Popular quotes about Comedy! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 72
I like comedy, but I like comedy as a device in drama. It's more interesting for me to use comedy to seduce people into thinking about something serious. If you want to hit a beat in a drama, you can distract people with a little comedy, and you can punch them in the gut with some emotion.
Steve CooganI thought if I could do stand-up comedy well enough, I could parlay it back into films - like Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen did. They merged principles of comedy and drama together, and that's what my first film really was, a stab at that kind of comedy.
Mike BirbigliaI can do comedy, so people want me to do that, but the other side of comedy is depression. Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don't realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.
Parker PoseyOn a practical level, I'm uncomfortable at comedy clubs because there are so many shitty dude comics who have made my life miserable. If I go to a comedy club and I look around, I don't know which of the dudes lining the wall told me that I was too fat to get raped. It makes me nauseous. But that was a couple years ago, and meanwhile, comedy has changed a lot.
Lindy WestAs a writer, I haven't delved into dramatic writing. As an actor, I could always, even more so than comedy, do drama. When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest.
Jonah HillHere'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.
John C. ReillyI had always drawn, every day as long as I had held a pencil, and just assumed everyone else had tooโฆArt had saved me and helped me fit inโฆArt was always my saving graceโฆComedy didnโt come until much later for me. Iโve always tried to combine the two things, art and comedy, and couldnโt make a choice between the two. It was always my ambition to make comedy with an art-school slant, and art that could be funny instead of po-faced.
Noel FieldingBritish comedy - which has been a big inspiration to me for many years - is very different to Australian comedy and different again to American comedy.
Jason GannAll 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.
Ricky Van VeenThere's always advantages and disadvantages to doing any role. And there's a great sense of achievement, testosterone, fun, being able to live out your masculinity when you play an action role, or an action-adventure, or a real tough-guy role. Really, if you're doing a comedy, you can sit back and relax. And it's good to know that at the end of the day, you don't have to run off for another two hours and go to the gym, or go spend the rest of the night swordplaying with stunt guys. Then I think, "Oh my God, I love comedy.".
Gerard ButlerIn the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.
Charlie BrookerWe always wanted to make a comedy that was a little bit more than that, which had tragic elements to it... that people engaged with - an intelligent comedy essentially.
Alice LoweNihilism in American comedy came along way before 'The Simpsons.' There was a fairly nihilistic point of view to 'Saturday Night Live,' for instance, back in the beginning, and a lot of really dark comedy had a really anti-sentimental take on life.
Matt GroeningI'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.
Samantha BeeI was seduced by the nouvelle vague, because it was really reinventing everything. And the Italian cinema that one would see in the theaters in the late '50s, early '60s was Italian comedy, Italian style, which, to me, was like the end of neo-realism. I think cinema all over the world was influenced by it, which was Italy finding its freedom at the end of fascism, the end of the Nazi invasion. It was a kind of incredible energy. Then, late '50s, early '60s, the neo-realism lost its great energy and became comedy.
Bernardo BertolucciWhen you're doing a comedy and you want to somehow satirise people who are taking themselves seriously, I think the most serious genre is the thing you're going to get the most out of. If you're trying to satirise a comedy, it's hard to do that - it doesn't really work as well. But I love the war movie genre and I'm a fan of all those movies that are part of what this movie is.
Ben StillerVerse 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.
David IvesIn the movies I've done for Sony, they've never given me quadrant specific notes ever. They say "Keep making it. Just make the movie you want to do." Especially in a comedy because comedy is so tone specific.
Will GluckThat's what I think works the best, and what I think makes the best comedy - something that's completely committed and more approached as an acting exercise, as opposed to being worried about whether to be funny or not. The comedy comes from the context.
Will FerrellComedy is a funny thing, and it's 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. You would never go to a club just to see "Live music," you would go to a jazz club to see jazz, a blues club to see blues, etc. But when you go to see "standup comedy," if you don't know the performers material, you really don't have any idea what you're gonna get.
Joe RoganI've never heard of a comedy that hasn't had reshoots, especially for the ending of a movie in a comedy.
Bradley CooperThe timing of comedy is so difficult. You've got to leave room for a laugh, you don't want to kill the laugh, but on film, you can't just suddenly stop for a laugh and then carry on. So, I think it's a real art form, comedy on film.
Helen MirrenYou 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.
Jeff RossThe fact is that comedy is actually too serious to be taken seriously. It may be that comedy touches such deep emotions that people feel better if they can just dismiss it as trivial. Just take a big belly laugh. I have watched people laughing, and for a moment they look-and are-absolutely helpless. Vulnerability. You can be assaulted while you are laughing.
Abe BurrowsIn the stand-up comedy top, there's room for everyone - if you're good, there's room for everyone. You'll put on your own show - no one casts you. You cast your own show as a stand-up comedian. When you get good at stand-up comedy you book a theater and if people show up, people show up. If people don't show up, people don't show up. You don't have a director or a casting agent or anybody saying if you're good enough - the audience will decide.
Jim JefferiesIf 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.
Roger EbertComedy is more difficult. You can look at scenes when you're doing a drama like, ยMaybe it works,ย but in comedy, when you're doing it, either it works or it doesn't. You have to keep doing it until it does, and the requirement is more.
Jack NicholsonHomophobia is a tough one. In some places it's actually very OK to be homophobic. Comedy clubs in general are very unsafe spaces for LGBT, for women, for Asian people. So my goal in comedy has sort of been to make this a safe space for people who were like me.
Margaret ChoI 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 CooganMost of the jokes that I wrote were funny and there always seems to be an aspect of comedy in my long-form work. I think that's how life is. I think even the more dramatic moments of one's life are often punctuated by very funny comments or situations. I like to say, "Keep your comedy serious and your drama funny, and you'll be pretty true to life."
Victor LevinComedy 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.
Eugene MirmanYour anger can be 49 percent and your comedy 51 percent, and you're okay. If the anger is 51 percent, the comedy is gone.
Joan RiversI know a lot of girls in the comedy world who are kind of like me. I don't know where the slutty girls hang out, but it's not the comedy world as far as I know.
Rachel DratchEven though I have fond feelings for comedy clubs, I enjoy the focus you get in a theater. Comedy clubs are a different animal. People are being served nachos and there's a blender going off in the background.
Brian ReganComedy doesn't really have any meaning without sadness. The most meaningful comedy comes from some really serious pathos.
Becky StarkWhen you start doing comedy, you think to yourself, "I want to be a headliner." And you become a headliner, and you're like, "Oh wait, this isn't what I meant. I meant I want to be a headliner that's famous enough that people come see me specifically." And that's a huge leap, because most of the time most of the audience is there to see comedy in general. They're not there to see you.
Moshe KasherI started in comedy when I first started as an actor on stage and doing improvisational theater and stuff like that. So a lot of people who know me know that sort of side of me. But I got the roles that I got as an young actor kind of steered me in a different direction, which were, at times, darker characters. And so comedy was not something that came easy for people to think of my in those terms.
Andy GarciaPeople used to make fun of alternative comedy because sometimes it would be someone being funny, and sometimes it was a crazy man with a flute making no sense. And it's very easy to be like, yeah, that's not really comedy.
Eugene MirmanComedy is so subjective. You could be in a room with 400 people laughing at a joke and you could just not think it's funny. You're just sitting there like, 'Am I in the twilight zone? Why is everyone laughing?' It's such a personal thing. People have such a personal visceral response to comedy.
Todd PhillipsI 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.
Aasif MandviI wanted to come to Chicago. I also wanted to do "Saturday Night Live." And then I got to a place where I didn't want to do those things anymore.For the sketch comedy thing, I got cast on "MADtv," and that will kill any man's desire to do comedy.
Simon HelbergI like comedy when its mixed with action, it's just so much fun to do comedy with a bit of action, its fun to watch and also so much fun to do.
Akshay Kumar