Charlie Brooker Quotes

What are people going to expect when they sit down to watch a new episode of Black Mirror? And what you're going to expect is somebody with a translucent TV in a drone strike and a robot walking by... or frowning at a phone and going 'aaah! Oh no! I've just deleted my own leg!' or whatever. So I thought well, let's not do that.

Joe [Wright] reached out to me and sent me a treatment, and I said yes on the spot just from the treatment. Within six weeks, I was in Cape Town and there was a script [of Black Mirror episode 'Nosedive'], but I didn't realize until I received the full script that Rashida [Jones] and Michael [Schur] had worked on it. It's a particularly funny episode. Joe and I always looked at it as a satire; it has a lot of comedic elements to it.

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

I'm hypersensitive to negativity and duplicity, and I want to push it away by writing comedy. Maybe that hypersensitivity comes across and allows me to play dastardly, multi-layered people.

There's this weird kind of coming-in-from-left-field thing going on, and I love it - I am a huge fan of Christopher Durang.

I think Noah Hawley's writing is hilarious, and I love a good dark joke.

A lot of comedies, I think, make the wrong choice of having the straight man being this bland emotional conduit for the audience.

I really like sardonicism and wit. I love the writing of Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore. I like Tina Fey, Amy Schumer.

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.

Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.

'Black Mirror' is definitely my favorite show.

I don't watch any other comedy, I don't study stand-up as an art.

That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?

I did a web series years ago where I helped write a kind of a spoof called 'Young Love.'

Writing comedy is a superpower.

I've noticed, as a comedy fan, that I really like Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino because when they're funny, they're actually funny. It's not like when other dramatic writers have comedy, and I'm just like, 'Well, that's not funny. Why are you even trying to make a joke here?'

I'm a huge fan of comedy. I write material whenever I can.

I'm a 'Saturday Night Live' guy. I'm a comedy guy. As long as they're giving it to everyone, I don't care about how low they go, most of the time.

Using humor as a wedge into different kinds of stories is my go-to. I think anything I do would have some sort of streak of humor in it.

I find that I'm extremely unattracted to anything that's humorless. There is writing that is entirely serious, and it doesn't ring true to me, because I think, oftentimes, life is very, very funny. Even the worst, most humiliating, savage disappointments in retrospect have elements of bleak humor.

I don't have to write jokes. I don't have to write insults. If you ask the man of the hour in the hot seat, my mere existence is clearly insult enough.

The difference when I'm writing a story versus writing a joke is that writing a joke is so much more about the structure and it's less about the conversation. To me, the thing that I love about stand-up is the intimacy between performer and audience.To get it even more conversational was something that really appealed to me and that I really enjoyed doing. My early experiments with it, with just telling a story from my life on stage, it was so satisfying to do. And seemingly for the audience as well. It's a different thing, and it's a different feeling and a different vibe.

Overall, looking at the stories [Black Mirror], almost every story we've ever done is concerned with authenticity or reality in some way.

I'm trying to think overall. Some of our stories [Black Mirror], I think you're right in that they don't tend to have a message.

It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.