Subtle Comedy Quotes

What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I'm more interested in, there's the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.

I think that there's a fine line between comedy and drama. I think that ultimately, the less winking that's going on when you're doing comedy - and this is just my own thing, and maybe it's why I've never been hired in comedy except by Bill Lawrence - but I think that the less winking you do with comedy, the better off you are.

So much of the humor on new sitcoms plays to the lowest common denominator. Wit isn't nearly given as much attention as slipping on a banana peel. So much of the writing is so coarse, so obvious that it doesn't provide a shock, never mind a laugh. What makes something funny is alluding to it without laying it out explicitly. You let the audiences fill in the gaps and that's where the laughs come.

I think the best kind of comedy is the least self conscious. I think if you just sort of let the comedy happen without the elbow nudge, did you get it, did you get it. I love straight face comedy or subtle - relatively subtle comedy.

I love the idea that we put in jokes the kids don't get. And that later, when they grow up and read a few books and go to college and watch the show again, they can get it on a completely different level.

So, deadpan I think just means not acknowledging for one second that you think that this is funny and clever.

The really funny comedies to me are always the ones that are played the straightest or given the most emotional content. And when people start making faces and setting things up and commenting and winking at you, I don't find that to be very funny.

I'm not really crazy about broad comedy. I like very possible, real situations that you might have found yourself in.

Comedy doesn't have to be loud and obnoxious and beat you over the head. It can be this really small detail that, when it computes in your brain, you think, "That's great. That's masterful."

The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They're superficial and I like articulate comedy. I don't know how to do the other, so I won't consider television until the audience's taste changes.

I love jokes that come out of nowhere. The ones where people look at the screen and go, 'What the Hell was that.' As long as it somehow ties back into the story, somehow.

There's a lot of comedy in Intermission but it's got this depth. It's not comedy for comedy's sake - it's informed by something else. I like stuff like that.

I think if you have a funny thought, and you want to get off a funny point, try to do it as realistically as you can. If you try to act it funny and accent the funny points, or do it in a funny style, you kind of lose it.

We always wanted to make a comedy that was a little bit more than that, which had tragic elements to it... that people engaged with - an intelligent comedy essentially.

I can do comedy but it's a certain type. I'm not a physical comedy guy. I'm not Will Ferrell - there's just this crazy and get naked and run through the thing screaming. That's just not my style; my style is drama or - I'm not slapstick.

They want to let the audience figure things out and let the reaction shot get the laugh.

My wife is very stealth-funny. She'll come out with something when I'm not expecting it, and it'll just kill me.