Writing Comedy Quotes

Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn't interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don't think in terms of comic dialogue.

The more life experience you have, the more comedy you can write.

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

What's the trick to writing a genuinely funny comedy? The trick is therapy. Take notes.

Every joke is an experiment. When you sit, alone, and write a script, or just a joke, you really have no idea if it will succeed.

I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.

I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose - short pieces for my blog - because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy!

As an undergrad, I was the editor of the Yale humor magazine, and since then, I've published humor in the 'New York Times' and 'Atlantic,' among other places.

When I was in improv workshops or doing stand-up or writing comedy with others, or just doing comedy, I just laughed. Funny was funny; I loved to laugh. I always liked people I found generally funny.

Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.

No one wants to read a story where I saw a cute puppy on the street and I petted it. I mean, that's not funny. I only write about the funny stuff.

Everyone who has ever met me for at least five minutes knows I'm a really funny person. I love to laugh and to make people laugh, so writing comedy comes naturally to me.

When I'm writing, quite often I start having a good time when I see there's a chance to make myself look like a real jerk. I start chuckling and having an interesting, rather than a boring, time.

If there's one regret I have of my time in comedy it's that I really I was so obsessed with improv for so many years and I exclusively did improv for the first 6 years or 7 years. I was doing comedy and then I started doing solo work and stand up, a bit of writing, making videos, and really going into it on that end.

The rules I go by are: Always keep your villains bad, and keep the plot grounded and real. If you keep those stakes, the comedy will bounce off that and work.

Before I went to a meeting at the 'Harvard Lampoon,' I had no idea that there was even a comedy magazine at Harvard, let alone that you could write comedy potentially for a living.

What it is is that comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write. Anyone can write, and then you leave it to special effects to make it look good. But comedy, you've got to do some writing.

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

And the sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy. The Exorcist not only ended that career, it expunged all memory of its existence.

When we graduated [ from Cambridge], we were grabbed right into television. I was grabbed straight into the practice of writing comedy. It was all writing and performing. You wrote something in order for you to perform it.

I had been writing and performing stand-up comedy pretty much the entire time I worked at Google.