Quotes About Comedy

The problem with a lot of comedy clubs is not that they are a comedy club; it's just the cheesy way they're presenting themselves. That's why a lot of people have a problem with them. If you're a relatively unknown comedian, you can play at a comedy club, you might play to hundreds of people every night. But if you try to make a concert event out of it, and try to play a rock club or something, where you might play to 10 people or no people. And the flipside of that is, that's also a great thing, to play to people who are your fans. Some people are too hard on the comedy clubs.

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.

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.

I love the idea of doing comedy, whether it's action comedy or just straight comedy. It's such a big, new world for me that I'm starting to realize that any character that I relate to, in any way, shape or form, or that I have any appreciation for, given enough preparation, I can find that person.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

I 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.

Do it [stand-up comedy] because it feels like the right thing to do. Do it because you don't want to do anything else. There is something in you that does not want you to do anything else other than comedy.

As a rule, Germans shouldn't do comedy. Their last box office comedy was Nosferatu.

I've talked to a lot of other women in the field of comedy and none of us feel like being a woman has been a barrier to success in our lives. I can't claim to feel like I've been under some man's thumb in comedy. I've sort of always done my own thing for better or worse, and have been lucky enough to be able to perform ever since. So I'm not surprised by all the articles, but I don't know if it's necessarily true. It's not like we haven't been around.

Comedy 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.

When 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.

Sometimes I would like the opportunity to do character-driven comedy and that's really what I was trying to do in Meet The Parents. I think in a way this is a more old fashioned type of comedy.

I remember reading in a comedy book very long ago when I first started, a person said there's a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.

Doing comedy for film is always a challenge because you are in the hands of the editor after the fact. I am hoping I can do some more soon, I enjoy doing comedy.

If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.

Just by nature, I think in comedy. I think in sketches and what have you. In every drama or action movie I've been in, I have to make a concerted effort not to turn it into a comedy. Every shot, before action is called and after cut is called, I'm usually in some goofy head space. It feels natural to me.

In terms of a comedy plan I don't really have a list of what I want accomplish. I'm just riding the wave! I think I will always come back to stand-up and comedy in all its forms. I just don't think it will ever be the one sole thing I do.

I love watching audiences scream. I imagine it's the same joy that a director feels who has made a comedy when he or she is sitting at the back of a theater listening to the audience laugh. That sound of laughter is so sweet to a comedy director and that's exactly how a horror film feels when you hear the audience scream.

I love my comedy too much to bastardize it with bad romantic comedy.

My favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning.

You aim comedy up. If comedy is aimed down, you're a jerk. You laugh at the powerful as a way of bringing them down to your level or bring yourself up to theirs. Donald Trump doesn't actually laugh. I've never seen him do anything other than smirking. He doesn't have a sense of humour. He's just mean.

The Lampoon was definitely quite formative. You know there's a crazy like kind of network of comedy writers from The Lampoon that are, that kind of you know like Seinfeld and The Simpsons and a lot of shows kind of had a lot of kind of Lampoon writers and so that was very formative. I mean, to me I got interested in comedy writing at an early like reading like Dave Barry.

I don't necessarily know much about comedy, I don't spend a lot of time watching it. Mainly because all my life for about 50 years I've had comedy.

I think comedy is on an organic upsurge right now because when I started, it was 1978 at The Comedy Store and Letterman had just stopped emceeing his morning show.

Comedy is actually very hard. It's hard to choose those moments and know when you can really push it, and know when you should be bringing it back and making it more subtle, and knowing as time goes on, as you do take after take and the crowd around you stops laughing. Whenever you do comedy, you realize you're up against - you're performing next to people who you would think are so unbelievably good at it, that that's a bit of a pressure. But at the same time, it's just fun. It's fun to be able to let out that side of you.

[In comedy] you never want to leave the actors hanging out to dry. So you need to come up with funny individual stories for each character, and then you do this sort of comedy geometry, weaving them together. Once you've got a funny structure and you know why the scenes are funny, then you get super funny people to say your own lines, say their own lines, say things in their own way, and every scene is a live rewrite in front of the camera.

It'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.

Yes, I would say my comedy is grunge, evidenced by the fact my jokes have put an end to big-hair glam comedy.

And you know, whether it's drama or comedy, the best work is based on truth. 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. So it's not that difficult to cross over.

I was doing stand up comedy when I was 11, that's how I got started; not because I wanted to do comedy, but because we were broke, living in Echo Park in Downtown Los Angeles, from 1986, I saw the Rodney King riots; my parents didn't really work. But I wanted a new backpack, that's how I got into this business - I wanted a new backpack.

One of the great things with comedy is that there's no such thing as a mediocre comedy; it's either uproarious or crap. That's the problem.

I dont think I could compare myself to Macaulay Culkin, because were pretty much two different kinds of actors. Hes done a lot of comedy. He does mostly just comedy like Uncle Buck and Home Alone and Home Alone 2. And Ive done a lot of different stuff, like sad movies, like the movie about the kid with AIDS.

I think people don't understand that comedy is an outlet for me. Comedy allows me to get outside of myself, and exercise this thing that is still kind of scary to me.

I like comedy a lot. I love comedy. It's so much fun, but it's hard, too.

You know, I've just always been sort of goofy and kind of gone with it. I actually usually work more in drama, but I have been floating back and forth with comedy and somehow they keep giving me jobs in comedy, so I guess there's something funny about me.

I like broad comedy. If I had an idea tomorrow for a film that was all slapstick and broad comedy, and it was an idea that interested me, I would not hesitate to do it because I enjoy watching these kinds of film.

I watch drama. I don't watch a lot of comedy. Watching comedy is like work.

I was not one of those people who wanted to be a comedian when I was growing up. I liked comedy, but didn't know it was something you could do for a living. I actually wanted to be an attorney. I did do things on the side like improv and sketch comedy, but law was my focus. I was a very bookish, academic kid. When I got out of college, I was really unhappy. I had a great job that I should have loved, yet I was miserable. I slowly realized that was because I wasn't performing. So I just tried stand-up and fell in love with it after one performance.

That's the nature of comedy. You always want to be improving and growing and changing with what's happening in the world. That's when comedy is most effective.

In every case, I find pre-planning noble, but not always that useful in comedy. You know comedy once you're doing it.

I can't watch other people doing comedy. As soon as somebody starts being funny I have to turn off because it upsets me. I get comedy indigestion. I just hate anybody else being funny. That's my job.

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.

I love a lot of comedy movies. I think I fell in love with comedy when I was younger. My brother and I would always sit down and watch some of the classics. Bottle Rocket is one of my favorite comedies.

People know where romantic comedies are going. It's not brain surgery to figure out the end of a romantic comedy.