Comedy Realism Quotes

'The Office' is less a comedy than so many other 'comedies' that have been on the air. It's really about the balance between what is real and what is comic.

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.

Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable.

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.

Since 'The Office,' everyone has this idea that comedy is only good if it reflects the way people really speak. But that's nonsense - and it's a problem unique to comedy.

Sometimes with a comedy it's just having the instinct of how real you play it and what level you want it.

I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that - you don't even know if you're failing in drama, but you do know when you're failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don't hear anybody laughing, you know that you've failed.

The thing you can't let go of is gravity. The reality of gravity in writing. If someone says something really mean in a sitcom, and the next wave isn't a reaction to the reality of that, you start losing relatability. In a lot of romantic comedies, they throw out the rules of life.

Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.

You can't be funny for funny's sake. You try to get as outrageous situation as you can but it always has to be believable and based in real character motivations and what people would really do.

I love insane, stupid comedy, but I can only make it work if it's a character I can give some history to and make real. Like the guy I played in 'Little Miss Sunshine.' He's a maniac, but to me he was absolutely believable.

When you have satire, it has to be real. No matter how outrageous the comedy becomes, you have to believe in the characters.

In my mind, if you write a comedy where human beings experience pain, you're just being realistic.

All the genres are so blended nowadays. There are lots of comedies out there that are more realistic than dramas, and some dramas out there that are so broad and wacky that they don't even pass for a broad, wacky comedy.