Comedy Pacing Quotes

The important thing, once you get 'em laughing, is to keep 'em laughing until you're through. With a 90-minute feature, you've got to stop the laughter and then pick it up again, which is tough.

Like I said, a sketch is one joke. They shouldn't really be more than a minute, two minutes. There are some shows where the sketch goes on for five minutes. It's like, "I get it! I'm already bored. I did like the joke, but I don't anymore, because you went on too long."

No comedy should be longer than 90 minutes. There's no such thing as a good long joke.

Most people are used to the T.V. comedy method of one joke every 18 seconds. And that's why it's not funny... There's no time for anything to develop.

I think comedies should be short. I don't want to be self-indulgent; I don't want a two-hour comedy.

Let's hit the joke once and move on to the next joke and just keep it where we have as many jokes per square inch as possible.

What you never want to do is have a story that doesn't track emotionally, because then you're going joke to joke and you're going to fatigue the audience. The only thing that's going to string them to the next joke is how successful the previous joke is.

A lot of comedy clubs are set up with people sitting at little tables and you have everything from the way they are seated to them ordering or taking a sip of a drink, these can make a comedian go harder and faster in a club.

You see a lot of sketch variety shows where each segment is one joke that they repeat over and over and over again, and the sketches are always three or four minutes too long.