Comedic Timing Quotes

Anything has a rhythm to it, comedy or drama. There has to be a musicality to it. And everybody can't play the same instrument, ideally. But I think that we all have the same comedic tendencies, and that's why it works. We all sort of agree with what's funny.

I don't mind a crowd's not laughing; it's the groans that slow down the show.

It's very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that's not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It's a gut feeling.

Around year seven or eight, you'd kill yourself when you realized Norm had to enter and you had to come up with a new beer joke.

Comedy is a noble art. And every comedian who does anything is serving a noble purpose.

I am one of those guys who could do the most emotional scene and crack a joke instantly. I'm lucky. I'm just like an idiot savant. I have one enormously enjoyable, pleasurable - for me - talent, which is being able to act.

One of the things I respected about Connors was that one second he would be spewing a four-letter word, the next second he would do something that had people falling off the aisles. Yet he never seemed to lose his concentration.

People who do comedy really are the nastiest people on the planet.

You can teach somebody how to be a brain surgeon, but you cannot teach them how to walk on a stage and make people laugh.

I knew I wanted to be in show business so I took the path of least resistance. I loved comedy. But you never know you are funny until people laugh. It's just what I was interested in. I could make people laugh, I guess, but doing it at school and doing it onstage are very different things.

Becoming a comedienne was my way of adjusting to puberty.

I think it was somewhere around age 3 when I fell down the stairs at my house, and I got up and did a Jerry Lewis impression and got a big laugh. And I thought, "Oooh, I like that. I think I need to do this for a living!"

We don't have a laugh track, which helped Seinfeld a lot, and did kind of tell people when to laugh. It just made it a lot easier. Our show doesn't have that, so it's hard for Middle America to catch on.

When I do comedy, my brain sort of locks up in the infinite possibilities. That's where I get sort of lost. I think, "Oh, there are six other jokes that we could say here!" I feel more at home with drama.

The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes.

I'm definitely not frowning on improv; I mean, I've been doing it for years. I just think that there's some styles of comedy that warrant a tighter pace.

When I used to watch vaudevillian impressionists, people like Rich Little or Frank Gorshin, I always felt like the voice was the only point. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be of the Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters model, where observation and storytelling was important.

There's obviously some appeal in scenes for me - there's something I respond to. I keep doing those films where I put myself out there like that. I guess I look for those kinds of moments and I pride myself on being an actor who will do just about anything for a laugh - so long as it's within context of the scene in the movie and it's not gratuitous. I have to feel it'll make people laugh.

Comedy is a funny thing, and it's really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title. You would never go to a club just to see "Live music," you would go to a jazz club to see jazz, a blues club to see blues, etc. But when you go to see "standup comedy," if you don't know the performers material, you really don't have any idea what you're gonna get.

With Edge and Christian, we were like 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure,' the Bill & Ted of WWE. We were kind of goofy, kind of funny, humorous, but then when we had to be serious in the ring, we would get serious.

At some point I stopped stand-up because I didn't have something to say on a nightly basis.

I like to think of myself as the middleman between Fred Allen and Henny Youngman.

I think the second you think that you're funny is when you stop being funny.

Clumsy jesting is no joke.

'Cheers' was great. They paired me up with Shelley Long on this tiny bar set for the final audition. That was my first really big one, and we just clicked instantly - I still think I got the part because of Shelley.