Comedic Craft Quotes

I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.

Comedy is like music. You have to know the key and you have to find players with good chops.

Comedy is just to me, maybe it's a natural knack, if I can see where the joke is in the writing and I can see where the setup is and I can tell this is the way to make it.

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

As you get older as a comedian and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.

I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.

Everything I do, in the middle of it, I lose all objectivity. The business of comedy is kind of ridiculous in that respect. Your job is to have a lot of fun in a jar, then sell it. There's something inherently illogical and impossible about that, but that being said, this is as good as it gets.

I've never sat down and written jokes. I wouldn't know how to.

Comedy is much more difficult than tragedy-and a much better training, I think. It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

Writing humour certainly involves pain. A sitcom is 6 months of writing pain!

You know, comedy's hard. With drama, you have a responsibility to the emotional truth, but with comedy, you have emotional truth and you have technique on top of it.

Comedy is a comfortable yet challenging place for me. I will always feel an inner pressure to do my best and to improve.

I love to write jokes and that's all I think about.

I'm a big believer in comedy writers. I've always defended the honor of all comedy writers. It's extremely difficult, but I've always felt that comedy writers far more easily can move toward drama than vice versa.

Comedy is much harder, it's a lot more exacting. You can't just be real and you can't just use the same kind of techniques you use to fill up a regular scene.

Comedy is a funny business, which you have to take seriously.

People always talk about the content, in terms of the politics of it or whatever social issues are in it, and it's like, "Yeah, but I'm also a good comic." You could at least talk about the form of it, and I feel like that's always the thing that's missed.

What it is is that comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write. Anyone can write, and then you leave it to special effects to make it look good. But comedy, you've got to do some writing.

I think the hardest thing to do in the world, show-business-wise, is write comedy.

I don't really consider myself to be a comedian. I mean, it's not like I'm sitting around writing jokes or anything. I just like dressing up and pretending to be other people.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

I certainly tried to talk about less complex things, but I've had to accept that it's just not what I do. That isn't to say that my shows are depressing - they aren't. At least, I hope they aren't! The problem I have with stories about happy things is that they don't require any skill from a comic - they just repeat the details verbatim.

I've learned to start from a really sound argument, boil down the essence of what you're trying to say, then build your humor around that, rather than starting with, 'This sounds funny,' and going from there.

I read every book about Buster Keaton and Chaplin to see how they worked - it's all about dedication, tunnel vision, pursuit of perfection, getting the gag right.