Cheryl Hines Quotes

I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic's best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he's doing is easy is an occupational hazard.

You know, I became a director out of necessity. I was writing comedies, and I couldn't find anybody to deliver it correctly.

I hate to give myself credit for anything, but I will say I really enjoy, as an actor, and especially with comedy stuff, playing with different rhythms and with different ways around a joke. There's always an obvious route, and there's one that maybe is a little bit different.

There's a lot of nuances to stand-up that you definitely see when you watch someone like Chris Rock in that his body position is also part of why the joke works.

I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.

If you want to make people laugh, your face must remain serious.

A standup set ends on a buildup of tension and subsequent release for a big laugh.

The first laugh is always key. I've done some improv stuff. Once you get your first laugh, you're good. Up until that point, it's a little nerve-racking.

I'm never happier when writing than when I see gags taking shape - ideally, gags at my own expense. What I like is the shuttling back and forth, serious into comedy and vice-versa, ideally, both in the same sentence, or even simultaneously. The best jokes are always ideas in miniature.

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

You can make me laugh at a thing that I think is horrific. You can make me laugh at a thing that affects me personally. But if you've done your homework and you've gone about it the right way, it will still be funny.

There is a magical, unexplainable phenomenon that still occurs to this day where, however funny you think the material you've written is, as soon as you turn up to a gig to try it out, it becomes almost incoherent.

I'm a good counter comedian. I can just work it off with looks, or have something crazy to say back. That works for me.

And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.

I never really write the jokes. I just sit down over a week or two and try to figure out what I want to talk about. Once I narrow that down, then I start working on the material, like "How do I make this stuff funny?"

David Zucker was great! Those guys are funny. I mean, they are funny. There's a wonderful thing about doing that kind of work like Superhero Movie: You have to be real, but you also have to get the laugh. There you are, your director and the producers are right there at the monitors, and you either get the laugh or you don't. And so you just do it until you get the laugh.

It's a simple and an effective way of getting everyone on the same page, prepared and paying attention to the gag. People just get into that frame of mind of you doing impressions. It can take a minute or two for an audience to catch on when you aren't doing one.

A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

With comedies, I like to be a producer, because comedies can get corny and go off track real fast.

Everything in comedy's got to be exactly right, which is why making a comedic film is kind of a difficult process, because, for most of the two years of shooting it and editing it and reshooting and all of that, it's not quite right. And it's only when you just at the end, you put the final polish on it, it becomes really funny again.

Today's comics use four-letter words as a shortcut to thinking. They're shooting for that big laugh and it becomes a panic thing, using four-letter words to shock people.

I think a shot can actually influence a scene in a huge way. For example, comedy is always better in a two-shot. What's between the characters is what's funny. So you learn about these things as you go along.

If I tell a joke on stage and the crowd laughs for a minute, I stand there for a minute and enjoy them laughing before I go on to the next joke. On TV, if I stand there for a minute while they laugh, I look like an idiot who can't remember the next joke.

If a joke is too hard to visualize, I tell the young comics, then what the hell good is it?

I use the cigar for timing purposes. If I tell a joke, I smoke as long as they laugh and when they stop laughing I take the cigar out of my mouth and start my next joke.