Comedy Balance Quotes

A comedy scene can't really have two weirdoes in it. It doesn't make any sense that way, so you need someone to ground it and call out what's unusual about this person and this scene. Early on, I got pretty good at doing that, and I felt pretty comfortable doing that.

I try to play serious scenes a little funny and the comedy a little serious.

When you do a good comedy show, you have to understand that if you don't have drama or sad moments, then the comedy turns into a clowning kind of situation.

I'm a huge fan of Richard Curtis - there's real grief, real compassion in his films as well as cheekiness; it's a wonderful cocktail.

I've been guilty of being in the writers' room and going too dark; other people have gone too wacky and zany.

For us, a lot of the cartoon and crazy stuff on 'F Is for Family' is tertiary characters; it happens on the television in the show. We try to keep whatever problem the Murphy family is dealing with rooted as much as we can in reality.

I think all great comedies - or at least the comedies I like - it has some of the funniest moments, but it never breaks the spell for the audience. It never pushes the audience away by spoofing itself too much or undermining the characters or making them cardboard or flimsy. Everybody is really trying to do what their characters believe in - and so nobody breaks the spell of the world, even though in other ways it's a comedy and very funny.

The trick [in comedy] is always to figure out how real you're playing it and how real it's supposed to feel. That's a hard thing to figure out.

At the end of the day I'm writing comedy. If you get too realistic as a comedy writer with your disasters, it stops being funny.

I think, for me, humour needs to be used like a strong spice - sparingly.

My dream career would be to be in things that have real heart and are telling real stories but while doing that, you're getting really big laughs. I don't necessarily love the straight crazy comedies. 'Caddyshack' is amazing, but there's not a lot of new 'Caddyshack's.

Along my path, I've realized that this comedy/drama balance is something that's really interesting to me, and I feel, like, authentic to my voice.

I love doing comedy. But sometimes, that exists at sort of the mid-level to the high-comedy level of craziness, and I don't necessarily get to plumb the depths of kind of serious acting as often.

Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps, and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance.

I would like to play some character that's somewhat dramatic. I don't see myself ever becoming that serious, or it sounds weird, but I don't see myself doing something that's really dramatic but somewhat dramatic. I would like to do something that's more real and doesn't have to be laugh out loud funny. I always like whatever I'm involved in... whether it be funny or whether it be somewhat like... I'm not gonna try to get people to really cry.

It's all about surprising people, and you're not surprising people if you're making them laugh every five seconds.

What helped me get the part was that I turned it down. When I read the script, Venus was just a black guy who came in wearing a big coat and a hat and making jive talk. I'd been up for so many of those! I'd had enough of caricatures, what white writers conceive blacks to be. I told the producer I wasn't interested in doing anything like that for three or four years. He said that it was just a pilot, that Venus would be given a human dimension and would be quiet off-the-air. I wanted that input. I thought that side was as important as the comic side. For 'WKRP,' too much of either would be bad.

I enjoy comedy and drama. A nice balance of both is great.

The next time I write a play - in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I'll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that - that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop.

It's famous that comedians have a very dark personal state of mind. I think, in my case, it's the same. The only way to get deep is to have a balance, or a counterbalance.

I'm always drawn towards the darker stuff, because I think it's just a lot more interesting. But it's also good fun doing the comedy, and I think that's why 'Misfits' has been great in that way, as you get a really good balance. I think it's best to try and do everything as an actor, really.

With the wacky jokes that we do on 'Great News,' you do overall still want to be coming from a place of truth with your character because, otherwise, it's just off the walls.

Sitcom writing is difficult because it's not just about writing jokes - there's a very fine balance between characters, plot, and comedy, that if you get one thing wrong, the whole castle comes falling down.

No, Jar Jar Binks was fine by me but probably went on a little bit too long. When they were in trouble and were battling, it should have been more serious and it became a bit too silly.

You have to be very cautious that you're hitting the right beats and making sure it's funny, but at the same time when those notes are serious, you're trying to get your point across and it's not about the comedy.