’t have. And I found comedy.”
“I think I have always tried to connect my comedy to my art.”
“Breaking records is not something you expect to be doing. That’s like a sports thing, it’s not usually a comedy and writing thing.”
“The thing is, comedy’s gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.”
“To me the goal of comedy is to just laugh, which is a really high hearted thing, visceral connection and reaction.”
“I don’t like comedy. I like funny things. I don’t like comedy. Like, comedy movies are just, ‘Oh Jesus.’”
“Comedy isn’t polite and it isn’t correct and it isn’t accurate, even. It’s just a mess. So that’s the way that I approach it.”
“It’s a comedy thriller, brilliantly written and it’s full of twists and turns at every page. When I was reading it I was desperate to get to the end to find out what happens, it really hooks you.”
“I really don’t want to do anything that resembles stand-up comedy. But I will agree to say that I am doing it, and I will hope that people expect it to be that, so I can thwart those expectations.”
“How to do half-hour comedy innovatively is something I do pride myself on. We invented it with ‘I Love Lucy.’”
“Comedy kind of terrifies me. I feel pretty intimidated.”
“Sometimes if you do a multi-camera comedy, often there’s rules, like, ‘We’ve got to have three main laughs per page.’”
“When I do watch things, they tend to be a lot of comedies. I actually like some of the British comedy series. But, on the whole, I’m not a huge viewer of anything.”
“We actually did quite a lot of comedy on ‘Xena’. The whole show was very tongue-in-cheek.”
“Trying to look cool and lovely in comedy is a recipe for disaster. You have to let go.”
“Friends applaud, the comedy is over.”
“In the future, I would like to do more films with contemporary themes. Perhaps comedy, which is something I have done in theater but not in cinema.”
“Comedy is really exciting to me.”
“Half-hour comedy shows are like a play, one night a week.”
“’The Dice Man’ is an anti-establishment cult novel, and you don’t normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.”
“Especially with a comedy, you’ve got the clear cut goal of trying to make a scene funny. It’s not like drama where you’re trying to achieve some kind of emotion or trying to further the story along. You’re trying to figure out what’s the funniest way to do something.”
“When you do a comedy, the goals are much clearer to me.”
“My goal on my bucket list is to write a romantic comedy movie.”
“Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make ‘Humpday’ a comedy.”
“Old radio comedy makes me laugh, as well as ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’ and comedians like Paul Merton.”
“All the parts I get offered are character and comedy parts, and I probably wouldn’t get them if I had a different face. So I’m glad I have a comedy face.”
“Comedy is created when someone is trying very earnestly to do what he feels is the right thing to do at that moment.”
“With comedy, it’s really hard to tell if something’s working on the page – you really need the actors to bring it alive. The scariest part is if people will laugh or not.”
“People used to say I’m weak in comedy. But, with ‘Mahesh Khaelja’ and ‘Dookudu,’ I have proved that I am good at comedy.”
“I have a lot of respect for actors who do comedy. They do it naturally.”
“I’d love, love, love to do a comedy. I can’t imagine being on set and being happy and cheerful. That seems so foreign.”
“There’s a lot of comedy in ‘The Guest,’ so it was a bit more fun in a sense – it wasn’t so heavy like ‘It Follows.’”
“Richard Lester is a wonderful director, a great comedy director, of course.”
“I never was shy, but as far as telling jokes, I’m the worst. I like physical comedy; it’s where I feel comfortable.”
“I’d love to do all types of film, not just comedy, although I love comedy.”
“I always love the quirky stuff, which is why I love ‘Childrens Hospital.’ That really pushes the envelope of comedy.”
“I was really shy growing up. I had braces, headgear, and no boobs – still don’t. So, the boys weren’t interested in me. The only way I could get attention was by being a goof and a dork, which meant a lot of physical comedy.”
“Doing comedy is one of the best gifts in life.”
“Comedy is obviously a matter of personal taste and the world always needs a clown and some people have no taste at all and any clown will do.”
“The development of the comedy club industry destroyed the uniqueness and intimacy of the profession but it also created jobs for comics and bred some great performers.”
“I love physical comedy. I adore comedy of any kind.”
“There are a lot of comics at the top end making staggering amounts of money and selling out stadiums. I think stand-up is a more intimate thing than that. Maybe because of the kind of comedy I do. It’s like a discussion, but I’m the one with the microphone.”
“My purist comedy friends accuse me of being a Jack of all trades and master of none.”
“Comedy was all I ever wanted.”
“I’m writing a record of comedy songs. I’m doing all these collaborations with artists. I bring them lyrics and they write the music to it.”
“Comedy was the key to everything. I grew up fast and controlled my future by bringing it on faster than it naturally unfolded. I cheated myself out of a childhood but then got a running headstart into adulthood that no one else could keep up with.”
“I do love the road, because for me, the road is very comfortable, and it’s very much what I’ve always wanted to do. It’s one of the most appealing things about comedy for me, so I do really have an affection for it.”
“I like all kinds of comedy. I like comedy that doesn’t talk about real beliefs or serious thoughts, but then I also like the stuff that does. I think it just depends. It’s a completely personal choice.”
“I learned that comedy is born out of strong characters. I won’t begin writing a character until I have a clear take on them.”
“I’m not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone’s laughing, and then you shake it out, and you realize, ‘There’s no joke there!’”
“Doug Motel makes ‘conscious comedy’. He makes me laugh, and he makes me think.”
“A comedy that is ironic, sometimes bitter, in some cases even dramatic, tragic: This is what Italian comedy is.”
“Comedy is what I really want to do and propel.”
“A lot of people say that comedy doesn’t travel well. I found it very accessible.”
“While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.”
“The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.”
“I moved from acting to stand-up because castings are just about what you look like. It doesn’t matter if you can act or not. In comedy, no one cares what you look like.”
“The only thing darker than ‘Overboard’ is ‘Micki & Maude,’ the bigamy comedy from 1984.”
“I always wanted to do Restoration comedy. It seems like so much fun.”
“Humour and high seriousness… Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.”
“If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this.”
“Many people mistakenly think of farce as broad low comedy. In fact, it’s polished high comedy.”
“In low comedy, a character gets hit in the head, and you don’t really believe it. In farce, he’s hit in the head, but he must be hit in the head. The character requires it.”
“As an actor, you can do everything. I grew up in the theater, and you could do a musical, a comedy, a tragedy.”
“But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.”
“People ask whether I put the politics first, journalism first or the comedy first; it doesn’t really matter. I’m just playing with the cards that I have been dealt because I really love doing what I do.”
“I approach a comedy the same way I do a drama. I try to make it as real as possible.”
“I love writing comedy.”
“Drama is played at the pace of chess… or billiards… or poker. Engrossing? Sure. But comedy is played at the jubilant, high-octane speed of sports like basketball or hockey.”
“Usually, like, on ‘Mean Girls,’ the task that Tina Fey and I set for ourselves was we wanted to maintain a comic intensity throughout the movie, where people just don’t really get a break from laughing. And if they do, it’s for a brief emotional scene, and then we’re going to once again try to knock them on their heels again with comedy.”
“After 20 years of doing comedy, I find dramatic work more challenging.”
“Humor helps ease the tension of race and the differences in society. If there wasn’t comedy I don’t know if Obama could have ever become president.”
“I got written out of ‘G.I. Joe’ and was like, ‘Welp, I’m going to go back to what I do: writing and producing comedy.’”
“There’s an art to comedy.”
“Comedy is very hard, but you have to learn the art and science of it.”
“Comedy is one of my favorites, but I also want to get into drama and sci-fi.”
“Comedy comes easily to me, and so for me, comedy is suspect.”
“There is nothing far-fetched about disappointment as a subject for comedy. It’s something we are all too familiar with.”
“Comedy can’t be about continuous success.”
“Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.”
“Trouble is, some accents lend themselves to comedy.”
“Although there’s an inherent light-heartedness to ‘Sherlock,’ I slightly err towards not doing the comedy.”
“I like dramatic stuff, and I have a goofball side, too. I like to do comedy and off-beat things as much as something really, really serious.”
“I don’t like forcing comedy and people just trying to do things just to find a funny beat all the time.”
“As long as there’s Big Momma, we’re going to bring you comedy.”
“I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We’re all cruel, aren’t we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that’s what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.”
“I was a huge fan of Steve Martin, as everyone I knew in comedy was.”
“Anytime there’s originality and comedy combined, it’s very potent for people who love comedy.”
“Comedy is a weird thing.”
“Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.”
“In college, my teachers were usually after me for going after comedy too much, leaning too much in that direction.”
“I went to art school for fine art and then I started doing performance art, and then I started making fun of performance art, and it turned into comedy.”
“The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They’re superficial and I like articulate comedy.”
“I didn’t have any plan to go into comedy.”
“I find comedy fun, and I really enjoy doing music.”
“Actors are a great subject for a comedy. They’re inherently funny because, like sportsmen, they take themselves so seriously.”
“I’m not making comedy albums. That’s too much effort for one joke.”
“I try not to see myself as anything, as that would be embarrassing. But if I had to label myself, I’d probably say I was an artist due to the fact that I enjoy working within the arts on different platforms, of which comedy is just one.”
“In most specials, the performer’s up – not only not surrounded, but up on a stage – and there’s a distance between them and the audience, and I think my comedy doesn’t work as well in that way.”
“When we started doing sketch comedy – actually in ’91 in Chicago – making your own videos, which we did, took forever. It would take like, a year to make one video. It was just so difficult to edit and just do everything you had to do.”
“When I came to Chicago, I didn’t even know what improvisation meant, as far as pertaining to comedy. I knew about Second City, but I didn’t know what the word ‘improvisation’ meant.”
“Many improv groups give off the same positive annoying vibe that I associate with Christian Young Life groups with shows that more resemble children playing than a comedy performance.”
“I like to do comedy, but I’ll be perfectly honest, I prefer to do drama and more character-driven-based stuff, generally.”
“I’ve always wanted to do action stuff. I like it. You really want something that’s special; that’s got something special about it and not cheesy, I guess. I’ll tell you something, it’s fun, it’s different. Comedy is difficult. Doing comedy is very difficult. Action stuff is fun.”
“Science fiction and comedy are generally a pretty bumpy mix.”
“Comedy is just to me, maybe it’s a natural knack, if I can see where the joke is in the writing and I can see where the setup is and I can tell this is the way to make it.”
“’Friends’ was an education in intelligent comedic banter; in intelligent vernacular. It was an education in scene study. It was an education in group dynamic. I came out of there with a master’s degree in comedy.”
“But I’m kind of spoilt when it comes to comedy. I was on ‘Friends’, which was one of the funniest things on television.”
“I mean comedy is something that’s very personal and people have strong opinions about.”
“When I left school I was full of angst, like any teenager, and I channeled it all into comedy.”
“We were the only ones interested in comedy. Everybody else wanted to be Martin Scorsese.”
“Although I do use some of my psychology training in comedy, but it’s more like pop psychology, not a course of treatment or anything. To me, it’s more like social intelligence.”
“It’s such a smart decision for comedy to not try to be relevant or contemporary.”
“I think people who can do comedy well don’t get enough credit. It can be harder than drama.”
“I’ve always loved improvised movies like Christopher Guest and the ‘Spinal Tap’ era of comedy.”
“There’s a moment in every romantic comedy when a person sees something in someone else that nobody else sees.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t make a movie with the blonde from ‘ER’ who is starring in every single bad romantic comedy.”
“With all comedy, you try to ground it in credibility and reality.”
“The male is always the pawn in a romantic comedy. Come together, break up, go chase her, get her, roll credits. That’s what happens in all of them.”
“I would love to do a comedy spoof, like a Spinal Tap kind of thing.”
“’The Whole Nine Yards’ I liked right away. It was kind of a dark comedy at first. And just the idea of being in a movie with Bruce Willis was pretty exciting.”
“If you want to reach any kind of poignancy or meaning a lot of times, coming from comedy is the best way to get there.”
“Even in comedy, I’m always the straight guy, which is okay because that’s a skill. But it would be nice to get out of that box.”
“Comedy is difficult, especially slapstick. The trick is to have fun while you are performing it.”
“I hate to give myself credit for anything, but I will say I really enjoy, as an actor, and especially with comedy stuff, playing with different rhythms and with different ways around a joke. There’s always an obvious route, and there’s one that maybe is a little bit different.”
“We’re taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we’re all ultimately ridiculous.”
“I’ve never done an actual Western, and I would love to do that. I’ve done drama and dark comedy stuff. I’ve never really done a romantic comedy either. I would do that.”
“I take my fun very seriously, whether it’s playing the drums or acting in comedy bits. The need to be disciplined about it, and not take it lightly, and not be too casual, is something I take deeply to heart.”
“I like comedy as a group sport.”
“Without a doubt in sketch comedy there are fewer women than men.”
“I don’t know if comedy is a male sport. I always wondered that.”
“I was raised on the purest comedy there is: ‘I Love Lucy.’ I was raised watching ‘Three’s Company’ and sitcoms of the ’70s and ’80s.”
“Comedy is free therapy. And if it’s done well, the audience and the comic take turns being the doctor as well as the patient.”
“See, I’m totally fearless. I got my chops in the most, like, dangerous comedy atmosphere. If you can make it in New York, you can really do stand-up anywhere.”
“As a comedian, Trump is comedy gold, and he almost makes my job too easy… the stuff that comes out of his mouth is a precious commodity.”
“The first time I performed at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, I was in the back of the room doing vocal exercises. ‘Me-me-me, my-my-my, mo-mo-mo.’ And I’m looking around, and no one else is doing it. I’m like, ‘They must have done it before they came to the club.’ I came to realize that I was an idiot.”
“One of the jobs of comedy is to expose hypocrisy. When you look at countries like Iran or North Korea that don’t have freedom of speech, we who do should push it as far as we need to.”
“My mother was very wary at first. And now she’s come around 180 degrees. She’s, like, one of my biggest fans now. Like, she’ll come over to my house, and she’ll be like, ‘OK, listen. I need two T-shirts from the comedy show, and give me three DVDs. The neighbors are asking for them.’”
“Trump is good for comedy but bad for the world.”
“Comedy comes from tragedy, and being Iranian in America from 1979 on had been quite tragic. In stand-up comedy, I was able to take the reality and exaggerate it.”
“Comedy can take you a lot further in getting your point across. People are entertained, and then, by being entertained, they get your point.”
“There’s a fine line between comedy and the darkest place ever.”
“I’m becoming more and more confident and am falling more and more in love with the whole world of comedy, and I think that’s something that I really want to explore a lot more.”
“Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.”
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
“I’ll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there’s some great comedy minds and performances.”
“Comedy can become quite addictive actually.”
“It was an honour to be asked to do ‘The Gift.’ The producers took a risk asking me because, coming from a comedy background, I am not known for this kind of highly-charged, emotional show.”
“I’ve tried to create a comedy that doesn’t look like any other comedy. Maybe traditionally in TV there has been a kind of formula that says, ‘Oh, comedy has to look this way; it has to look super bright.’ But the way we shoot ‘Insecure’ is motivated by the mental state of each of our characters.”
“I never really saw myself as a comedy director, and I still don’t. I see myself as a director.”
“Well, being a Canadian, I love SCTV, and I think it’s the basis for all good North American comedy, so I compare everything to that.”
“I think comedy is so specific, so hard. I’d audition for comedies and think, ‘I can’t pull this off.’”
“Comedy to me is all about the bumps and bruises and weird tics.”
“There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn’t comedy be treated as seriously as drama?”
“Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.”
“A lot of times, comedy writers will go for the gay joke, and I’ve been vocal about saying, ‘Go for the smart joke.’”
“Anyone can write. But comedy, you’ve got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.”
“Comedy is underrepresented in every actor’s life, because it’s so bloody difficult to write.”
“Growing up, I loved magic, I loved acting, I loved comedy. I really didn’t know what direction I was going. I was trying a whole bunch of stuff.”
“I can’t speak for every American comic, but for me, a great show is its own reward. Comedy is too subjective for awards.”
“Comedy’s my outlet for my ridiculous emotions.”
“I don’t know how you can do comedy once every two weeks. Ever since I started, if I’m off for three days, I got to learn how to do comedy again.”
“Your number one job as a comedian is to be aware. You’re supposed to understand the temperature in the room more than anyone on the planet – that’s the whole craft of comedy.”
“I’m lucky enough to have two different platforms to perform on – I do stand-up comedy, and I have ‘SNL.’ That’s where I make my most controversial statements because I can explain myself and I’m in control of the microphone, as opposed to Twitter, where it’s in the hands of the reader.”
“Live comedy is fantastic. It’s when live comedy is transcribed and reported and critiqued outside of the venue without context that things become complicated.”
“In comedy, you work with people so often that they just become familiar faces – it’s like a fraternity.”
“Comedy is subjective.”
“I feel like comedy is only respected on the highest level, and on every other level, it’s like a joke, like, ‘Ugh – comedian,’ you know?”
“I usually work from the inside out but sometimes in comedy it’s fun to work from the outside in.”
“In all my content I don’t really swear or use profanity, because I believe comedy can just be pure.”
“I’m very observational in my comedy and what I create with the characters that I’m blessed to play. I don’t believe comedy needs to be offensive, and I don’t believe it needs to be a mockery of anything.”
“I was like the funny guy in sixth form. When we used to do showcases, I’d host them, and I would do, like, little comedy segments.”
“I love good comedy. I don’t like bad comedy.”
“You have to have energy at hour 13, at hour 14, at hour 15 – comedy cannot be tired, cannot be lazy. You have to be ready to go; you have to have energy.”
“As an actor, I’m not sure what I had to offer the world of tragedy and comedy when I was 21. I hadn’t lived a whole lot. By my middle 30s, you know, I had been knocked around a little bit.”
“Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.”
“I think I learned everything about comedy and timing and drama from watching ‘The Muppet Show,’ which was one of the best shows ever produced.”
“There’s this misconception that comedy and music go together. They don’t. Comedians can’t compete with rock stars; they’re just not on the same level. Rock stars will always be cooler. They will always get more girls.”
“When I do an action thing, it speaks louder than the things that I’ve done that are dramatic and comedy. Actually, if you look at my resume, I have just as much comedic things as dramas, and I have far less action things than all of the other things, but I’m kind of defined as an action person.”
“People, when they talk or write about comedy, they don’t really get it.”
“In my experience, it’s not just that serious books get a hearing on comedy shows. But serious books get a serious hearing, as well as a funny one, on comedy shows.”
“I pray to the shrine of ‘Mr. Show.’ It saved sketch comedy.”
“Comedy is a great slayer of rogues in power.”
“I think that there’s a fine line between comedy and drama.”
“To spoon-feed people their comedy is not the proper evolution of the art.”
“Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.”
“The true essence of comedy is a baby seal hunt.”
“I’m just an actor. If it’s drama, I add as much humour as the part will stand. And if it’s a comedy, add as much drama as you can, so it balances out; you don’t wanna be too serious.”
“I’ll read, like, ten scripts, and then sometimes if I’m lucky, there will be two or three scripts that I like, and sometimes they’ll all be dramas, or they’ll all be comedies, or there will be two dramas and a comedy, and then I’ll go for whatever. If I have to audition, I’ll audition. If it’s an offer, great.”
“As a kid, I saw a lot of scary movies, but they were mixed with comedy, like ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.’”
“I believe in the importance of sincerity and emotion and honesty in TV, even when it’s goofy comedy.”
“All of comedy at some level is trial-and-error, whether it’s a stand-up trying out jokes or a comedy show trying stories.”
“For storytelling purposes, there has to be conflict, but that doesn’t mean the people have to be mean. I’ve never liked mean-spirited comedy.”
“I like to play characters that get to do it all – to have a bit of comedy here and a bit of pathos here and a bit of suspense here, that’s what’s fun.”
“In comedy, I often see so many weird race jokes, and it’s like, there is no racial diversity in your show to even make those race jokes. The problem is that there is no one in the back to say, ‘Hey, that race joke is not really appropriate.’”
“I get to do physical comedy! When do women get to do physical comedy? Very rarely.”
“Because I do mostly comedy, I’m usually working with friends, and it’s usually a ball.”
“In ‘Seesaw,’ I played Gittel Mosca, and because it was a musical, I loved it more because I was able to do anything. I was able to use all parts of me that I don’t get to use… the comedy and the singing and the dancing.”
“I love the dark comedy in ‘Breaking Bad.’”
“It’s really challenging to play comedy.”
“I do find comedy difficult. I don’t know why. Maybe I think about it too much. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure to be funny.”
“I was one of the people that always got chosen last, and I think I bulked up my comedy bone to make up for my lack of friends.”
“Some comedy has turned into, ‘Donald Trump’s bad, isn’t he?’ That’s a true statement. But where is your joke?”
“Before comedy, I worked at a tech company, and before that, I worked on Wall Street. And, honestly, I’ve never really been sexually harassed.”
“Taking a night off from comedy to go on a date with someone I’m probably not going to like anyway sounds like the worst trade-off in my mind.”
“I’m so lucky that I found comedy and that I get to do it for a living.”
“I loved George Carlin… I used to sit in front of the TV and watch the HBO comedy specials. I loved those comedy specials.”
“The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.”
“I think everything benefits from a little comedy. The worst thing to me is to see a great drama or a great thriller with no laughs.”
“The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.”
“The one thing you’re most reluctant to tell. That’s where the comedy is.”
“I drank the Kool-Aid of being a network star. Once it didn’t happen, I realized it wasn’t the best version of my comedy.”
“Over the years, I managed to develop this comedy career, went from opening act to headliner at comedy clubs, to playing concert halls, and had an off-Broadway show with ‘Sleepwalk With Me.’”
“I think serious situations actually make for the best kind of belly laughs. But they’re also the hardest to convert into comedy at the outset.”
“Everything about starting out in comedy is pride-swallowing, from handing out fliers to bombing in front of audiences.”
“The Comedy Central CDs combined with the TV specials are what led to my stuff being traded and passed around, and a lot more people knowing my jokes than I thought.”
“In some sense, Comedy Central has made their audience into comedy connoisseurs.”
“People come to my shows on purpose as opposed to coming to a ‘comedy show.’ Which was always my goal.”
“I’ve actually always wanted to write like a one-person show that was sort of a romantic comedy – a show that was kind of cynical about romance and marriage but ultimately embraced it. Because I feel like comedy is always cynical, inherently, because it’s contrarian.”
“I always try to attack the most honest issues I can in my comedy.”
“The thing with film is that it’s so wide-reaching compared to comedy. When I release my comedy special, half a million people will see it. If I release a movie, five to ten million people will see it.”
“Comedy unites, it doesn’t divide!”
“I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you’re starting out in comedy, it’s the audience that tells you what’s funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.”
“Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody.”
“I think in life, the sense of humor and comedy always exists.”
“I left Indiana, and I ain’t been back since. I’ve been doing comedy and paying my bills.”
“I’ve been doing comedy and paying my bills.”
“Comedy. It was just huge in my house. Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness, Monty Python and all those James Bond movies were highly regarded.”
“I love making comedy. I never stopped loving it. I will continue to love it and I can’t believe that I get to do it.”
“Dad loved movies, and I grew up with British comedy. My ultimate favourite is Peter Sellers.”
“I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it’s impossible and always was impossible to define.”
“Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it’s soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.”
“Comedy is brutal. It’s powerful, though.”
“Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with.”
“It’s very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. And you have to be almost a saint, like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid the corrupting of it, because there’s very little work where the actual work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that.”
“The reason you do this stuff – comedy, plays, movies – is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.”
“Commercial directing felt like a very natural transition from my comedy, sketch, music video directing experience.”
“Comedy came early. I knew when I was a kid that I was silly, and I knew that I liked people who were funny, but I don’t think I knew I was funny. I didn’t really think about it.”
“I went to Dartmouth College so simply by being an Indian-American woman, I was already so statistically interesting. And then the fact that I didn’t want to do anything science-related, and I wanted to write comedy plays and act little bit – I mean, I became deeply interesting in college because of how rare that was.”
“People don’t want to listen to a celebrity tweeting about their charities and shows. That’s why comedy writers do well – we put out little funny ideas.”
“Fast food is hugely important in the life of a comedy writer. All we do is order in, and what we’re going to eat is hotly debated.”
“Comedy writers have the most fragile egos.”
“I’m such a comedy fan that I just love laughing and so admire comedians who have brought me joy.”
“I’m not saying writing comedy’s brain surgery, but there is a certain pressure to it. It’s the equivalent of doing homework that’s going to end up on national television.”
“It’s on the bucket list for sure to do a comedy film, even if it was just one line on the lot.”
“My very first job was something called ‘Nobody’s Watching,’ that Bill Lawrence who created ‘Scrubs,’ it was his pilot. It was my very first TV job, and it was a sitcom. Ever since that experience, I’ve been so itching to get back to that kind of environment and just to be involved with comedy.”
“If I ideally can, I’d do a comedy, and then I would do something where I’m a mental patient, and then I’d go back and do a comedy so I can continue to express myself in different ways.”
“I haven’t been offered a lot of comedy. In theater, I’ve done quite a bit of comedy or dramas that included a lot of funny stuff. But in my TV work, those aren’t the roles that I’ve been offered.”
“I don’t like ‘comedy,’ I like ‘life,’ which has everything in it.”
“Hypocrisy is great fodder for comedy.”
“Honestly we never lied to people about who we were. Usually the wackier interviews came to pass because the interview subjects, aware that we were Comedy Central, just wanted to get their stories out.”
“I can cry at the drop of the pin. But comedy is hard for me; it’s the timing.”
“The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.”
“As the purpose of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I see no reason why anyone should be exempt.”
“I love comedy, but I did always consider myself a dramatic comedian.”
“I went to NYU drama school, so I was a very serious actress. I used to do monologues with a Southern accent, and I was really into drama and drama school. And then, in my last year of drama school, I did a comedy show, and the show became a big hit on campus.”
“I’m gonna play this game the way I want to. It might be serious, it might be a comedy, it might be a dramedy, it might be variety, it might be a talk show, whatever. There’s no box.”
“I would much rather watch a horror film or science fiction than a comedy. I don’t know why. I just like them. I find them relaxing.”
“I’ve done two Shakespeare tragedies, so I’d desperately like to do comedy. It would be nice not to die.”
“When you are the lead in a romantic comedy, you have to worry about people really liking you.”
“When people write comedy from neutrality, it just gets kind of silly.”
“Too much comedy today is vulgar, not clever. I say that as a comedian and as a consumer.”
“Too often, these comedy guys now only care about getting on and then getting off and getting rich.”
“There’s some actors that go easily between drama and comedy because they play the naturalism of the role, and they just have natural timing.”
“Comedy always benefits from different points of view and even tension. It can never be satisfied.”
“In comedy, it’s so subjective; there is no right or wrong.”
“Norman Lear was talking about everything in the ’70s… race, sexism, all of it. The network comedy really stayed away from that in the 1980s and 1990s.”
“’Seinfeld’ was an amazing show. It’s iconic and defined a whole generation of comedy writers – but by their own admission, that show was about nothing.”
“I’ve actually done a lot of comedy.”
“Outside of ‘Justified,’ I do like to keep it to comedy. When I’m not there, I try to seek out stuff that sort of more along the lighter fare. I have more fun on those sets than I do on drama sets just because when it’s heavy, it’s heavy, and it’s hard to get away from it.”
“I really enjoy laughing at work, and I find that it’s easier to do that when you’re shooting a comedy.”
“I’ve been trying to get into comedy for years. I had a meeting with one of the networks a couple years ago, a general meeting, and when they asked what I was looking for and I told them I’d prefer to do comedy, it was as if I had two heads.”
“There are some die-hard ‘Chelsea Lately’ fans, and that’s where the majority of my fans come from. Chelsea is really helping make comedy audiences hipper and edgier.”
“Comedy is just one of the many professions that women are taking over.”
“My comedy isn’t about being attractive – it’s about how the bar of dumb seems so low right now, and I desperately want to raise the bar of dumb just a tiny bit.”
“I was very lucky when I started doing comedy because I hadn’t seen much stand-up. I just got up on stage and did it without thinking.”
“I’ve played comedy before but not that much. I mostly do get drawn to darker material.”
“I loved women who weren’t afraid to get ugly in their comedy.”
“It’s much funnier when the comedy can happen with me just trying my best to genuinely do a good thing.”
“There’s comedy even in tragedy. There’s comedy in life. And in ‘Castle’, we go for that comedy.”
“I don’t just want to be a cute girl in a comedy or the actress who just does the same thing over and over again. I want to play roles that are distinct. I want to have a more varied career like actresses Viola Davis or Angela Bassett – those are the people that I grew up watching and admiring.”
“There are thousands of ways to make people laugh – satire, black comedy, slapstick.”
“Comedy is easy. You have to react to what others are saying and it is all about the timing, the dialogue delivery.”
“I think ‘Mean Girls’ was a kind of significant movie. It was a very successful comedy, and it was also before ‘Bridesmaids,’ and it really launched some of today’s biggest women in comedy.”
“There’s a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up – or didn’t – and Jamaican stories.”
“I wanted to write something that would be a comedy in the sense of making people feel happier when they finish it than they did when began it.”
“I want to be able to infuse some youthful energy and comedy while appreciating the generations before.”
“’District 9′, ‘Elysium’ and ‘Chappie’ were all born out of some visual concept first. ‘Chappie’ is the imagery, because I think I’m a visual person first, of this ridiculous robot character. It’s much more comedy based and in an unusual setting.”
“The first Emmys I went to was in 1990 when the five nominees for best comedy were ‘Designing Women,’ ‘Golden Girls,’ ‘Murphy Brown,’ ‘Cheers,’ ‘Wonder Years.’ Three and a half were created by women.”
“I think empathy is undervalued in a lot of these comedy writers’ rooms.”
“After ‘Jamai Raja,’ I wanted to experiment, hence tried my hands at ‘Comedy Nights Bachao Taaza.’”
“Comedy and drama are both challenging to me.”
“I knew after ‘Sarah Marshall’ that my favorite genre is romantic comedy. Nothing is more satisfying than a great romantic comedy.”
“As a comedy writer, I’m always praying for the day I can tell a self-aware/break-the-fourth-wall style of joke.”
“There are so few good comedy sequels. The only one in recent memory that’s good is ’22 Jump Street.’ It’s a hard genre.”
“A good romantic comedy is my favorite movie to watch.”
“There are still movies where females are just there to be cool, or they are there to lambaste their husbands and scold. But female comedy characters are changing for the better.”
“R-rated comedies make as much money as PG-13. And I think the audiences wanna be shocked. Especially with comedy.”
“I’m comedy’s forgotten nearly man.”
“In general in comedy, there are fewer people making a ton of money and a lot more people making a living. For me, the goal is just being able to make exactly the show I wanted to make.”
“Whether it’s corporate investigations or comedy, there are certain inherent truths to trying to get what you want while trying to be a decent person doing it.”
“I think my goal was just to do comedy, honestly. It still is. Whatever form that took or takes, it doesn’t matter.”
“My thinking is, if we’re setting out to make comedy in which nothing is off limits, then everybody is fair game.”
“Comedy is so collaborative. You’re going to come up with better jokes with people you like joking around with. It just makes sense.”
“My wife happens to be probably the greatest working woman in comedy. I can’t think of anyone who even approaches her achievements and her abilities.”
“I’d like to start trying different fields of work. I don’t want to be stuck in just comedy, and I’d be interested to try to break into the movie business because it’s so much different than television.”
“Comedy is so subjective, you know what I mean? To sit there and technically pick it apart is so stupid.”
“I started in the club route. I did the alternative scene later on. When I lived in New York, I did the Luna Lounge and stuff, where Janeane Garofalo and David Cross and all those guys worked out of, but I came from a comedy club background. I’m proud of that background. I’m one of the people that really crossed over and did both.”
“I’ve predominantly done comedy over the years.”
“My intent when I moved to L.A. was to get in good with the comedy clubs and, eventually, try to break into Comedy Central and have my half hour special.”
“The best comedy is based on truth.”
“Ellen DeGeneres is a huge influence in my life. She’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do stand-up comedy. I was a big fan of her stand-up before she even came out of the closet.”
“You get dinged for wanting to do a comedy, then wanting to do a big-budget action film, and then wanting to do an indie. But you can’t let other people trying to label you get in the way of trying to do something artistically.”
“I would love to make a romantic comedy.”
“Nobody really knows, but I got a little comedy in me.”
“The way I toe the line with comedy is I run jokes past people.”
“My mom was like, ‘You talk so much. You have too much energy. Why don’t you just join the play or something?’ It was a comedy, and I got laughs in rehearsal, but onstage, in front of a whole audience, I got a lot of laughs.”
“Comedy is subjective, so if you don’t like it, that’s fine.”
“Comedy can do so much more than make you laugh.”
“In my comedy, I’m not always trying to say something, but when I’m playing a creepy dude, you’re laughing because you know that creepy dude. You’ve heard that dude say something awful, and I’m just putting a little creative spin on it.”
“I don’t think anyone gets into comedy to host a baking show.”
“If you want to be an actor, you need to learn how to act first, even in sketch comedy.”
“I think the first rule of comedy is that it has to be funny and I find a lot of the broad comedy which is sent to me, painfully unfunny.”
“To be perfectly honest, drama is a lot simpler than comedy.”
“I nannied for a couple of months. The kids were super-funny; it made me wish I grew up in a comedy household. But nannying is demoralizing. I’m just not cut out for it.”
“My sister was very, very beautiful and I was very not. Doing comedy is the greatest thing ever because you don’t have to do that, and I’ve since learned to let go of that.”
“When I did ‘Nikki and Sara Live,’ I think a lot of the comedy got lost because we were always so worried about how we looked, and so was the network.”
“I started out splitting my time between the Kansas City and St. Louis comedy scenes, which both had bluer sensibilities than other cities that I’ve worked.”
“I always told my parents, ‘Just give me till I’m 27 to do comedy, to make it’.”
“Sarah Silverman. She’s the reason I do comedy. Her DNC speech was my favorite thing I ever heard. Sitting down with her and laughing would be incredible.”
“I definitely think that comedy is my niche.”
“I’d like to try different genres: comedy, period drama, rom-com, action.”
“I don’t want to sit and cry for an hour in a movie. I’d rather have an action or a comedy.”
“Obviously, when you do something with drama and comedy in it – and by that, I mean a scene that has drama and comedy in it – you know the minute you introduce music, you’re either scoring the drama or you’re scoring the comedy, and therefore the scene becomes either dramatic or comedic.”
“For the second series of ‘Luxury Comedy’, I tried to drop the ‘Noel Fielding’ from it. I thought that would make it less like a solo project and more like a show. Also, it would probably have been easier to take the reaction to the first series if it had been a project rather than my name and face!”
“The Goons were always one of our favourites; we always felt we were in that tradition – Goons, Monty Python, Peter Cook, Vic and Bob, Spike Milligan. We felt we were part of that lineage, but in England, it wasn’t happening like that. There was a brand of comedy like ‘The Office,’ which was very real.”
“I’m a progressive person, very liberal. I have this thing in my head where I’m going to change the world, but with comedy.”
“Comedy is just honesty. Whether things are going well or bad.”
“’S.N.L.’ is the comedy establishment. Of course you want to go through that, because you want that stamp of approval. But it has its own identity, and our voices didn’t mesh for whatever reason – or they decided we didn’t belong.”
“The movies and comedy that I love the most, even if there are men starring in them, often the men wrote the parts for themselves.”
“I eventually became an actor, starting with doing stand-up comedy in New York and then theater wherever they would let me. Finally, I moved out here to Los Angeles and got on a show.”
“That, to me, is what comedy is all about: keeping fresh and keeping current and changing with the times.”
“Although I had a good job as an advertising manager for a shoe company in Boston, I really liked to fool around with comedy.”
“Comedy is surprises, so if you’re intending to make somebody laugh and they don’t laugh, that’s funny.”
“A lot of people think I’m difficult to work with. It’s not like I really want to do that much stuff, so it doesn’t really matter. I guess I’m somewhat difficult when it comes to comedy.”
“I’m in the mood for another Moonstruck experience, for another romantic comedy.”
“There are people who like just ordinary comedy fun, and making mistakes – which I do easily – and then there are people who like the falling over.”
“I believe in physical comedy, because that reaches out most to people.”
“Even in comedy it’s important to get your body acquainted with what you’re going to do.”
“Comedy actually is quite difficult to do. The timing, the tone, the delivery, and the precise expressions are all very crucial, especially for actresses, because we are not given the author-backed punches.”
“Doing a comedy is a bit different for girls.”
“I don’t like the bullying, do-one-over style of comedy. It’s so cheap.”
“I started off in comedy, but that’s just where I got my work. I’ve always been an actor.”
“I trained in Shakespeare, and that’s all comedy, even when it’s tragedy.”
“When I was starting out, I always wanted to be able to do everything – comedy and drama and action, and everything in between. Film is so diverse, and it’s fun to be able to take advantage of all of it.”
“I wanted to play a TV detective because it’s a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven’t done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.”
“When I was a kid, I used to make up all these characters. I love comedy a lot, and I don’t get to do it often. Somewhere in the middle, I shifted into doing drama.”
“I’m definitely more at ease with comedy – that’s where I started out – and so it’s my first love, so to speak, and I have more of a sensibility for it and more familiar with it. Having said that, I also want to be open to everything else.”
“I’ve done a lot of comedy recently, so I would really like to explore something else. I am hankering after a really meaty, dramatic role… like Natalie Portman’s part in Black Swan.’”
“I like the idea of the comedy of resilience.”
“I’ve always just been attracted to comedy.”
“A lot of French comedy is satire.”
“’Newton’ is a black comedy, a social satire. Amit Masurkar is directing the movie, and Drishyam films is producing. Rajkummar Rao is in the movie. I am playing a very important character. It is a very interesting project.”
“Comedy is important, and I do not want to end up being recognised for just one genre.”
“I used to do comedy during my theatre days, and I was good at that.”
“You would think doing comedy would be nerve wracking, but punting and kicking footballs gets me more nervous.”
“Only in America could you get away with the kind of comedy I did.”
“I didn’t want to do comedy again. It is way harder when you are doing comedy. You can’t just concentrate on the character and the plot. In comedy, the writers, instead of obsessing about character and plot, obsess about the jokes.”
“Drama is easier to do because you just have to have the emotion and not get caught acting, but comedy is much harder.”
“I like physical comedy. And I like the old comedies.”
“Great comedy is always sadistic.”
“Most of what I write is comedy.”
“Fifteen- to 30-year-olds are interested in all kinds of intelligent movies – it doesn’t have to be a broad comedy or an action adventure for them to go see it.”
“I wish I could have a recurring role on ‘Modern Family’. I think ‘Modern Family’ is the best comedy on television. It’s extremely well written, extremely well acted and directed.”
“I was in musical comedy. And I did very well, but the memorization killed me. I’m not good at memorizing, and it gave me a lot of anxiety. I hated the makeup. I hated all that pancake makeup. I didn’t really like dressing for parts.”
“I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.”
“I’ve gotten very cynical and kind of anhedonic about all the things I have to do to get to do comedy: all the travel, hotels, and airports.”
“One of my favorite films is ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ I’d love to do some really silly comedy someday.”
“I’d love to do a really broad comedy at some point.”
“The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more widely variable from person to person.”
“My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.”
“I have an inability to enjoy things, but that’s why we’re in comedy. If we were happy, we wouldn’t be funny, I guess.”
“Women comedy is different than men comedy. Guy comedy is very aggressive, it’s about insulting each other, name-calling, and kind of busting each other’s chops, and that’s not what women’s comedy is.”
“The reason most comedies don’t win awards is that the filmmakers put the comedy first. This means you have to create a story around the jokes.”
“We didn’t used to be so precious about women in comedy back in the old days.”
“Comedy becomes intensified in short scenes.”
“Catherine Tate was a proven comedy actress from a comedy background with great taste. I knew her work, and was an incredible fan.”
“Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable.”
“I really don’t take any interest at all in contemporary comedy.”
“When I was nine I spent a lot of my time reading books about the history of comedy, or listening to the Goons or Hancock, humour from previous generations.”
“In fact, I don’t watch a lot of contemporary comedy for fear of being influenced by it.”
“In 1986, I was attacked in the street as I helped Neil Mullarkey from the Comedy Store Players to put up posters. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time – midnight – and we were English. I got kicked in the head.”
“I’m like the Davy Crockett of comedy… after Davy Crockett opened up the West and helped everybody… they didn’t need him anymore. I freed a lot of comics… if I never would have done comedy, it would’ve been a different art form… I’m sure of it.”
“My comedy is a nuclear bomb inside my mind. It’s a weapon that’s never been tested. It just blows up and flattens everybody.”
“There’s always a message in my comedy.”
“The king of comedy is dead. Richard Pryor was the king of comedy. The rest of them are the king of copycats.”
“I like comedy, I mean, in all forms.”
“Every movie I’ve ever made says the same thing. They all find comedy in people trying to live their lives without any rules.”
“Rome has New York’s formlessness, aimlessness, a kind of hard-boiled sophistication, blase about everything. In their filmmaking, too, the Italians have this tongue-in-cheek sense of comedy.”
“Comedy, your funny bone, is formed in childhood.”
“I wear so many disguises on the show that only a real comedy fan might spot me.”
“Fear is what makes comedy funny.”
“’Anchorman’ was never supposed to be a popular, like, hit movie. That movie was a cheap movie – it felt like we were working on a weird independent comedy in a way.”
“Growing up, I was certainly drawn to comedy, but my goal was just to be as well-rounded an actor as possible. I really liked Daniel Day-Lewis, and I thought, ‘Oh, he’s a good guy to try and emulate.’”
“I don’t have an agenda where I do a comedy and say, ‘I have to do a drama next,’ or ‘I am looking for an action movie now.’”
“I’d like to do something dramatic or a different kind of role, but I tend not to separate comedy and drama all that much.”
“I think I used comedy as a mechanism: if I could make the other kids laugh, I wouldn’t get beaten up or teased as much.”
“Anything traumatic in my life I’ve always dealt with through jokes and comedy.”
“Awkwardness is such a gold mine for comedy.”
“My definitions of comedy, drama, and straight man are all blurry for me. I don’t think of it in those terms.”
“I’ve noticed, as a comedy fan, that I really like Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino because when they’re funny, they’re actually funny. It’s not like when other dramatic writers have comedy, and I’m just like, ‘Well, that’s not funny. Why are you even trying to make a joke here?’”
“It’s a lot of people’s goal to be the lead in a movie, and that was never my goal. I just wanted to be the third banana in an ensemble comedy.”
“Growing up in Iowa, there weren’t many people who looked like me. And then when I moved out to L.A., every guy in comedy looked like me.”
“A lot of the time, a comedy script is just dialogue, and that’s the main thing you have to worry about.”
“Adult Swim has cornered this really cool market, especially for comedy shows.”
“I love to do comedy, but music is really my heart.”
“My years on ‘SNL’ had reconfirmed that what I do best is play for a sort of edgy comedy.”
“My first film was a comedy, but after that I went always into more heavier stuff.”
“I’ve always felt that there’s a lot of similarity between doing a comedy and doing a scary movie because jokes and scares are all about timing. If you give the punch line too early or too late, the joke falls flat. And it’s the same with a scare.”
“Above all, in comedy, and again and again since classical times, passages can be found in which the level of representation is interrupted by references to the spectators or to the fictive nature of the play.”
“I realized I do tragedy better than comedy.”
“I’d like to try comedy, at some point, but no one ever hires me for comedy, ever.”
“I’ve always wanted to do a romantic comedy.”
“I always like the physical comedy because I actually do a lot of it in my own life, but not on purpose. I am the klutziest person on the planet.”
“Twitter is really – I got very addicted to it just because it’s so simple, and it’s like a video game for comedy writers to just do a one-liner about something.”
“I did auditions at a club called the Comedy Connection. They wanted nothing to do with me. But one night they were doing a night of all women comics, and they invited me to do that.”
“I started out more interested in drama, but comedy just came naturally to me, and it’s become what I’m most known for, even though my sensibilities still lean towards the dramatic for the most part.”
“Comedy wasn’t something I chose – it chose me.”
“Comedy wasn’t something I chose – it chose me. I was just inherently funny when I was a kid.”
“I think the best comedy comes from stuff that’s based in reality.”
“I really love writing comedy. Writing romantic comedy is even nicer because you get to write about how insane we all act when we’re falling in love.”
“I love mixing horror with comedy.”
“I don’t play comedy as comedy. That would be the biggest trap. I think about the characters and their situations. Then you don’t have to worry where the laugh is going to be. But comedy is harder than drama.”
“With a play, you do it and it’s gone. Films always date. Television drama always dates. Television comedy, for some reason, seems to go on.”
“Comedy is taken care of by a free market.”
“I’ve been fired from a situational comedy with a script they wrote specifically for me because of my voice.”
“’Mandem On The Wall’ is an online comedy series that I produce, write and act in along with three other people.”
“Good comedy can be liberating, and if I’m doing my job as a comedian, part of the joy for the audience is getting that release.”
“As soon as I heard the term ‘comedy nerd,’ I’d hoped there was a lot of them.”
“I mostly do faces and sounds. That’s what I do. Comedy doesn’t have to be art.”
“I think a good comedian was probably bullied a little bit. Probably felt doughy and oblong and rhombus-shaped and strange and a little bit of an outsider, and then learned the healing qualities of comedy.”
“Science would like to tell us that people laugh because of the benign violation theory, but comedy doesn’t have hard rules.”
“The underlying goal of comedy is feeling not-alone.”
“There are elements of comedy that can be competitive and back stab-y, but one of the underreported sides is that we love each other and help each other, kind of like a messed up extended family.”
“People know me. I’m not going to produce any cartwheels out there. I’m not going to belong on Comedy Central. I’ll always be a tennis player, not a celebrity.”
“No subject is unsuitable for comedy.”
“First and foremost, I just want to write comedy.”
“In life, comedy occurs naturally, as it should, in the most appalling of circumstances.”
“I think ‘Paper Moon’ is a comedy-drama. ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ was the most severe comedy, but my favorite film of my own is ‘They All Laughed,’ which is a kind of bittersweet comedy.”
“Comedy has to be built carefully.”
“Drama is easy. Comedy’s hard.”
“’Movie 43′ is about the hardest R Rated comedy ever.”
“’24 Hour Party People’ was a comedy, and I knew that from the beginning.”
“When things are really painful, I turn it into comedy.”
“I’ve played farce on the stage, but I have never played any sort of comedy on the screen.”
“The rules I go by are: Always keep your villains bad, and keep the plot grounded and real. If you keep those stakes, the comedy will bounce off that and work.”
“Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.”
“When I go to the movies, I like romance, comedy, and thrillers. I hate gore.”
“What I loved about ‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin,’ the title is the easy sell, but when you see the movie, the comedy is more free-form and more relatable.”
“If you’re doing an animated comedy on the same channel as ‘South Park,’ no one can really tell you anything. The bar has been set so high.”
“I’m going to keep doing the comedy and the art that I do. I’m going to keep uplifting marginalized voices, and I think that’s my place to do that.”
“I love doing standup, but I love watching it more. Watching people like Michelle Buteau or Baron Vaughn get up and do their thing – that is what comedy can be like.”
“I never really thought of comedy as a career. My goal was, when I moved to New York, I was going to write serious films.”
“At its best, alt comedy can be challenging, surprising, and innovative. And at its worst, alt comics think that being awkward.com/FAQS is a substitution for punchlines.”
“Comedy is subjective, and any joke can be funny.”
“It is utterly asinine that people continually go to comedy shows without bothering to see if their sensibilities line up with the comedians.”
“Anyone who does stand-up comedy can agree that doing a late-night spot is a dream of theirs.”
“I love doing comedy and I love watching comedy… I’m more inclined to go watch a Seth Rogen film than a serious Oscar drama.”
“To me, most comedy is dark comedy.”
“I think it helped that ‘Fleabag’ had such a dramatic arc to it, even though it was disguised as a comedy.”
“After the play of ‘Fleabag,’ we had conversations with different channels and with film companies about whether ‘Fleabag’ should be a half-hour sitcom, an hourlong, serialized drama, or a film. And I knew that it couldn’t be a drama because I wanted to hide the drama – that had to be the surprise. I knew it had to be comedy.”
“I do like comedy and drama.”
“I like to see love stories: romantic comedy or romantic drama.”
“Dark comedy is very difficult. You have to bring the audience in and push them away at the same time.”
“If I got into a fight in a bar, I’d miss the dude by miles. I wouldn’t know how to connect. It would be a comedy.”
“I want my films to be entertaining: not comedy, but something which is gripping.”
“Horror comedy – very rare in Bollywood.”
“Govinda is my favourite actor – his comedy and dance is unique.”
“I think for a heroine to do comedy and action and also be glamorous is a big thing. That’s why ‘Supreme’ will be very close to my heart.”
“Doing comedy is very challenging, as I am a shy person in real life.”
“I feel like I work on scripts for comedy as well as dramatic stuff the same.”
“I love Frances McDormand so much. I love her career. And I think it’s fun because she gets to do comedy as well as drama.”
“I love doing sitcoms. I love doing comedy. I love the whole shooting match.”
“I think people like musicals. And when done with a modern comedic sensibility, musical comedy can be the most efficient delivery of both storytelling and jokes.”
“Comedy was not necessarily the thing that I thought it would be, but I was searching for something that felt scary to me.”
“I wanted to absorb the comedy world by osmosis. But I really loved kind of throwing myself in head first.”
“Female hysteria is a subject I’m very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.”
“I was sort of the class-clown type, and I was also in school plays, and I always liked comedy.”
“The physical part of comedy is as hard as a lot of action movies. It scares me, but in a way that I like.”
“I’d like to do a comedy, actually. I think it would be great to do a sitcom or something like that. I’m pretty much open to anything.”
“What’s more important to ‘SNL’: comedy or buzz? To the writers, players and guest hosts, it’s probably the former; to Lorne Michaels and the suits at NBC, it’s ultimately probably the latter.”
“Groupon, as you probably are by now aware, is exactly what it sounds like: a daily-deal site offering group discounts. Maybe you’ve seen that done before, but certainly not like Groupon, which has executed with an energetic sales force and engaging copywriters, many culled from the Chicago comedy scene.”
“I’ve done a lot of drama, and comedy was the one genre I was not being offered. So I became obsessive about getting one.”
“Life is neither comedy or tragedy, life is what you make of it.”
“I’d love to continue my career in Hollywood – I’d love to do another action film, or a romantic comedy, or horror. I love horror films.”
“With ‘Attachments,’ my goal was to write a really good romantic comedy. I wanted the reader to be smiling throughout.”
“The great thing about ‘The Office’ and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it’s mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.”
“Very honestly, I don’t feel ‘Munnabhai’ is a comedy film. I seriously feel it is a very emotional film.”
“I wasn’t the guy running out to the Viper Room or comedy clubs until three in the morning. I was the guy running back to watch the Mets win the World Series in 1986.”
“You didn’t find comedy in ‘Magadheera.’ Any film high on emotions doesn’t need such elements.”
“I’ve tried to go out of my comfort zone to experiment with comedy onscreen.”
“Not long after ‘The Pacific,’ I began shooting the comedy ‘Larry Crowne,’ which was also with Tom Hanks, who also directed and plays the title character.”
“People used to think of me as a comedy actor.”
“I would love to do a film with a lot of humor in it: a comedy with pain instead of a painful film with some comedy.”
“As an actor, you read so many scripts and parts written for Asian-specific characters, and you see a lot of stereotypes and a lot of one-note characters, especially in comedy.”
“There’s a show on Comedy Central that I love called ‘Nathan for You,’ which is kind of a reality show, almost a prank show, where this guy Nathan Fielder goes around helping struggling businesses. He’s so hilarious and so awkward.”
“During my theatre days, I was more comfortable doing comedy. It’s such an irony. I have always played a buffoon on stage, and yet I don’t have any comic role to my credit.”
“I’m a comedy geek so anything comedy related, whether that’s standup shows, improv shows, I’m all over that. That’s my favorite way to be entertained always.”
“Comedy is like music, and the way to make the best music is to have skilled musicians in your band.”
“I would be an idiot to say comedy is easy, but it does come naturally. It never feels forced.”
“I became a dancer in self-defense. I was doing a comedy monologue and didn’t know how else to get off, so I danced off. I’ve been dancing ever since, but I’m still a comedian.”
“In stand-up, there’s that idea that comedy comes from a dark place, but it’s not a rule.”
“The only thing I miss from the sitcom format is that immediate gratification of when you’re, if we’re talking about comedy, of the live audience.”
“The best comedy, I feel, comes in a drama because it balances each other out.”
“I’m a big fan of comedy music.”
“Sometimes, comedy and entertainment is not all about telling jokes; sometimes you just have to be you for a few moments.”
“I don’t know what the next acting job will be. I would love to do a comedy.”
“Yes, there have been women in comedy. Moms Mabley was one of the earliest. She was an African American comedian; she often dressed up as an older, disheveled woman.”
“In 1965, Cosby had become the first black man ever to star in a prime-time television show; he was conscious enough of his non-dissolved, traditional nuclear family that he made it the foundation of his public persona, his comedy act, and eventually of his blockbuster sitcom.”
“Sometimes my mum is very disapproving of my comedy.”
“At first I moved from Sydney to Melbourne, because most of the comedy was shot in Melbourne, and then from Melbourne to Los Angeles – and you have to sacrifice stuff.”
“It’s fun to do a comedy and hook people in and then hoodwink them into watching a serious movie. I like to lead in with the comedy and then hit them over the head with a drama.”
“Music is very similar to comedy: It’s all about texture, timing, context, vocabulary, performance. When someone’s onstage doing a solo, essentially it’s the same thing as what a comedian does. They’re in the moment. They’re listening.”
“The more cerebral, slightly darker comedy stuff is where I love to live.”
“I’ll always come back to comedy. Doing drama can feel satisfying, but day to day, it’s just not as fun as laughing.”
“Honestly, my biggest education regarding improv comedy actually came on the job working for ‘My Boys.’”
“’Tin Cup’ was great because I loved the comedy aspect of it, so that was good.”
“If I had to design a career for myself, I would have done comedy.”
“I started when Chris Rock did ‘Bigger & Blacker.’ I used to watch that before I went onstage as inspiration to get hype, but I noticed I started taking on his cadence and talking like him. I was also doing the New York-style comedy thing, which was angry and annoyed. I was creating a persona instead of trying to embrace my own.”
“Comedy helped me out in my teenage years. It saw me through puberty and helped me to deal with dating.”
“Here’s my take on Andy Kaufman… For Kaufman, comedy was a skill that was open for examination. He didn’t just do comedy, he deconstructed it like it was a transistor set. He pulled out all the wires and switched them around, often in front of our very eyes.”
“When I grew up, one of comedy idols was Rowan Atkinson, who of course is Mr. Bean and uses physical comedy. Same with Jim Carrey. Both of those guys. And Peter Sellers. Most of my comedy idols are physical comics.”
“Comedy shouldn’t be restrained under the belt of normality.”
“I’m a comedian who happens to be Muslim; my comedy stems on all forms of my identity.”
“What I wanted to do was the comedy, and I found that. I found my bliss, I think.”
“My influences are a wide variety: from Dave Chappelle stand-up comedy specials on YouTube, to watching chick-flick comedy movies, to scrolling through stuff people say on the Internet.”
“I have this friend who does comedy but also music, and I really enjoyed his stuff, and I wanted to do that.”
“Being able to make a comedy at Disney was really appealing.”
“Light, trivial comedy does not appeal – it is not something I go to see.”
“I’d like a bit of a crack at some kind of anarchic comedy, but whether or not I’m skillful enough at it all, we’ll see.”
“’Birdman’ is basically ‘All About Eve’ – the 1950 comedy about rehearsal rivalries in a Broadway show, and another Best Picture laureate – reimagined as a Batman suicide mission. The movie couldn’t be actor-ier.”
“Though not really a comedy, ‘Rosewater’ is a demonstration of the creed behind ‘The Daily Show’: belief in the crucial need for impious wit against entrenched power. The freedom of the press is also the freedom to depress – and to inspire. That’s a message that can outlive any Oscar season.”
“I haven’t done much comedy; I would love to. I love doing dramatic roles, but I’d love to do comedy. I think it would be refreshing.”
“I wrote a script – a script about a guy working on the automobile assembly line; I never could get money for that. I did a pilot about minimum wage workers for HBO that didn’t get picked up; they thought it was depressing, even though it was a comedy.”
“I’m lucky that I get to jump around, do a big-budget comedy and then a smaller film. I don’t even make a big distinction between them.”
“What’s odd is that I’ve never been asked to do any comedy in film. That’s something I could certainly do.”
“I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.”
“If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what’s funny in the joke.”
“Comedy, not screaming at someone, can make someone lift their legs higher. There is a way to do a push-up and a sit-up, and it doesn’t have to be so complicated. Everyone is putting a difficult twist to it and making you do way too much.”
“I’m trying to make sure that there’s comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.”
“I like grown-up comedy, where it’s about character and attitude and life as opposed to obvious gross-out and jokes.”
“I’ve avoided doing a network comedy, because I wouldn’t get my own way. Even though it would get more viewers, it wouldn’t be mine.”
“I think comedies should be short. I don’t want to be self-indulgent; I don’t want a two-hour comedy.”
“I find comedy easy, and I find drama exciting and tantalising.”
“Comedy is easy for me, but with drama, I don’t know… it’s still the Holy Grail.”
“I was considered a comedy magician. And – how do I put this without sounding egotistical? – it didn’t take me long to realize that comedy magicians usually couldn’t do comedy or magic.”
“I was never really comfortable doing comedy.”
“All Internet comedy is niche comedy. If you do an Internet video about Halo, every Halo fan will send it to every other Halo fan. But if you did an episode of a network comedy that parodied Halo, most of your audience wouldn’t even get it.”
“I would like to have a bit of a break and do a comedy.”
“The word ‘comedy’ implies slapstick.”
“As I see it, there’s mainstream comedy – and then there’s me, out in the badlands.”
“If you’re trying to be an actor, sometimes you get lucky, and you end up on ‘The Office’, but if you don’t, and you know that you have something to say, it’s really, really fortunate to be able to get to write and star in your own comedy.”
“I’m a big fan of comedy such as Cendric the Entertainer.”
“I’m known as a dramatic actor. But because I don’t do a lot of comedy, I love watching it because I can really immerse myself in it and not think.”
“I found out I had a real love for comedy and comedy writing. The logic was, there weren’t too many female comedians, so I thought I might as well try a field that had fewer competitors than the field I was in, which was acting, singing and dancing.”
“I did six Broadway shows, and I noticed there weren’t many female comedians. When I went to a dancing audition, there were 1,000 girls. And there were three jobs. So I said I’ll just try comedy. And I loved it.”
“I go to a lot of stand-up comedy. I find more inspiration from observational stuff than from rap.”
“I get all of my comedy from CNN.”
“’Rob & Big’ was a buddy comedy show.”
“The comedy world is like a small pond; we all know each other.”
“During the first season of ‘Human Giant,’ I remember the people at MTV were all over us. They hadn’t really done a live-action short-film comedy show, so they didn’t know what it was going to be, and they were worried. But after that, they let us do whatever we wanted.”
“When I first started out, I kinda just wanted to do comedy stuff, and thankfully, I had a fair amount of success. I’ve been able to be on, I think, almost virtually every American sitcom.”
“My hopes and aspirations haven’t changed since I started in this business. They’ve been to be able to play drama, to be able to play comedy, to be able to play leading men, and to be able to play character roles. I have no other aspirations in this regard.”
“In comedy you have to be willing to not take yourself seriously, you know? I take comedy really seriously, and so to take comedy seriously, you must not, you cannot, ever take yourself seriously.”
“Dramas need to have a certain aesthetic that comedy just doesn’t really seem to need to have.”
“When you’re leading Marines, you don’t screw around, so the comedy is limited in uniform. And when you’re a comedian, you can’t be heavy handed and come across with tales of gore or material that people won’t understand, so I try to keep them separate.”
“The comedy seeds were planted before the Marine seeds. The thought of comedy never happening was scary. When you have a plan, you never know what will happen.”
“I’ve always been a fan of comedy. I’ve always enjoyed it. It’s something I’m very passionate about; it’s like lifeblood to me. I had to pursue it. I thought I had a little bit of talent, and if I could make a living at it, I would do it. It’s worked out so far.”
“In college, I was a theater and film major at Kansas University. I always had an affinity for comedy. I could probably quote everything from ‘Caddyshack,’ ‘Stripes,’ and all those great comedies from the ’80s.”
“I knew I wanted to try comedy and acting. Even if I failed, at least I would have tried. It’s better than never having tried.”
“I’ve always been cast in authority roles; I think because I have that presence… Comedically, I can play against that pretty well. I enjoy playing that arrogant ignorance. That’s one of my favorite games to play in comedy.”
“I don’t mind it so much if I get type cast as an authority figure. I get to do comedy no matter what it is, so it doesn’t bother me.”
“Anyone watching ’30 Rock’ always knew Tina Fey was playing a fictionalized version of herself, a workaholic comedy writer who also plays one on TV. She’s the boss; Liz Lemon just works here.”
“’Buncha Losers’ comedy is one of those homegrown American art forms, up there with infomercials and Elvis-shaped soap carvings. No other civilization could have invented it. The French took a stab with Sartre’s ‘No Exit,’ but then they had to ruin it with a lesson at the end.”
“I like the rhythm of comedy in dramas, if that makes sense. In other words, I don’t want to write setup, punch, setup, punch, where the joke dictates the scene; I want to find comedy in which the drama is actually driving the moment in the scene.”
“Comedy, at least the way I write comedy, is just drama with jokes.”
“To me, horror and comedy never work. Never worked for me, anyway.”
“I think I have a natural, if I can say that, got a kind of natural ability in comedy.”
“The comedy in ‘Star Trek’ is always very subtle, if it’s there at all.”
“I always loved working in comedy.”
“I have an Italian comedy at the Venice Film Festival.”
“There’s nothing more difficult to do than comedy.”
“Some readers took ‘Heaven’s My Destination’ as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy.”
“Comedy is king for me; it’s the genre that everyone loves.”
“Comedy is still alive, and there are still funny people. Jews are still overrepresented in comedy and psychiatry and underrepresented in the priesthood. That immigrant Jewish humor is still with us.”
“And the only studies were – Rodney Dangerfield was my mentor and he was my Yale drama school for comedy.”
“I have a work-out regime; I am not a maniac. It sounds cliche, but stand-up comedy, doing a one-man show, helps keep me young, and yes, it is exhausting, but I don’t collapse.”
“When I started, there was no comedy community, no comedy industry; there were comedians.”
“Comedy has lost its eloquence.”
“If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you’re going to have a musical comedy administration.”
“The secret of writing comedy is to know where it’s all going, then get ahead of it.”
“To do comedy, you have to be a pretty good actor to start with.”
“I can’t imagine getting bored with comedy or thinking comedy is beneath us suddenly.”
“We call ourselves comedy writer-performers, and that encompasses everything, and I certainly have a very open mind about it.”
“I grew up watching British comedy on TV, really.”
“There was a lot of terrible, terrible comedy in the seventies along with ‘Fawlty Towers.’ It’s easy to forget.”
“I was in the play ‘Fat Pig in the West End,’ which is a comedy but has dramatic moments.”
“I’m a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn’t matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They’re the same if you reach the beauty.”
“’The Divine Comedy’ is very sophisticated but also very popular.”
“There can be a science to joke writing, there are certainly rules and patterns that can be followed, but I think most of the best comedy goes beyond the rules.”
“When you take a character seriously, there’s more room for comedy because you’re not aware of how absurd you are.”
“I love period dramas and language, but I love comedy as well.”
“Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.”
“In the process of looking for comedy, you have to be deeply honest. And in doing that, you’ll find out here’s the other side. You’ll be looking under the rock occasionally for the laughter.”
“Comedy is acting out optimism.”
“I started doing comedy because that was the only stage that I could find. It was the pure idea of being on stage. That was the only thing that interested me, along with learning the craft and working, and just being in productions with people.”
“I’m ready to do a Woody Allen comedy.”
“It’s so funny because, here in Hollywood, an actor who really is versatile and who has the ability to transform between comedy and drama roles is considered a rarity.”
“I thought comedy would be the hardest thing I could do, and if I could do that, I could do anything.”
“If a movie isn’t a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.”
“It is hard enough to be good at all, but to be good in comedy speaks for your character.”
“I think what’s very French is the mixture of comedy with intimacy and a kind of reflectiveness. For U.S. audiences, the nearest thing is Woody Allen.”
“For me, comedy and drama are all the same thing.”
“Denver has smart and energetic crowds that appreciate good comedy and don’t take themselves too seriously.”
“My comedy is kind of a counteraction to some of the comedy I don’t like. Or things I don’t like.”
“Some of my biggest influences are people like Steven Wright and Todd Berry. I’m a shy person, and I don’t think people who aspire to do comedy think that’s an option.”
“My portrayal of Fagin was all to do with my experience in comedy and revue.”
“There’s probably been very few people in comedy that have a diversified background as I do.”
“Most people are used to the T.V. comedy method of one joke every 18 seconds. And that’s why it’s not funny… There’s no time for anything to develop.”
“I came to Vegas because I wanted to, not because I thought it could help my career. I didn’t even know they had comedy clubs here.”
“I can’t write a joke. I could never write. I do a lot of stories and I call them stories, but they’re just comedy recitals on a given subject.”
“Comedy is all about the pause.”
“The only way to stay sharp is to do live shows. There is no part-time comedy.”
“If I’m in a town for very long, usually I’ll work out in the comedy club just to keep my chops or work out the beats on new stuff.”
“I was a huge fan of comedy when I was a child.”
“I really understood a lot more about comedy after listening to Bill Hicks, who died at 32 years old. He’s probably the best comedian who ever lived. Although you can’t say that because of Carlin, Cosby and Pryor.”
“I started selling out comedy clubs before I got to town with no advertising. I was selling out theaters just on the rumor that I was going to be there.”
“If I’m not in the theatre, I’m in an open mic night or doing a guest set at the Comedy Club, or whatever, just trying to develop stuff.”
“I don’t watch Comedy Central. I don’t enjoy it.”
“I was a comedy fan when I was a little kid.”
“I think the world has their own good, clean, Christian comedy. They don’t need my help.”
“Comedy is great because there’s no overhead.”
“All I know how to do is take what’s on my mind and spit it out funny. I don’t know what else I could do besides comedy.”
“All those I admired as a young performer had a calmness to their comedy.”
“Our comedy was light-hearted amusement that seemingly tripped naturally off the tongue. That’s why I don’t think it will date.”
“There are many comics around who don’t really have a feel for comedy. They can say outrageous things, have clever thoughts, and deliver some funny angles. But they are not genuinely funny.”
“Comedy taste changes. It only changes slightly, but there’s always a different angle, a different attitude.”
“Always being the outsider, you… feel comfortable everywhere, but you don’t really feel at home anywhere. I definitely draw comedy from that.”
“I joined a campus competition, as I felt I could do comedy, and I won. Then I started doing standup gigs in 2009 while completing my law degree, but I never told my parents. They only discovered a few years later.”
“My style of comedy is probably absurdist, observational, and Olympian.”
“I grew up in Singapore, and I went to Australia for law school, and after law school, I started doing stand-up comedy.”
“What happened was, in my final year of university in Australia, there was a campus comedy competition, and I felt like it was something I could do. I won that competition, and I kept doing it, and I couldn’t get a job in law. So I just kept doing comedy.”
“When you do comedy shows, you usually don’t finish until about 11 P.M. Then you have this adrenaline dump, and you get hungry.”
“Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.”
“I’m not at all funny. I can do dark comedy pretty well, but straight-up comedy, I don’t know. I’m much darker. I’ve been like that since I was 3 years old.”
“Scotland needs comedy more than ever. With the independence debate, finally after 300 years, reaching room temperature.”
“What’s fascinating about doing comedy about the referendum is, because it is the first time, it is the most extraordinary atmosphere. You find that if you are making jokes about politicians, it becomes intensely political.”
“When I was 15, I was asked to do ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ at school, and it fundamentally changed my life. It’s obviously an extraordinarily diverse and potentially electrifying part. It’s a big leading part, and I hadn’t really played anything like that before; I was the one doing the comedy side bit.”
“I would love to play the lead in a big romantic comedy. That’s definitely a dream of mine.”
“Comedy just comes naturally, so I’ve always gravitated to comedy.”
“I get a lot of my sense of comedy from my mother. She’s very funny, but she doesn’t know she’s funny.”
“I’d love to try comedy, which I’ve never actually done. I could fail miserably at it, but I’d have fun working it out.”
“I love the absurd – kind of absurdist comedy, absurd things in life.”
“I try to do women’s-point-of-view comedy. The joke is, ‘This is what I think; there’s the truth.’ I try to think of stuff that’s real broad, but the more personal it is, the more universal it is. All my friends go through the same stuff.”
“Comedy is the only hope for humanity.”
“I was ballet dancing at four, playing piano by six, and doing commercials by 12. When I was 21, I was on the number one live comedy show in Puerto Rico. I told my parents, ‘I’m going to New York to become a performer.’ And I left.”
“While I wouldn’t say that I’m going to do another Disney TV show, I would like to do another comedy or something musical. But I like doing the dark independent stuff as well.”
“Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.”
“For me, if I were to be at home in any kind of style, it is more comedy than anything else.”
“I do as much comedy as I possibly can, but I’m basically limited by the imagination of the secretaries who make the decisions.”
“I always try to keep in mind that while the characters in a farce may find themselves in outrageous dilemmas, and may behave in a way that the audience finds amusing, the characters themselves don’t have the consolation of knowing they’re in a comedy.”
“Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on ‘canned’ laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.”
“I got everybody on my side through comedy.”
“The original Dean Martin Comedy Hour handed me some hysterical sketches. I’ve got highlights on tons of these variety shows, given to me by their great writers. I’d love to be doing all that again.”
“My parents are desperate, they keep saying: ‘Please stop doing these angsty roles; make it easier for us.’ So, yeah, I’d love to do some comedy.”
“I’d like to do a romantic comedy like ‘Notting Hill,’ which is one of my favorite movies.”
“I don’t like to be entertaining. I don’t like the feeling of being entertaining. If there was a musical or a comedy that was not just for entertainment but was rooted in something I could relate to on a real level, then I think I would do it.”
“I always wanted to do a comedy, but I wanted to pick the right one. But it came down to working with Steve Carell. I’ve wanted to work with him since I met him years ago as a kid.”
“I don’t get a lot of romantic comedy scripts.”
“Truly, with a sitcom and the rhythms of comedy… music is so helpful in that area of life.”
“I used to do stand-up, actually. I had a ten-minute routine I did for a thing called ‘Stand Up for Labour’ where we’d go around different seats and use comedy to raise money. I stopped doing this routine when I started running for mayor.”
“There was really a snobbery from people in film – they did not want people who had come from television. It was the poor relation of show business, and especially situation comedy.”
“I love acting but I also love writing, especially comedy.”
“With every film, I try and give the audiences a little more than the previous film in terms of comedy, action, drama and so on.”
“I love comedy, and I love listening to comedians talk.”
“Hugh Grant is the main man. He’s the number one romantic comedy man in the world.”
“Stand-up comedy is an art form and it dies unless you expand it.”
“When has stand-up comedy been kind to anyone? It goes after anyone who’s the target. Comedy attacks, man.”
“So many of these comics are just frustrated singers or actors – they want to get a gig doing a sitcom. It’s paint-by-the-numbers comedy, lame joke-telling. They’re drawn to it as a career move.”
“Just because I do a few comedy bits about gay people, that does not mean I’m out there promoting some anti-gay cause.”
“I’m a comedian, and my comedy has never endorsed violence towards gays.”
“I’m not going to give up the shock part of my comedy.”
“I grew up watching ‘Ghostbusters.’ I loved that movie before I knew it was a comedy! As a kid, I lived between Ghana and Detroit and in Ghana for, like, first and second grade. And I had a VHS tape of that, and I would watch it every day. It’s kind of like why I got into comedy.”
“I think Detroit deserves a comedy that’s not about suffering.”
“Hollywood constantly wants to label you and type you into a certain category, ‘Oh he’s a comedy guy,’ or the weirdo character guy or the villain.”
“I think comedy’s harder to pull off on the screen than on the stage, anyway. Tragedy is easier on the screen… oddly enough.”
“I have always had huge respect for comedians/comediennes. It’s because comedy is very hard to portray.”
“I would like to do a romantic comedy, but not a romantic comedy that is cheesy. I want to do an old romantic comedy like ‘Roman Holiday’ or ‘My Fair Lady.’”
“Usually comedy is only available to us ladies in the romantic comedy. That’s why I hate romantic comedies.”
“I know nothing about love and romance, so I prefer to stick to just comedy.”
“As for doing more dramatic work over comedy, I do whatever turns me on at the moment.”
“Comedy is wonderful when you really nail it and you hear people laughing, but it’s not always that easy.”
“I will do comedy until the day I die: inappropriate comedy, funny comedy, gender-bending, twisting comedy, whatever comedy is out there.”
“I was very young when ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ came out, but that kind of comedy and the spontaneity of her, I think it really deeply affected me within just the joy of performance.”
“People don’t want to always see a comedy or an action film. If the film in a particular genre is made well, then it will see its share of success.”
“Good drama, challenging drama – and comedy for that matter – has a place in the daytime schedule.”
“It always interested me that ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ and ‘The Kumars,’ when shown around the world, were referred to as British comedy. It was only here that they were referred to as Asian comedy, even though I always felt it was very British in its humour and structure.”
“I was greatly influenced by ‘The Goons’ and ‘Monty Python’ reconstituting what comedy was – it could come from a funny word, not just a set up and a pay-off. I liked the zaniness; they were satirical, slightly saucy and very literary in their references.”
“I love comedy, I love comedy… I think I’m funny!”
“My whole life I try to make into a comedy, so it would be nice to see that onscreen.”
“I love a lot of comedy actors and actresses like Kristen Wiig and Tina Fey and all those women who are really brilliant and funny.”
“People in comedy are just gorgeous, just the best human beings. They are naturally interested in other people and in playing something other than themselves.”
“The secret of comedy is enjoying it. If you’re not laughing, it’s not going to be funny.”
“In television, women can really run anything. It can be a comedy, it can be a drama, it can be genre, it can be anything. But in films, women are still getting to the top.”
“I never defend my material. Comedy is subjective.”
“Whether that’s an action film or a comedy or a drama or anything in between, I’m willing to prove that I can play with the big boys.”
“I think most of my tastes were British, as far as comedy went, when I was growing up.”
“I enjoy doing physical comedy.”
“’Monty Python’ and ‘The Simpsons’ have ruined comedy for writers for the rest of our lives.”
“I never looked at my future as comedy. Even at Second City, I always thought of it as acting. I knew I was going to be an actor financially, emotionally, egotistically.”
“People just associate me with comedy – not that I mind. I don’t mind that at all.”
“Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years.”
“Working on ‘Comedy Bang Bang,’ we’re there from 10-7, and that’s a pretty light day compared to most other TV shows. Other shows, it’s like 10-10.”
“After the comedy boom of the ’80s, there was a certain formula that comedians had to do and could do in order to be successful touring comedians, and those were mainly observational comedians who had a very strict structure of what made an act, and I think it was very performance oriented.”
“What I love about comedy is breaking down the barrier between the audience and the performer.”
“There’s always something interesting about comedy teams that have the exact same energy. The one time I really noticed that was Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in ‘Step Brothers.’”
“I probably could be a world-class screenwriter by now if I had spent the kind of work I devote on Comedy Death-Ray to that. But I do okay, in that regard. I mean, my stuff gets bought, so it’s all right.”
“I grew up loving David Letterman and Pee-wee Herman, but as far as live performance comedy, all I knew were the Jerry Seinfeld-type comedians of the world, and that’s what I thought live performance comedy was all about.”
“I’ve done a lot of work other than sci-fi, and between half-hour comedy, stage, and various movie roles, I’ve really tried to avoid being typecast.”
“Really I’m a fan of any movie, whether it’s suspense, action, or comedy – anything that has a good story.”
“I’ve been doing comedy in New York since 2007.”
“When you get started in comedy, you’re at the bottom of the totem pole. Not only are you not getting paid at these open mics. You’re actually paying to do them.”
“My background is in comedy.”
“I never considered game show host as a career, but it’s fun because I get to inject some of my comedy into it.”
“Well I think comedy everywhere has lost a bit of its bite. In Canada, I can’t argue with the quality, but it feels like it’s gotten a little safe.”
“If comedy duos don’t like each other, it just won’t work.”
“Comedy is actually very macho driven.”
“My theory is that comedy comes from little people.”
“’Greg the Bunny,’ the comedy television show that I co-created, happened almost by accident. Dan Milano, Spencer Chinoy and myself made a public access show that caught the eye of IFC, and it has had three incarnations since then with a season on Fox.”
“I make dramedies, but ‘Tangerine’ really has a lot of comedy, and I saw that it had a great effect – it reached a larger audience.”
“Everybody kind of looks to comedians and comedy for relief and a fresh breath about what is going on in the world.”
“It’s always comedy first on ‘Will and Grace.’ There was never any other agenda.”
“I think the worst thing you could ever do is label comedy. I’m a fan of the broadness of Lucille Ball, the subtlety of Peter Sellers and the oddballness of Fred Armisen and the wittiness of Marty Short. I’m a fan of all of it, and I want to do all of it.”
“Maybe I’ll just become a cartoon character because there’s nothing left for me to do in an R-rated comedy.”
“I started working full time as a comedian in 2005, shortly after we did the Vince Vaughn ‘Wild West Comedy Show.’ I worked at the Four Seasons hotel from 1998 to 2005, so about seven years, just trying to put some food on the table and pay the rent while I went out to the open mics and got my feet wet with stand-up comedy.”
“I used to devour a lot of stand-up comedy in my cousin’s basement. He had cable and I didn’t, so I went there and saw all the comedians.”
“Comedy is only funny when there’s real pain.”
“I did sketch comedy with a troupe at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.”
“I still have a desire to do some sketch comedy. My dream is to be on ‘SNL,’ to host ‘SNL.’”
“I like to approach comedy from character, to have the stakes for the individuals in the story be very high.”
“With any half-hour comedy, it kind of takes on its own life and finds itself.”
“I did not go into comedy to escape anything. I went into comedy because I had parents who thought it was a reputable way to earn a living.”
“I started in high school, and in college, I studied radio, TV, and film. The plan was to be a filmmaker, and it was always comedy.”
“It is always exciting when you find someone who is really enthusiastic about being half of a comedy team.”
“Good comedy doesn’t have to be a comedy idea.”
“Most comedy comes out of misery.”
“The only thing I can ever do is make a film that I can respond to. I could not make a romantic comedy for college girls. I wouldn’t know how that works.”
“’Mad TV’ is one of my most favorite shows of all time and is a huge part of my obsession with sketch comedy.”
“I’ve made a lot of crazy comedy videos and said a lot of crazy things. If it’s too offensive, I apologize and move on, but I do comedy.”
“Being a family in general is a comedy of errors.”
“I love comedy, but I actually do prefer drama because I am already animated as a human being.”
“I suppose comedy is my first love, in a way.”
“To be honest, I’m probably more of a comedy person, actually. I really enjoy the comedy stuff, and I’ve got some things I’ll be working on that I think are just different ways of combining genres in comedy and drama and action.”
“You know what I would really like to do? I’d like to do a half hour drama with comedy in it.”
“Women and minorities have excelled beautifully in comedy, but very few women are the lead in a drama.”
“There are lots of actors, and you need a way to stand out. Writing comedy sketches was a way of doing that.”
“I was the kid who liked making other people laugh, so maybe the comedy came before the acting.”
“The most fun I ever had on a movie was working with Albert Brooks. He’s the caviar of comedy. I mean, nobody’s funnier; nobody is smarter than Albert Brooks.”
“I never set out to build some behemoth comedy career. My taste in movies is far more eclectic than that so my aspirations as a filmmaker are far more eclectic than that.”
“Unquestionably, standup comedy is and has always been an art form.”
“I will always love to perform standup comedy.”
“Comedy is one of my strengths.”
“I’m grateful to be working. The most exciting thing for me is that I never get bored – I’ve done comedy, drama, musical theatre and now Shakespeare.”
“I worked on this Showtime series called ‘Beggars and Choosers,’ this was like 2000, and Bea Arthur guest-starred on our show. I always loved ‘The Golden Girls,’ and thought she was a supreme comedy actress, supreme actress period.”
“The comedy of class, played so straight, is a wonderful thing for an actor to sink their teeth into.”
“Fleabag’ is its own genre. It isn’t comedy. It isn’t drama. It isn’t even tragi-comedy.”
“Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.”
“When I did comedy I made fun of myself. If there was a buffoon, I played the buffoon.”
“I’ve been very fortunate to be able to jump around. I just did this really wonderful film called Map of the World. That was a real, amazing, dramatic story. Then I did a movie called Company Men, a little comedy about the Bay of Pigs.”
“People are amazed that I do comedy. I always did comedy.”
“I think that every piece has its challenges. I love going back and forth between one and the other. I’ll always pick a comedy over a drama.”
“I always felt that my way into comedy would be through my writing rather than my acting.”
“When I look at it now, the whole punk thing is sort of comedy in a weird way.”
“I grew up surrounded by sketch comedy.”
“I certainly think, obviously, rhythm is a huge part of being an actor. It just is unconscious, to a degree, but particularly in comedy, rhythm is pretty essential, and there’s probably something more physiological going on.”
“When I decided I wanted to be an actor in high school, I really went into improv. I took classes at The Groundlings. I studied acting. Did sketch comedy in L.A.”
“I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it’s a doddle because you’ve got an audience.”
“There is a universality to comedy.”
“Jewish comedy doesn’t come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn’t come out of nothing… I don’t want to be part of a story where Jews are just victims or bullies – and I’m not saying that’s what the Israelis are.”
“I was in the Air Force and was a boom operator (in-flight refueling). I got my comedy start in the Air Force.”
“People think comedians don’t do drama. Comics are drama. And what is drama, as opposed to comedy? It’s all the same to me.”
“You can be too pretty for comedy – man or woman.”
“I’d say a lot of black comics were forced to do the black comedy circuit. I’d go into black comedy clubs and see what they’re going through, which is different because they’re almost made to be in another world.”
“What holds you back in comedy is fear.”
“Everyone wants me to do the comedy thing. But I always wanted to do action adventure. I want to be a guy like 007 who fights against the establishment. If they can make Bruce Willis believable as an action hero, I could do it, too.”
“I like to do things that are shocking or challenging for the sake of comedy.”
“I love comedy that seems kind of a little bit absurd.”
“I own four copies of Robin WIlliams’s Live on Broadway comedy special for HBO. One in Wilmington, one in L.A., one in my trailer, and one at my parents’ house. I can watch it over and over again and it never gets old. He is the funniest, wittiest man on the planet!”
“People seem to want to give ‘Flowers’ a comedy or a comedy-drama label. I suppose it’s closer to comedy-drama, but it feels like it requires a whole new definition all of its own.”
“I would like a comedy. A comedy would be nice.”
“You cannot say, because I am from Naples so I like the mixture of drama and comedy all together.”
“It’s so rewarding being on radio, especially because it’s not about what you look like at all. And I love comedy, so it’s very exciting.”
“I think, in a comedy, it’s easy to play people as very two-dimensional. But what is enjoyable to watch is seeing a more fully rounded person.”
“It feels a lot freer doing a comedy.”
“I think so. I can’t think of anything that requires more finesse than comedy, both from a verbal and visual point of view.”
“The principles of comedy are the principles of comedy. I can hear funny.”
“I would love to do a romantic comedy – a good one.”
“Status is always ripe for satire, status is always good for comedy.”
“I liked comedy as a kid. When I was a kid, I’d go to sleep to, like, Bill Cosby albums every night. I’d listen to ‘Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow… Right!’ and ‘Wonderfulness,’ which are two of his most famous albums. Then the next night, I’d flip them over, ’cause it was the old stackable turntable.”
“The first time I met Jon Stewart was at the press conference that Comedy Central held to announce Jon would be the new host of ‘The Daily Show,’ which back then was not called ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.’”
“I loved George Carlin and Dean Martin. I was one of those kids who had every comedy album.”
“The only thing that I don’t like is my kids watching comedy that isn’t actually funny. There’s a lot of supposed tween comedy on TV that isn’t particularly funny, but it’s got a lot of laugh track. And I go, ‘Please don’t watch that. Please just watch something that’s actually funny.’”
“I’ve mainly been in dramas, so this is one of my first comedy kind of performances in Cecil B. Demented.”
“I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire.”
“The prospects for a coherent, hilarious and consistent American comedy seem to lessen every year, as the poor waterlogged, gassy corpse called ‘Evan Almighty’ proved when it floated ashore recently. So there’s a temptation to think too highly of Robin Williams’s uneven but occasionally funny ‘License to Wed.’”
“I’d like to do a bit of comedy.”
“I am a passionate believer that comedy is a way of tackling some of the most dark and difficult aspects of being a human being.”
“Comedy is a very personal thing, and some people will find it funny, some people won’t.”
“Maybe there’s a sort of veneer of optimism about U.S. comedy, whereas perhaps in England, we don’t mind ending it on a sourer note.”
“I’ve always been a fan of physical comedy. It kind of hits you in a different way; it bypasses the intellect and hits you in the gut.”
“It never really occurs to me that I’m doing cringe comedy. It’s something that people tell me afterwards, and I say, ‘Again? Really? I never set out with that intention.’”
“After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.”
“There used to be an art form called the ‘comedy of manners.’ Why aren’t comedies of manners made now in this country? The answer is simple. We no longer have manners to speak of.”
“To the extent that there is anything properly identifiable as dignity in our society today, our present writers of comedy would be inclined to treat it as a proper object of ridicule.”
“Many comedians and comedy writers have shared the childhood experience of learning to joke to protect themselves from neighborhood bullies when challenge or physical defense were not among the sensible options.”
“I do comedy shows. I make fun of myself, first of all.”
“I always feel so pretentious talking about comedy and deconstructing it. It always feels somehow self-centred to talk about any sort of process.”
“Taste in comedy, like fashion, changes all the time.”
“I’ll do whatever I can do to remain employed. I’m just not precious about doing comedy or doing drama. I never want to do something in order to prove to other people what I can do.”
“There are a lot of action movies with very little comedy.”
“I’ve done hip-hop videos, family comedies, a quirky comedy.”
“When I was a student I was very, very ambitious, completely immersed in my comedy career. I never had that period of reckless hedonism that you should get out of your system in your youth.”
“There is a strong ethical dimension to the best comedy. Not only does it avoid reinforcing prejudices, it actively challenges them.”
“I’ve always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy.”
“Comedy is unique in the sense that laughter is a palpable noise that everyone makes.”
“There’s something quite joyful about doing comedy which doesn’t really need much analysis. I’m not elitist. I like to do crowd-pleasing stuff which is a bit smart, but is just about belly laughs.”
“The great thing is that the funny side of getting old is fuel for my comedy.”
“Big comedy is good, I like things that are big, but good comedy has to be truthful I think and has to reflect some sort of reality.”
“I’m a huge fan of Jack Lemmon, he was someone who managed to tread that line between comedy and tragedy and sometimes give very big performances, but they were never over-demonstrative and they were never not based on a kind of real truthful human being.”
“I don’t think there’s anything outside what comedy can address.”
“It’s good Xerox is known for its copying machines, and it’s good Jim Carrey is known for comedy.”
“Unless you’re Jack Lemmon or Cary Grant, there are few guys who can do comedy and drama.”
“I just wanted to be in show business. I didn’t care if I was going to be an actor or a magician or what. Comedy was a point of the least resistance, really. And on the simplest level, I loved comedy.”
“What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.”
“I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.”
“Comedy may be big business but it isn’t pretty.”
“When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.”
“In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do do comedy during that show. It’d be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.”
“I thought ‘Borat’ was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn’t some studio-produced script with 14 writers.”
“With comedy, you have no place to go but more comedy, so you’re never off the hook.”
“I gravitate to ensemble comedy.”
“The trouble with a series as it gets older is it can feel like a tradition, and tradition is the enemy of suspense, and it’s the enemy of comedy. It’s the enemy of everything, really. So you have to shake it up.”
“I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.”
“I’ve been doing comedy longer than I haven’t been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on ‘The Tonight Show.’ There’s truly nothing like it; it’s intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.”
“To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It’s commenting or observing or twisting life.”
“There’s an assumption that my audience is all these bearded twats from Dalston. But actually, quite a lot of older people go. For them, it’s like pre-alternative comedy, when there was Dave Allen or Jackie Mason or someone. Also, weirdly, because I don’t really swear, they’re not scared off.”
“I wasn’t the classic comedy type; I wasn’t bullied or extrovert. I was more the ambitious literary one who wanted to write clever little plays.”
“If I had grown up in London, I wouldn’t have been as keen to become a comedian or a writer. I’d have been able to see a lot of good films and music and comedy. I’d have been distracted. As it was, I had to make it.”
“With comedy, it’s not always a blessing to be beautiful because part of it is self-parody and gurning.”
“’Yamla Pagla Deewana’ is not slapstick but a situation based comedy.”
“I want to do more comedy… I’ve done a couple TV shows that had some comedy going on.”
“When I tell people I’m a comedian they say, ‘Oh, are you funny?’ I say, ‘No, it’s not that kind of comedy.’”
“I think if I have any kind of unique gift, it’s more in the comedy area than it is in the dramatic area.”
“Anders Thomas Jensen and I had talked about making a movie which addressed the cancer issue, and we didn’t want to make it heavy-handed. We wanted to do something which had a lot of hope in it. And then for some reason we came up with a romantic comedy.”
“Comedy has always been my favourite genre, and I always wanted to be a part of a process which makes people happy. The genre has always been lucky for me.”
“In terms of level of difficulty, it would go comedy, thriller, and then romantic drama.”
“When I tried to branch out into comedy, I didn’t do very well at it, so I went back to doing what I do naturally well, or what the audience expects from me – action pictures.”
“There’s sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy.”
“Comedy gives you a shot of euphoria that distracts you from everything that’s awful.”
“There’s sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy. But I do like the idea of being an auteur in the sense of writing and being in your own stuff.”
“I acted in high school and studied at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford for one summer. I minored in theater, and I was always acting growing up, but really, I was just more interested in the comedy of it all.”
“Stuff that I write isn’t as similar to the stuff that I’m in, but I don’t really care. I just do comedy.”
“I don’t really know how to act that much. I’m quite good at comedy, but it’s mostly acting naturally.”
“I acted in high school and studied at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford for one summer. I minored in theater, and I was always acting growing up and stuff, but really, I was just more interested in the comedy of it all. So for me, it’s always comedy, and then acting is just one medium of comedy.”
“I do comedy to give people an ephemeral escape from the tragedy that permeates everyday life.”
“I’m a student of comedy in general, so I’ve always loved Billy Crystal. But I’m a different type of showman. I’m a clown and a jester.”
“I am trying to do comedy on every single medium. I consider myself a public servant.”
“My father is very dry and very quick-witted, and my mother is very silly. It was the perfect combination because I got an education in physical and verbal comedy.”
“Steve Martin’s comedy albums are so ridiculous.”
“’Silicon Valley’ is a great show. It might be the best comedy on television. And if the Academy feels I have stood out to the point of deserving an award, I won’t pawn it.”
“It’s the comedy that guides me. The acting and all that stuff comes second. It’s equally important, but I just try to do that as best as I can.”
“My favourite kind of comedy comes from the awkwardness of living, the stuff that makes you cringe but borders on tragic – that is more interesting to me. It resonates; it comes from emotional truth.”
“I don’t mind going from sadness to comedy in a split-second or mixing the two up.”
“’Eagle vs Shark’ was about keeping myself sane. I wanted to go back to my comedy roots with people I trusted and had worked with before and do something low-budget and more experimental.”
“I do all these various activities like painting and writing, comedy and films probably because not that I’m good at everything but because I’m not good at any of these things.”
“I love comedy because I’m naturally a very silly person.”
“I love edgy comedy. ‘Coming to America’ still gets me and ‘Friday.’ I watch old Richard Pryor stand-up on VHS, too.”
“I have to be careful not to do so many comedy airhead roles from now on. I’ve turned down a couple already.”
“I can do a little bit of comedy. I can be in an in-between place, where I can do a little bit.”
“I think comedy is the perfect vehicle for that which is slightly beyond life.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of drama, but I feel like comedy is my strength.”
“I started off first doing a TV series called ‘Boston Common.’ That was my first big job, and then I went on to do another half hour comedy show, and that was with Tom Arnold, called ‘The Tom Show.’”
“I find comedy to be really scary, because it can go so wrong so easily, and the margin for error is so huge – and I guess that’s what makes it funny, that tension.”
“I haven’t really done a lot of comedy. It’s something that terrifies me.”
“Doing a lot of drama earlier in my career and now exploring comedy has been a treat for me, and I’ve had an absolute blast, and I hope to continue.”
“Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.”
“Good comedy is ageless.”
“I really enjoy comedy. It’s a real challenge.”
“I was on ‘In Search of the Partridge Family,’ MTV’S ‘Miss Seventeen,’ and the comedy ‘Love Monkey.’”
“Nobody who is a Penn & Teller fan thinks of us first and foremost as magicians, but as a comedy team.”
“I could’ve ended up in action films forever. But the comedy thing has been my forte.”
“I’ve been fortunate because I got the gift to do comedy and drama. When you can do both, you get twice as many parts as anyone else.”
“When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor.”
“There is still a lot to be said for the well-made, witty, clever, three-act comedy.”
“A talk show is about having a look at a famous face, a bit of stand-up comedy, knockabout stuff – an interview is what Barbara Walters or Connie Chung does in the States, in-depth, done properly.”
“I find that comedy is my specialty, but drama is slowly starting to move up in that rank. I’ve always liked playing a character that has depth and that I’m able to bring my own niche to.”
“WWE prepares you for everything in entertainment. It’s the truth. You need a host? Get a WWE Superstar. You need someone for an action movie, a comedy movie, a drama movie, you get a WWE Superstar. Because these guys are the most well-versed, well-trained, and hardest working guys out there.”
“By the time I got to ‘St Vincent,’ I had shot so many scenarios I was ready for anything – I’ve shot kangaroos, I’ve shot dogs, cats, crowds, fight scenes, stunts, comedy, drama, handheld, dolly, helicopter, crane – I just felt that there was nothing I was unprepared for.”
“If you don’t have comedy in a movie, you don’t have a movie.”
“There are times when I wonder how I ever thought that I could dramatize the death of a national discussion as a family comedy.”
“I think it’d be a lot of fun to jump back into the comedy world.”
“There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central – and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.”
“I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that… stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I’m much more cautious now.”
“T.J. Miller and Kumail Nanjiani I met when I was in Chicago, learning how to do comedy.”
“With YouTube streaming and Twitch and all that, you can just hop on on any given night and play videogames and have people come watch you. And even if you’ve only got 400 people watching your stream, that’s more people than would see my comedy if I went to UCB.”
“In any awards ceremony, if you’re a finicky person like myself, you can pick a multitude of things to nag about. I get frustrated with the comedy category because it feels like it gets sidelined a lot of the time for all kinds of things – not sidelined, marginalized.”
“I’m not joking – it’s a top-three dream of mine to be on a comedy on HBO and to have it directed by Mike Judge and Alec Berg, and then on top of that, have it be with friends, two of them I’ve known for 10 years.”
“I’m definitely not frowning on improv; I mean, I’ve been doing it for years. I just think that there’s some styles of comedy that warrant a tighter pace.”
“Comedy is a coping mechanism, and it helps us stay alive.”
“Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t become Mr. Universe because he went to the gym every now and then. He did it on a regular basis. It’s the same thing with comedy. I try to perform seven nights a week.”
“When I got emancipated from the foster care program and I became homeless, it was a struggle. I was working at an airline, and then I stopped to pursue comedy 110%.”
“I think of comedy as my man: it’s the one thing I can always rely on that will keep me safe, keep me fed, put a roof over my head.”
“It attracts all types. But I definitely call the comedy world the land of misfit toys. Looking around the room at my friends, that’s what I see.”
“As a kid, I loved Paula Poundstone and Richard Pryor. But my mother was a huge influence on my comedy.”
“Comedy was a secret want, but it wasn’t anything I pursued.”
“Luckily, I’m not a gambler or a drinker or – you know, I get my fix of comedy.”
“While awaiting sentencing, I decided to give stand-up comedy a shot. The judge had suggested I get my act together, and I took him seriously.”
“Comedy is the ultimate anarchist.”
“Drama and comedy, to me, are all about being surprising, coherent, and true, all at once.”
“Stanley Kubrick went with his gut feeling: he directed ‘Dr. Strangelove’ as a black comedy. The film is routinely described as a masterpiece.”
“I’ve known Harvey for over 40 years and I worked with him on the Burnett show for 11 years. I guess you could say we’re about as close as you can get to being a comedy team.”
“I think comedy has to come from a real place. It has to come from an honest place.”
“With comedy, you really want to work things out beforehand.”
“Working with Lucille Ball was just a master class in how to do comedy.”
“’Goon’ is very much an action – it’s got a lot of heart, it’s got a lot of comedy, it’s got a lot of similarities to what I think was successful in ‘Deadpool,’ and so I think it’s not a stretch to compare those two things and say the world is a little more ready than they used to be for this kind of material.”
“What I’ve created comedically owes a lot to my ignorance of comedy and love of making theatre stuff.”
“It was – I’m very didactic in my lyrics, but I’ve always been drawn to mock my own emotions, and so I write this very lyric-heavy stuff, which suits theater and comedy much more than it suits pop.”
“Comedy is often a short career because you get to a point where you are no longer a small thing punching up at targets; you are the big thing, and it’s hard to write from that position.”
“Comedy actually works best when you’re living in an OK world, and you are pointing out the hypocrisy in apathy.”
“When I came into comedy in 2005, I didn’t even know there was discrimination against musical comics in the alternative-comedy strain.”
“In terms of comedy, I never did five-minute sets or clubs or anything. I just started doing shows. Coming from that theater background, it never crossed my mind that I should start doing five-minute sets.”
“Comedy covers such a wide range of different styles that I’m not really qualified to talk on all of them any more than anyone else is.”
“The one that was most fun was That’s My Bush; the part that I did for Comedy Central. That was a hoot. That was more fun that one should be allowed to have.”
“The Duplass brothers do that so well – that very simple, very horrifically awkward comedy.”
“The ladies of comedy now are comfortable dressing up. It’s not forbidden anymore.”
“In the beginning of my career, all I did was drama, and I couldn’t get arrested doing comedy; nobody would hire me!”
“’Buried Alive’ is a little scary, but also a comedy at the same time.”
“I basically did comedy there for about a year, and then moved to New York. If I had it to do over again, I would have booked myself on the road for at least a year.”
“I mean, I guess I started during the comedy boom, so it was literally like, on Sunday you could decide you wanted to be a comic, and on Monday, you could be on stage.”
“There seems to be more comedy for comedy’s sake.”
“Well, I have since seen you at Tinkle. It’s a comedy show started by David Cross, me and Jon Benjamin. It features a wide variety of acts for all tastes and seasons.”
“I’m traveling the world, ripping rooms apart with my stupendous comedy.”
“The worst thing you can do as a comedy director is be on set and think of something ridiculous, or an actor comes up to you with something ridiculous, and you say ‘No, no that’s too much.’ Let’s not worry if that’s too much, let’s shoot it, and then decide if that’s too much when we see it.”
“With comedy especially, it feels like such a clear-cut thing to be a writer-director. There is so much nuance and tone in a comedy that it’s hard to contextualise it in a script.”
“All I mean is, I’m not the kind of audience comedy directors want at a test screening because I seldom laugh, and if I do, it’s not very loud. That doesn’t mean I don’t like the movie.”
“Chris Guest is the godfather of improvisational comedy.”
“I’ve worked a lot in comedy. As much as I love playing dramatic roles, it’s always nice to be able to have some humor around when working.”
“One of the biggest heroes and influences of mine, especially acting and working in comedy, is Steve Coogan.”
“All comedy is really talking about social issues and things that are affecting our lives.”
“It bothers me when people say ‘shock comic’ or ‘gross-out’ because that was only one type of comedy I did. There was prank comedy. Man-on-the-street-reaction comedy. Visually surreal comedy. But you do something shocking, and that becomes your label.”
“When I was a television broadcasting student in 1993 up in Ottawa, Canada, and my friends and I started making a show, I consciously set out to apply comedy to technology. I started tomgreen.com back in 1994, and we weren’t able to put video on there yet, but we were aware that that was coming.”
“I tend to find comedy in dark places. I also tend to find comedy in taking on the status quo – which has always been something I find important.”
“I knew at an early age that I wanted to pursue comedy.”
“I’ve always liked outrageous comedy and pushing the envelope.”
“When I started doing stand-up again, a lot of it was coming from an angrier place, and I quickly learned that doesn’t spell a good time in a comedy club.”
“Comedy is delivered to people in the same form that music is being delivered: by YouTube. People are sharing music and comedy in the same way now.”
“If an audience is loud and in a party mode, that’s an audience that can absorb comedy.”
“I’ve always had fun looking forward, seeing where technology is going, and finding interesting ways of applying that to comedy.”
“Technology can’t eliminate the need for people going to want to go out and see theater and standup comedy.”
“I am desperate to do a comedy now.”
“I’ve always wanted to do a real comedy. I haven’t done enough, and it seems silly not to do more, considering the fact that people tend to laugh at me.”
“I love musical comedy; I love comedy in general, and I have varied taste in terms of books, film, theatre, and culture.”
“I enjoy doing these silly little videos, and a lot of stuff online is stuff I actually created for my live comedy shows.”
“When you shoot a special, you have no idea what’s going to happen, and the fact that I got to do the first one with Comedy Dynamics was a roll of the dice. It was a game changer for me professionally.”
“In the best traditions of American comedy, from its beginnings through the crash-bang comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, Leslie Nielsen skewered the otherwise proper, did it with mischievous delight and convulsed audiences mercilessly.”
“Obviously neither ‘American Idol’ nor ‘Dancing With the Stars’ is a variety show in the classic sense, but the way they incorporate elements of drama, comedy and suspense is moderately ingenious.”
“A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.”
“One of the attractions of translating ‘Heroes’ is that it’s not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It’s much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.”
“I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.”
“The funny thing is, Dennis Miller got me back into comedy.”
“Comedy is the ultimate truth. Jazz is hitting the notes that that no one else would hit, and comedy is saying words that no one else would say.”
“I know the musical world as well as I know the comedy world.”
“Stand-up keeps you alive. It is definitely the most specialized field in comedy because you need to stay sharp and well-tuned every night.”
“I haven’t had a lot of comedy come my way as a performer.”
“You cannot have the drama without comedy.”
“It’s just that, with comedy, the circumstances are just crazy-heightened, and you have these crazy things thrown at you. But you still have to do it truthfully, because that’s where the humor comes from.”
“’All Def’ is unlike any other comedy show or set because ‘All Def’ goes back to the essence of how urban comedy started. We give it a ‘stoop appeal.’ A stoop appeal is important for us because it’s where pretty much all black comics started doing their standup: cracking jokes on the stoop, in the hood.”
“If you enjoy and become a fan of Tony Rock, I really appreciate it! But, I do my comedy for me, so I don’t try and please everyone or appease anyone. In the end, it’s for me.”
“If you’re at the Comedy Store or the Laugh Factory or the Improv, even two minutes helps. You never know who might be in the audience.”
“I haven’t been offstage for more than two days since I started doing comedy.”
“My brother nurtured the love of stand-up comedy in a skinny little black kid named Tony.”
“When I was growing up, I was really into comedy. I listened to a lot of comedy albums. I loved Richard Pryor, but the comic that had the most impact on me was always my brother Chris, who was in the next room. It was tangible. If Chris could make it, I could try.”
“Lily Tomlin was one of the early comedy greats who influenced my courage to be the person I am.”
“A lot of stand-up comedy is embarrassing: too many idiots doing it in orange neckties against brick walls. I find most sitcoms embarrassing, too, because they seem so forced.”
“I just want to be funny, I just want to do comedy.”
“Comedy clubs are sacred ground. That’s where anything goes.”
“Reality is the scary thing. Not my work, not comedy.”
“People bring camera phones into comedy shows and clubs and concerts, and sound bites never come out right.”
“I do comedy for real people.”
“No one set that I ever do is the same. I mean, if I go to a comedy club, and I perform three sets, all three sets are different because anything can happen in between sets.”
“When Richard Pryor did comedy, it was like he was having a conversation.”
“Comedy should be easy, not laboured.”
“I think there should be comedy in everything; it doesn’t matter what you’re doing.”
“A sketch should be about two to three minutes, which is basically what most songs are. They’re usually done by groups. Good examples of each build and have different parts and twists in them. I guess sketch would be the comedy version of music.”
“Comedy is really getting quite popular in South Africa.”
“What I’ve always said about comedy is if you do it in the right way, you can say anything to anybody because they know where you’re coming from. They know it’s not malicious.”
“I want my audience to be my friends – that is when they will get the best comedy. If they see me as a performer, they won’t get the best show.”
“Nobody owns comedy. Nobody owns a premise. Nobody owns an idea.”
“If you look at it, the history of comedy has always been strongest among the nations who have been persecuted the most.”
“It’s funny because I think a lot of it is simply… We’ve never considered ourselves satirists, but because we’re on Comedy Central and because we’re South Park on Comedy Central, we can do any topic we want.”
“Jerry Bruckheimer creates comedy, he just doesn’t realize because he’s a turd.”
“Theo does comedy now, and he’s traveling around the country doing comedy, and I actually just saw him, he’s from Louisiana, and I just saw him when I went home to visit my family in Louisiana. I saw his comedy show and he was brilliant.”
“Trixie is like a hyper-feminine child’s toy who has it all. I love looking like I’m from Toys ‘R Us but serving off-color comedy.”
“Dark comedy helped me survive.”
“I grew up playing guitar and writing music, and I always wanted to be a songwriter and a singer and play the guitar. But while I was finishing college, my drag became lucrative, so I had to pursue what was going to pay the bills – and doing comedy as Trixie was something that I was able to market.”
“If you make comedy, if you try and make comedy where no one gets upset or offended, you’re going to fail.”
“Comedy can be fun no matter what you’re playing. It always has the potential to be a blast.”
“When you get on a comedy show, people assume you’re a comedian. I’d say I’m more of a comedy nerd.”
“For me, comedy is richer and larger than anything else.”
“More than an adult comedy, ‘Great Grand Masti’ is a naughty horror comedy, more on the lines of ‘Masti.’”
“I try to play serious scenes a little funny and the comedy a little serious.”
“One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”
“At those times I got into… I suppose you call it a rut. I used to do comedy, comedy, comedy and I suddenly thought I ought to break away from this somehow.”
“I had a terrible job letting me do anything that wasn’t comedy.”
“I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill… as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything.”
“Well I sure had been looking for a comedy for years without any success.”
“Partly because the town is just finicky, there are strange Catch 22 clauses in the consciousness of this community and one of them was that you, I found out, you can’t do a comedy unless you’ve just done a comedy.”
“My idol is Bea Arthur. I really tried to follow her example. She is one of my comedy ‘she-roes.’”
“Comedy writing is the hardest, and yet there’s so much that’s relatable in it.”
“I think drama and comedy are pretty much all the same, and the issue is whether or not you have a sense of humor.”
“Comedy is saving me.”
“Being sick is the reason I went into comedy.”
“It’s tough to do comedy. After ‘Mister’, my inhibitions with respect to comedy have come down.”
“I always tell people I went to the Harvard School of Comedy in front of America.”
“I much prefer doing comedy. I get a little paranoid when the audience is not laughing.”
“I am no prude, but when I watch comedy, I ask myself, ‘Who wrote this? A teenage boy in the locker room?’”
“Women are under-represented in TV comedy for a variety of reasons, the hackneyed ‘fear that women aren’t funny’ being one of them.”
“I love comedy; I’m very goofy and spontaneous.”
“It’s great extremes which leads to great drama and great comedy.”
“I’ve always been taught to just play the truth of the situation. If comedy comes out of that, or drama, whatever comes out of it, at least I’m playing the truth of the moment-to-moment reality.”
“I have a rule – ‘funny is funny!’ When I write comedy, it’s not my aim to upset people. I will be offensive, edgy and immature, but I will also be very intelligent and relevant. At my shows, there are no holy cows.”
“I don’t think one gets to choose the kind of comedy he/she does. I may not talk about Rahul Gandhi’s take on an ordinance, but I will talk about things as simple as a ‘chappal’ or a ‘sherwani.’ My comedy is about small things, and that is how it connects.”
“I’ve a belt that I have worn for every single stand-up comedy session since I was 19. I fear if I ever lose it, my career would crumble. That’s my one OCD.”
“Stand-up comedy is a lot about amplifying emotions and situations; movie acting has a lot to do with mellowing things down and making them subtle. The transition was almost terrifying because of the magnitude of change.”
“Anybody with a sharp brain and a mic can become a comedian, but there’s a need to move beyond it. The audience wants to witness the marriage of theatre, comedy and something more.”
“In Bollywood, I think Boman Irani and Vinay Pathak are unbelievably good at comedy.”
“Comedy comes from confusion.”
“A lot of people do comedy about India, but they’re not from India. It’s a Kwik-E-Mart perspective. I want to provide a genuine view and maybe one on how we see the West.”
“I do films which get me out of my comedian routine so that I don’t get bored being a stand-up comedian. And with films, it’s here today, gone tomorrow. So stand-up comedy is here to stay for me.”
“Going from drama to just straight-up comedy with Tommy Davidson and Jamie Foxx – what a blast.”
“Comedy can be very deep sometimes.”
“In 1998, it was possible to make a big-screen romantic comedy about email. Yep, email – the same medium we often think of now as boring and even annoying.”
“I learned early on that in the real world, the masks of tragedy and comedy adorn the proscenium of every life.”
“Harpo Marx looks like a musical comedy.”
“And then also I think it’s harder for women because comedy is so opposite of being ladylike.”
“I think it’s because my comedy is in your face, and it comes from a place that’s real.”
“It seems like when I first started, people got into comedy because they wanted to be good comedians.”
“Then you had people who wanted to get into comedy just to get a TV deal.”
“I watched a lot of comedy growing up.”
“Comedy comes from conflict, from hatred.”
“Juilliard gave me the ability to go and do classical, contemporary, comedy, drama, everything.”
“I grew up in the age of variety shows. ‘Flip Wilson,’ ‘Carol Burnett,’ ‘Donny and Marie,’ and ‘Sonny and Cher’ – I never missed an episode. These shows had it all: singing, dancing, and sketch comedy. One minute, they’re ice-skating with pyrotechnics, the next they’re doing a scene on a gigantic set. I just couldn’t get enough.”
“I’ve been pitching a show of five female stand-up comedians through the generations, from Phyllis Diller to Amy Schumer, so when I got an e-mail asking me if I would participate in the Women in Comedy Festival, I was thrilled.”
“The real reason for comedy is to hide the pain.”
“An old-codger comedy – that’s what I want to do.”
“What I like and find liberating in dialogue comedy is that the characters, and what they say, are not me. These are fleeting thoughts and observations and not presented as truths but as something that illuminates the character and the dynamic between the characters. This kind of dialogue is thesis and antithesis – and we never get to a synthesis.”
“Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen’s wonderful – this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic.”
“When I was doing ensemble theater and comedy work, I felt I had some talents. But when I started doing my shows in Berkeley and found that I could be funny on my own, I was shocked.”
“Paranormal reality shows are some of the best unintentional comedy in the history of recorded entertainment.”
“When I was a kid, I was a fan of comedy. I always loved Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Dave Letterman – not an actor, obviously, but I’m still impressed by his wit. I wanted to emulate them because they made me laugh.”
“I’ve got no dark secrets, I wasn’t beaten up, my parents were kind to me and there was a low crime rate where we lived. Maybe that’s where the comedy comes from, as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring suburbs.”
“I think a lot of the instincts you have doing comedy are really the same for doing drama, in that it’s essentially about listening. The way I approach comedy, is you have to commit to everything as if it’s a dramatic role, meaning you play it straight.”
“A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.”
“Molly Shannon and I used to always talk about that we really felt strongly that we were comedic actors, that we weren’t comedians. You just played things real and the comedy came out of the context.”
“I love mustaches with all my heart. There’s just something about sketch comedy and mustaches.”
“I joined the after-school club, School of Comedy, which progressed wildly, and in quite a Hollywood way. It sounds like ‘School of Rock’, right up to trying to raise money to pay for a venue in Edinburgh.”
“I look up to Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon. I’m a huge fan of their work. I also like actors who really transform themselves, like Joaquin Phoenix. And I loved Robin Williams growing up. He does comedy and drama so brilliantly.”
“If I tried to do comedy for the rest of my career, I would not be very successful.”
“It’s tricky: with comedy in any movie, you’re hungry for an audience to embrace a movie and be a part of an experience that’s comedic; it’s the easier way to go in some ways.”
“I didn’t set out to be a villain in film. I’m a character actor, and if my first movie was a comedy, I could have played a geek just as well.”
“Unintentional comedy is comedy just the same.”
“Do you know what the key to comedy is? Timing.”
“In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.”
“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”
“’Natural Born Killers’ is really a misunderstood romantic comedy.”
“I feel like if I consider myself comfortable in something, then that’s not exactly where I want to be. And in ‘Jane the Virgin’ specifically, I feel like I don’t have to choose… We get to do drama and comedy sometimes within the same thirty seconds.”
“All the jokes in my films, the comedy, they’re not me, I just try to hold a big mirror up to us.”
“There’s depth in my comedy.”
“Something that’s a hilarious comedy, for someone else might be a drama.”
“’Community’ is a comedy show, and one of the characters happens to be a Christian. I do think they have been very careful to make sure everyone is the butt of the joke for various reasons.”
“I found I had the ability to do comedy. My timing was really inborn.”
“People are surprised I do comedy! And I’m like, ‘Guys, that’s all I have been doing. For, like, forever.’”
“For me, comedy was deftly terrifying.”
“I want to own a comedy club.”
“I started comedy in 2006. I didn’t even think it was a thing I could do.”
“Comedy’s the ultimate pill that helps the really hard truths and hard facts go down, right?”
“Getting into comedy was difficult for my parents to comprehend. I think now they are really proud I stuck to it.”
“I really like just super dry comedy.”
“I adore doing comedy, I think it’s fantastic. I never saw myself doing exclusively comedy.”
“That’s one of the great things about comedy: we can – and should – say the things that other people aren’t supposed to say. If we didn’t do that, if we didn’t push against those limits, we’d just be standing around onstage and yelling.”
“It’s not good for comedy to be like, ‘Thanks for liking me.’ Being popular is poison.”
“This is going to sound pretentious, but I like comedy that addresses something I find either worrisome or interesting in my life.”
“I don’t like comedy that makes me feel worse about the world than I already felt before I turned it on.”
“If I’m doing comedy, I try to improvise a lot. Even if they don’t use it, it helps me loosen up and figure out the character.”
“I’ve done comedy, and I’ve done drama. I’ve sort of been a journeyman in my career so far.”
“I would love to do a comedy, and I think physical comedy is something I probably have a knack on.”
“I’d love to do a comedy; that’s the one thing I haven’t done yet that I really, really want to do.”
“I want to do a romantic comedy. Like a ‘When Harry Met Sally’ romantic comedy… A really sweet, show-my-vulnerability kind of role.”
“The majority of my work in games, outside of ‘Depression Quest,’ has been experimental pushes into comedy games. I think there are a lot of intersections there.”
“The bulk of my work is comedy and I wanted to use the gaming world as a vehicle to deliver comedy.”
“You don’t really see many games that stand as a pure comedy games.”
“When you really boil it down, what comedy does is you expect one thing, and you get a totally different thing that’s humorous, and we all laugh. That’s generally how, just mechanically – super-distilled – comedy works.”
“I like romantic comedy as a genre, but I think it can get stuck in its ways.”
“Comedy arises out of necessity, because some things are so dark that you have to laugh about it.”
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