Ben Kingsley Quotes

With stand-up, there's a little bit of an exaggerated reality because things have to be manipulated to create comedy, to create jokes.

I think so. I can't think of anything that requires more finesse than comedy, both from a verbal and visual point of view.

Comedy is not funny. Comedy is hard work and timing and lots and lots of rehearsals.

Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.

I'm not making comedy albums. That's too much effort for one joke.

I didn't want to do comedy again. It is way harder when you are doing comedy. You can't just concentrate on the character and the plot. In comedy, the writers, instead of obsessing about character and plot, obsess about the jokes.

I never set out to do a sketch show.

The tendency in comedy is to have a character who's stupid get more stupid, because you're trying to top yourself and not just repeat.

Some people learn comedy, and some people just are comedy.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.

For me, comedy is constantly presented as this fake casualness, like a guy just walked on stage going, 'This crazy thing happened to me the other day.' And he's in front of 3000 people, and he's acting like an everyman, and he's getting paid so much money.

A lot of comics aren't their on-screen personas; Chris Rock isn't always ranting and raving. What I do is make myself this over-the-top character that people either find endearing or they think is a joke. Then I can do anything I want.

I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.

I wanted to be a comedian.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

There can be a science to joke writing, there are certainly rules and patterns that can be followed, but I think most of the best comedy goes beyond the rules.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

When I tell people I'm a comedian they say, 'Oh, are you funny?' I say, 'No, it's not that kind of comedy.'

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

I always felt that my way into comedy would be through my writing rather than my acting.

Comedy is very difficult. I love it because when you do it right, it's the best feeling in the world.

I never wanted to do observational humor because I never wanted to tell people what they were seeing.

Comedy writing is taking the brief thought and going with it.

It proved to me, though, that comedy is so much harder.

I don't play comedy as comedy. That would be the biggest trap. I think about the characters and their situations. Then you don't have to worry where the laugh is going to be. But comedy is harder than drama.