Chris Messina Quotes

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.

I feel the life expectancy of a comedian is 30 seconds. If you don't hook an audience in half-a-minute, you're dead.

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

Whenever I go on a show with a comedian I just counter punch.

The basic function of a comic is stand-up because it's so straightforward and simple. If the audience don't laugh, you didn't do your job. I've had some audiences where I didn't care if they laughed or not because they were either too drunk or stupid.

The great thing about writing jokes for President Obama is that he is not afraid to tell jokes that are actually funny - and not just funny for a politician.

If you're not doing something or saying something in comedy, the camera is going to go somewhere else.

I like seeing what the comedian thinks is funny, not just what they think I'll think is funny.

If you play it straight it's funny - the best comedy is always played straight down the middle. The adjustment is understanding from the screenplay that a moment is hilarious.

Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

I was the kid who always hung back and then dropped the jokes when you least expected it. Timing was everything. My mouth sort of developed over time.

I'm not a comedian, but I love the comedians who know when to get off the stage.

Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can't have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.

Comedy can be more difficult than drama. It requires more attention to timing. In the theater, you're always dependent on the audience for the energy, but in comedy the feedback you get is more important. You can judge by the quickness and the length of the laugh just where you stand with the audience.

When you're a standup comic, you get up and you try stuff, and you're always kind of seeing how far you can push things.

Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I think that's how I tap into it.

Comedy is very controlling - you are making people laugh.

Everyone knows the feeling where you're in the pub and you make your mates laugh. It's awesome, you feel like you rock. That's what comedians want with a bit of extra ego.

I need to keep my ad-libbing skills honed and make sure I'm able to banter with people and treat topics a bit more light-heartedly. But as a stand-up, first and foremost, my job is to make sure that I can write the routine that hopefully people will talk about when something big happens.

Like hitting a baseball, comedy is very much about timing. To some degree, you either 'got it or you don't.'

In television, there are so many things between you making a joke and the audience seeing it. It's like an assault course.

We've all seen comedians look like they're reaching just a little bit too much for the laugh. This is counterproductive. The conceit of standup is that it is effortless, which makes the prospect of generating new comedy a tricky one: you are trying to be funny without looking like you are trying to be funny.