Comedic Evolution Quotes

Comedy has had no history, because it was not at first treated seriously.

People are funny in like young adulthood, just like how people's musical tastes are cool, but it changes very rapidly. In five or ten years, I'll probably still be confident about what's funny but it probably won't be funny anymore.

I've never been able to tell jokes. In the beginning of my career I did impressions and jokes like any other comedian, but I was never very successful because I did it poorly. So I started to talk to the audience and started talking about the atmosphere around me and started to become angry, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a fun way - and my attitude developed from there.

Stand-up comedy is an art form and it dies unless you expand it.

I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that... stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I'm much more cautious now.

I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.

I don't take anything from the podcast and bring it to my act, because I feel like that's been burned, unless I feel like I can really develop it beyond two or three jumps beyond what I said on the podcast.

I am not doing comedy because the genre is successful. If that was the case, I would have done a run-of-the-mill comedy film. I set my own trends. I like to give something new and different to my audiences. I want to do the kind of comedy that has been missing till now.

All of our heroes did silly stuff early and got more serious as time went on. Steve Martin, Adam Sandler, Bill Murray. They got older, wiser, and made different choices.

I worshipped guys like Bill Maher, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld, and was doing my variation of that. But as a young person with no political point of view or life experience, it was as funny as you can imagine.

Obviously comedic styles do change.

When I started stand-up - and this is in the '90s - there was definitely people hadn't watched decades of Comedy Central, where people are really much more educated on stand-up comedy.

I consider a CD or a comedy collection as a record of what I've been doing, and I try to wrap it up and start new material.

I did stand-up for a long time, and I did classical theater. As much time as you could spend on a stage will always inform you and your job, as you evolve. I feel the freedom of being able to find comedy in the darkest moments because it makes it way more interesting, I think.

'Monty Python' and 'The Simpsons' have ruined comedy for writers for the rest of our lives.

We used to get 27, 28 minutes to do a story in, and now they're lucky if they get 18 or 20 minutes. So I don't think they can really do a beginning, a middle, and an end anymore. There's an awful lot of one-line jokes; almost every line is a punchline. It's not the same, but there's still good comedy around.

Yeah, there were a few years in the early nineties where I really began to hate what was valued as funny and just sort of what was valued in stand-up, period.

In the '80s especially, a lot of comedians felt compelled to stick with what made them famous and those people became caricatures.