Comedy Rules Quotes

In stand-up, there's that idea that comedy comes from a dark place, but it's not a rule.

Comedy has no rules, per se.

I've told Michael Jackson jokes. If you got really technical, you could say those are jokes about child molestation. You could, if you got technical. A lot of this is just selective outrage because honestly, the audience are the ones that tell us that something shouldn't be spoken. The audience lets us know. And I've never, in my almost 30 years of being a comedian, seen a comedian continue to tell a joke that the audience doesn't respond to. I've never seen it.

Comedians second-guessing themselves is scary. Poor taste is not a crime and we can't forget that.

I have a rule - 'funny is funny!' When I write comedy, it's not my aim to upset people. I will be offensive, edgy and immature, but I will also be very intelligent and relevant. At my shows, there are no holy cows.

Good taste is the enemy of comedy.

In the old days, if you topped the bill one evening, you'd do 22 minutes maximum, and if you overstepped and did 27 one night, you'd get a knock on the door telling you it wasn't acceptable.

Few years ago [Donald] Trump was being roasted by Comedy Central. They always have rules about things that you can't joke about. Donald Trump's rule at that time, the only thing that you couldn't joke about was a suggestion that he has less money that he claimed to.

I guess there are no real strict rules [in comedy], but I just learn to apply my philosophy about comedy which is, it's a serious business and the result needs to be funny, not the process.

There's only a handful of people who are just purely, inherently funny, and I'm not one of them. I need content and a situation. I don't just walk on the screen, and people go, 'Ha ha ha!' There are people like that, and they can do almost anything. It's the Christopher Walken Rule.

The first rule of comedy should be, you must be very lazy. Whoever works should be immediately removed.

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

I have such a respect for comedy. It's a lot harder than doing drama, in my opinion; you have to have sort of an innate sense of humor. There are rules to comedy you can learn. But ultimately, it really does require a certain point of view on the world, and that really does appeal to me.

It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn't stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.

Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can't have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.

Sometimes if you do a multi-camera comedy, often there's rules, like, 'We've got to have three main laughs per page.'

Science would like to tell us that people laugh because of the benign violation theory, but comedy doesn't have hard rules.

The one and only thing that every comic agrees on is that you do not steal jokes.

I think when you do comedy, you play by a different set of rules. No one really wants you to be in that good shape. Being in good shape implies a level of vanity that isn't necessarily funny.

But I think our humour is exactly the same today. Only, we've made rules now. We've said we are not going to do prosthetic make-up scenes, because when they take it off half your face comes off.

According to the rules of comedy, your suffering will be funny after an undetermined length of time. Maybe not while you're having your gangrenous leg sawed off, watching your home burn down or learning how to be intimate with your cellmate, but, in the big scheme of things, soon.

Whatever the joke is has to be funny, and not coming from a mean-spirited place. I think some things are totally off limits. If someone's spouse died, or one of their children, I would never joke about that in a Roast situation. I don't have any aspirations towards writing any cancer jokes, and there's some stuff that I think is definitely taboo.

Comedy Central made me delete the Boston Marathon joke. I wasn't happy about it but, despite popular belief, I can occasionally be a team player.

Race is still somewhat of a taboo in comedy. But if you're a minority, then you can make fun of your own minority. And that's a nice service that many of them provide.

You can't always go by the book, even in comedy.