I like some of my stuff not to be particularly funny. It's supposed to be amusing, entertaining or thought-provoking, like a curiosity. If you put it on in front of 500 people in the Odeon they wouldn't laugh. They shouldn't laugh.
If you can't joke about the most horrendous things in the world, what's the point of jokes? What's the point in having humor? Humor is to get us over terrible things.
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
Laughs, just laughs. It's the only motivation of a comic.
Well, I mean, if a joke or humor is bawdy, it's got to be funny enough to warrant it. You can't just have it bawdy or dirty just for the sake of being that - it's got to be funny.
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
The sense of humor has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.
True humor is fun - it does not put down, kid, or mock. It makes people feel wonderful, not separate, different, and cut off. True humor has beneath it the understanding that we are all in this together.
You don't want to just do a joke because it works - we can make a lot of jokes work - you want to do a joke because it will hopefully build into an argument.
There seems to be more comedy for comedy's sake.
Nobody is here without a reason. I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy - from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated - but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.
Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make 'Humpday' a comedy.
