Quotes About Comedy

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.

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.

I find that I'm just drawn to anything that's going to challenge me as an actress. So any time I get a chance to do a little comedy, that's also a nice change for me. Most of the time people think of me as a dramatic actress and singer. And there's a challenge there because comedy is hard. What do they say? "Dying is easy; comedy is hard."

I've stopped doing things that aren't clear comedy gigs - to do something that's not "comedy night," it's a difficult thing. People have to be given permission to laugh. You need to know it's comedy; otherwise you might just think I'm a man talking out loud.

For the first actual comedy-comedy I did, I took a comedy class in New York, which was full of slightly unhinged people. It was a pretty depressing crowd, very angry and strange people. But then I took a class at the Upright Citizens Brigade and I loved those people.

I think it's harder to go from comedy to drama than from drama to comedy. Seeing you dramatic all the time, they crave to see you being silly or funny. But, seeing you in comedy all the time, it's hard to see that person go be serious, for some reason.

There are two types of actors. There's the actors who can acknowledge that they could never do standup comedy. Then there's the pretentious ones, who believe that acting is harder than standup comedy. I definitely don't think it is. I also think making a comedy is substantially harder than making a drama.

I love comedy. I suppose comedy is my first love, in a way. I did a lot of acting, funnily enough, unprofessionally, as a kid. From when I was 10 years old until I was about 19, I was always doing little sketches with my friends, and doing different accents and voices. Probably about 3/4 of those were comedic, in some way, and the other 1/4 was more serious stuff or more action or more dramatic little pieces that I would make. But, I tend to lean towards comedy.

Endings of television shows are sometimes such depressing things. I think shows that have more of a narrative and are about what's going to happen next, those need to wrap up as a complete story. But it's weird when a goofy comedy show needs to end, and we knew it was going to be the end, and sometimes it's just better if a comedy show ends and goes away and they never had a series finale.

The secret to comedy is not playing the comedy, but actually playing the situation, playing the drama of it.

The 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.

In Canadian comedy, you'll almost never see guns. If you bring a gun into a scene, it's like, 'Whoa! Wow, how are we going to deal with that!' Guns in an American comedy are a given. Violence in America is used in a much more cavalier way.

The 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.

When you're doing comedy, it is so subjective. What is funny to you is not funny to another person. What is dirty to you is not dirty to the other person. Comedy is one of those things you throw against the wall and see what sticks.

A comedy isn’t about being funny...a comedy is about characters who dare to know that they may choose a happy ending after all.

I've never heard of a comedy that hasn't had reshoots, especially for the ending of a movie in a comedy.

When 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.

You know, sometimes I worry, you know, is comedy and my type of comedy going to get stale? Is it going to be so offensive that it becomes uninteresting or so niche that I don't have an audience anymore? But it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, where roasting now is a movement. These roasts are on in India, in Mexico.

The 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.

Human comedy is more profound than tragedy. In tragedy we die and it is very sad. In comedy we avoid death, and it is even sadder.

I think comedy is an angry art form; it's an outsider art form. Anger and comedy are really connected. If I'm angry about something I will try to think about something funny about it to lighten the load of the anger and cope with the anger.

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.

There was a producer from the Aspen Comedy Festival who happened to be there, as a friend of a friend, and she said, "I'd like to book you into the Aspen Comedy Festival," and we said, "Well, there isn't really a show to book in, this is just a little showcase and it's really our workshop." And she said, "No, it's great, I love it, just do exactly what you did."

What I've kind of learned about comedy is that when comedy gets too expensive it might not be funny. Sometimes it's good to keep the conditions where you're pressed for time and it's just about getting the work done, as opposed to how much things are we eating on the set.

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 just want to continue to do comedy. Comedy, I'm discovering, is my niche. It's what I'm born to do, so I would love to have my own sitcom one day in the future.

I'd love to do some comedy. Particularly French comedy, which I know sounds like a contradiction in terms.

People are amazed that I do comedy. I always did comedy.

I was always the Class Clown and over time became very good at it. I started doing comedy on stage at the Dallas Comedy Corner where I honed my skills by watching guys like Garry Shandling, Robin Williams, Jay Lena and more.

I think that comedy is a good defense for a child. Because you know childhood is a nightmare as it is. And so why not use comedy and being funny as a defense to get through your life as opposed to drugs, alcohol and good looks? Because those things are dangerous when your young.

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.

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.

The comedy really comes from how badly you want these characters to succeed and with a comedy that's often hard.

I gravitate towards dark comedy, because I'm a huge fan of dark comedy. I always think the most painful thing that you can laugh at is the best.

My childhood was lonely. Both my parents were away a lot, working, and the maid basically raised me. And I think that's where a lot of my comedy comes from. Not only was the maid very funny and witty, but when my mother came home I'd use humour to try and get her attention. If I made mommy laugh, then maybe everything would be all right. I think that's where it [my comedy] all started.

I have a romantic comedy I'd love to make, but I can't get the money for it. It's hard to get people to give you money for an arty romantic comedy when you've done a horror movie. So I can just sit there and keep complaining about that, or I can go make another horror movie this year. People will get behind me on that, because I'm relatively bankable. As long as I can do my own thing with it, I'll keep doing it.

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.

I'm not playing a comedy. I want to be playing the truth of the moment, and then have the comedy come out.

There’s obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

My first time on stage was the class "graduation" at the Comedy Store. It was awesome. Everything got huge laughs and I just thought I knew how to do comedy.

I think the role of comedy in your life should supersede anything and everything negative. Just by virtue of the fact that you have to be funny, you can't afford to focus on the negative. As a comedian, your challenge is to turn negative stuff into positive energy. You should be able to hear anything that sounds bad, that people normally wouldn't laugh at, and make it feel funny to you. No one should be able to deter you, once you have your mind set on comedy. Your survival as a comedian should be as natural as breathing. I need to breathe and I consider my career my air.

All 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.

Life is funny. Life isn’t categorized into comedy, drama, action, is it?So I don’t know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy-why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or…I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know

When I started stand-up - and this is in the '90s - there was definitely people hadn't watched decades of Comedy Central, where people are really much more educated on stand-up comedy.

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.

What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.

I was bad at sports and picked last every day. I couldn't quite figure out what my role was in the social order, so I decided I was interested in comedy. And what was then interesting was, nobody else was interested in it at all. I didn't find one friend who was interested in comedy until I moved to California and met other comedians. And suddenly I knew hundreds of people who knew as much about SCTV as I did. But it took me 20 years to find those people.

have you ever noticed how a man orders food at a fast-food drive-through window? ... men have an innate desire to be cute while placing their order through the drive-through microphone. It's as if they believe the invisible mike on the plastic menu screen is actually connected to a standup comedy stage somewhere in the recesses of the restaurant.