Larry Wall Quotes

I think if you're trying to be funny, sometimes you're bending a piece of metal in a direction it doesn't want to go. And sometimes comedy just needs to find itself.

I was always writing. I was writing in high school because it was a really competitive school for class clowns; I used to have to write all of my snaps and my disses the night before and then act like I was making it up the next day.

Tina Fey is a genius - I've seen it with my own eyes now. She's a very observant person, and I've never seen somebody write such a high volume or as quickly as she does.

We've always had a philosophy that we would always go wherever the joke is.

George Carlin is brilliant with words, and Johnny Winters is very creative. It's taking something common and drawing out the humor, being clever with words.

Comedy is the ultimate truth. Jazz is hitting the notes that that no one else would hit, and comedy is saying words that no one else would say.

I'm convinced to do improv. All you have to do is listen to what people are saying to you, and then just add more information to what they've just said. That's all there is to improv, but it's the hardest thing to do.

The best timed joke or the best timed phrase comes at spontaneous moments and just relies on me as the host to be very quick, and that's what I do.

Usually, my favorite joke is whichever joke I most recently came up with that surprised me the first time I thought of it.

A lot of my work is a matter of reacting to surprises in life.

It takes intelligence to make real comedy, and it takes a reality base to create all that little stuff I like to do that makes you giggle inside.

People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.

Irreverence is easy - what's hard is wit.

Comedy is surprise. Comedy is not something that you can, necessarily, do twice.

I was always good at being observationally funny - like, contributing something funny to the conversation.

A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.

Comedy has no rules, per se.

I crack myself up. Even I don't know what I'm going to say next.

A mimicry artiste should be spontaneous and he should be able to crack jokes on the spot.

I think I'm funnier in my writing than in person.

The kick [of comedy] is to think quickly. It's a great kick.

A good wit will make use of anything.

I wasn't a class clown, I just found at an early age that I was able to make people laugh. So I mostly wrote funny stuff instead of writing what I was supposed to be writing.

I don't want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.

The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear.