Comedy Training Quotes

The great thing about a sitcom is that you're in front of a live audience, so you really get in touch with what audience reaction is, but also there are lots of elements of film that you're dealing with, and there's kind of a great boot camp or graduate school mentality to it, because you're going to suck.

I worked with the Groundlings, doing sketch comedy and improv at a theater here in L.A. It was my hobby, but I took classes and stayed passionate about it because it's what I wanted to do. It just fit. It takes a while before you can actually make money at it. I worked for years.

I'm not a comedian. I didn't study sketch comedy; my background isn't that.

After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that's where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.

For the first actual comedy-comedy I did, I took a comedy class in New York, which was full of slightly unhinged people. It was a pretty depressing crowd, very angry and strange people. But then I took a class at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and I loved those people.

Yeah, well I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre and that's really where my training is. As an actor, that's my training.

I moved to New York and went to a performing arts college, but it wasn't until UCB that I started performing on the regular, figuring out how I'm funny, why I'm funny, and how to play with an audience.

I'd taken some classes at UCB in New York and again at the Magnet Theater and the PIT Theater. I definitely never advanced to where I was on a team or anything like that.

I know how to have a conversation, but I've never done improv. I've never taken improv classes.

I always felt that it was easier to take a funny person and teach them to write television than to take somebody who was a television writer and make them funny. And I discovered a lot of great writers that went on to do a lot of great shows like 'Seinfeld,' 'Friends,' you know, 'Three and a Half Men.'

I trained at The Groundlings and was surrounded by some very funny women and also some very unfunny men. I didn't feel a sense of things being different because I was a girl.

Comedy prepared me for drama. There are a couple techniques you can think of. One of my acting teachers said that comedy is like ping-pong, and drama is tennis. You take things a bit slower, so you do get to breathe more and take some more time.

When I graduated from college, I moved to New York and started doing improv because I read all about the early 'Saturday Night Live' guys having come through Second City and learning how to improvise, so I wanted to get immediately into that.

I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.

I went to Second City, where you learned to make the other actor look good so you looked good and National Lampoon, where you had to create everything out of nothing, and SNL, where you couldn't make any mistakes, and you learned what collaboration was.

I'd say I've gone to grad school for comedy being on 'Community.'

Honestly, my biggest education regarding improv comedy actually came on the job working for 'My Boys.'

When I came to Chicago, I didn't even know what improvisation meant, as far as pertaining to comedy. I knew about Second City, but I didn't know what the word 'improvisation' meant.

I graduated from Improv Olympic. I used to do standup comedy.

My first lessons in comedy, how to construct a joke, I learned from Eileen Brennan, who had unbelievable timing.

Some of the best dramatic actors have started in comedy.

Steve Martin said that philosophy is good for comedy because it screws up your thinking just enough, and I agree with that. Being forced to see life's metadata is good training for looking for interesting angles on a topic.

I took a class at The Second City, and it became contagious.

I had seen some shows at the Groundlings [legendary L.A. improvisational and sketch comedy troupe] and thought, "If I could ever do that, that would really mean something, that I have arrived." So I went through the program and said to myself, "I'm going to stay here until they kick me out." Seriously, they can ask you to leave at any point. Luckily, they never did that to me.

I wanted to be a director and comedian and my plan was to go to NYU. I wanted to be in UCB.