Popular quotes about Comedy! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 29
There is no late-night comedy. You watch comedy, you watch whenever you want to tune on. You can it in the middle of the night. You can it in the morning. It's all comedy. They just label it late-night comedy so they don't have to pay as much.
George SchlatterI love good comedy. I don't like bad comedy. Of course, nobody loves bad comedy, but there's a lot of bad comedy out there.
Michael DornWe have little bits of comedy throughout our films but this is like a full-on comedy. I had great time. It was fun to do a comedy and see a lot of the people I worked with on our previous films and meet some new actors. It was a good experience for me.
Alex KendrickThe more serious the situation, the funnier the comedy can be. The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red rubber ball and if you throw it against a soft, funny wall, it will not come back. But if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively. Very, very few people understand this.
Mel BrooksPeople have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.
Carl ReinerComedy is hard to do, and I don't know why it doesn't have its own category in awards. I don't understand why people think it's harder to do drama than it is to do comedy. It doesn't get respect. It's hard. It's really hard. It would be more gratifying to get something for a comedy, because it doesn't happen much or at all.
Leslie MannI remember like that scene with Pharrell where they're at the music video shoot, we have this on camera actually, Pharrell's confused because we weren't doing the script. We were doing all this improv and then Diddy says to him... Pharrell's like I don't understand what's going on and Diddy goes, "We do a lot of improv". (laughter) I remember being we just made him into a comedy nerd. We somehow turned Sean Combs into a comedy nerd, so.
Nicholas StollerIts consistency of what comedy can do and what comedy can be.Growing up with that show [The Simpsons] shaped my worldview.
Eric AndreThe thing that still exists is that if it's at all possible for me to step outside the club after the show, because I still haven't encountered any comedy clubs that - legally they can't have weed smoking and alcohol at the same facility, pretty much in all the states that have legalized, that's part of the deal. And, unfortunately, comedy clubs make all their money from the selling alcohol part of it. So, since there are no venues I can smoke with the fans in, I step outside and pretty much every show I do there are some people out there and we have a nice little session.
Doug BensonMy 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.
Christopher WalkenThe interesting trick of comedy, in a lot of ways, is to have both the comedy and the grounding of the real thing. You get a real sense of a human being.
Natasha LyonneI see parody as another form of comedy. If you are making a comedy, there are a lot of different ways to do it. I'm not necessarily always aware of my quote-unquote persona when doing things like that. It's more, "What does the character need at the time?" I'm certainly drawn to certain types of material, there's no doubt about that.
Bruce CampbellComedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.
Ricky GervaisWhen you get big special effects pictures, sci-fi and things, there's little or no comedy. Or it's a domestic comedy and there's not one special effect. But very rarely do these things fuse and come out right.
Mel BrooksWhen Steampunk meets adventure and adventure meets comedy and comedy meets ingenuity and ingenuity meets charm and charm meets wonder and wonder meets pleasure the result is a Triumph. Dr Grordbort is the future. And the past. Which makes an ideal present.
Stephen FryI would love to be able to play anywhere, but to me the sweet spot is clubs and theaters, just because I feel like you lean in to tell a joke. You don't back up. Comedy lives in that area. I've played amphitheaters, big clubs, and pool halls, and the most fun rooms hold anywhere from 500 to 2,000 people. That intimacy is where comedy really lives.
Michael CheThe essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
Ralph Waldo EmersonAnyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.
Michael CaineI definitely prefer working in comedy over drama, but at the same time, when it comes to comedy, I tend to prefer comedies that have a great sense of truth to them and that come from an honest place.
Fiona GubelmannComedy can reach many more people than, say, a serious lecture on the topic. And comedy might just be the access point to reach people who want to be entertained and also learn something.
Aasif MandviI think if you turn down the volume on the good comedy, you should not even know if it's a comedy or not. It should look like a drama.
Peter BillingsleyThat's one of the things about comedy that annoys me the most from a comedian perspective. Comedy has gotten so segregated. Now it's like if you don't agree with somebody, you probably aren't going to like their jokes. I think comedians are starting to write for their audience and not towards the country.
Michael CheI don't like comedy that I think is bad comedy, where people are trying to be sick for the sake of it, where there's no intellectual point behind it. I like stuff that's got an underlying point of view.
Steve CooganI want to go to Australia so bad, do comedy there, and see the people there. It's a great country. I have friends that are Australian that have told me all about it. I want to do comedy there.
Brad WilliamsHumor is not funny. Humor is something else. Funny is a joke, sometimes silly. Comedy is deep and connected to tragedy; comedy could be deeper than tragedy, in my view.
Gerald SternPhyllis Diller came through a mine field of male comedians when she arrived on the comedy scene and she defused them all. She won her place in the Hall of Comedy as the First Lady. I will miss her.
Tim ConwayI do an act, and I've been doing an act for 50 years. I do a variety show, which is a musical comedy show. I do comedy, and I do singing, Broadway show tunes and different songs that I like. Been doing it for many, many years.
Debbie ReynoldsI'll probably stick to comedy for the time being. I mean, a great piece of work is a great piece of work, and I'm up for good work anytime. But I do love comedy!
Jenna ElfmanGeorge Lopez has to get a physical comedy checkup every year to make sure his bulging eyes don't get out of control... Good news George... you are humor free! There's no sign of comedy anywhere in your blood stream.
Andy KindlerIt's completely unsexy [Yello, "Oh Yeah" 1985]. It does capture that weird '80s materialism and "We're gonna get it on now" vibe. But it's a very juvenile approach. It also became a weird signal for comedy, in the sense that when you heard the song, it meant comedy was happening on screen. I feel like this song was probably done in a couple of minutes in a studio.
Margaret ChoI was sort of trained in drama. I went to theater school. I started on the stage. Comedy is absolutely an essential part of what we do as actors. But I think in the grand scheme of things, comedy was born from tragedy. First there was tragedy and then there were the comedies.
Alex O'LoughlinAll of comedy at some level is trial-and-error, whether it's a stand-up trying out jokes or a comedy show trying stories.
Michael SchurI've always been a fan of comedy, and I understood from a young age that what makes most comedy work is the immediacy of first person experience. I'd spent a lot of time from 1995-1998 focusing almost exclusively on poetry, and it's an incredibly difficult form in which to achieve a sustained comic tone unless you're Alexander Pope.
Kevin KeckI've always prided myself on being able to perform in the "alt-comedy" zone, but also being able to do comedy for people who aren't media-saturated, and maybe don't have the latest Dan Deacon album. I probably won't be the most popular guy at Zanies in Nashville, and I'll never be the coolest dude at Largo, but I like that I can swim in both those waters.
Christian Finnegan[Robert Smigel] is one of the greatest comedy writers in the last 50 years. "TV Funhouse" and Triumph and all those sketches.He's really unique, and he has an amazing comedy mind.
Neal BrennanUsually comedy is only available to us ladies in the romantic comedy. That's why I hate romantic comedies.
Sandra BullockFor instance, our music, They Might Be Giants, has this element of humor, which is probably the most uptight part of what we include in our music, because we're in part very self-conscious guys, and we want our music to stand up to the test of time, not just be visceral comedy records. We love humor and comedy, but there's this aspect to it that runs counter to what is included in most music.
John FlansburghI know it's the comedian's instinct to say, "Do it, man, nothing's off-limits! It's cool, bro!" I don't know if that's the answer for me. "Do I really want to make a joke about a miscarriage when a woman in the audience might have had one?" I don't worship comedy; at the end of the day I don't fall to the altar of comedy unquestioningly.
Bo BurnhamComedy is more difficult than drama. I think it's really difficult to make someone laugh because people have very different comedic sensibilities. In drama, you can get away with being a great actor and surrounded by great actors and having good writing. But in comedy you have to listen and you have to perform with a certain rhythm, because if you don't, it's like playing a wrong note in the orchestra and you can hear the off key and it will fall flat and you won't get that instant response.
Aimee GarciaI laugh a lot in horror films. If I'm scared in a horror film, I try to think about what's scaring me... particularly, if it's a bad movie, but something they're doing still works. It's the same way I look at comedy. I've always had an intellectual view of comedy, and what makes people laugh, and how does it work.
Jason ReitmanI had always been - everybody kind of likes comedy. I was very interested in comedy, beyond just liking it. I had friends that took apart radios; I wanted to take apart jokes.
Chris RockAll good writers across the board, if they're dealing with real tragedy, they will give you comedy in it. And if they're dealing with real comedy, there will be tragic moments in it.
Chukwudi IwujiI think comedy because of the Internet it has a bigger audience, a bigger fan base. It has fans that understand comedy more than any generation before because there is more guys like you, more guys like me, more guys like Louie CK who talks about it a lot. When you get a chance to see perspective that I don't think you ever got to see before.
Joe Rogan