I’m a huge fan of comedy. I write material whenever I can.
Vegas means comedy, tragedy, happiness and sadness all at the same time.
In ten minutes, I’m thinking, ‘OK, you know what? I love these guys. They’re really smart, they’re really good, they’ve got a good sense of comedy, under their guidance, I think maybe this could come out OK.’ But I didn’t like the part.
Good comedy is ageless.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
And sometimes you can make your point better with comedy than you can through shouting about it.
If I’m not in the theatre, I’m in an open mic night or doing a guest set at the Comedy Club, or whatever, just trying to develop stuff.
The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.
I can cry at the drop of the pin. But comedy is hard for me; it’s the timing.
I was very young when ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ came out, but that kind of comedy and the spontaneity of her, I think it really deeply affected me within just the joy of performance.
I would love to get into feature films; I’m willing to do an action flick, I’m willing to do a romantic comedy.
Comedy in America is very serious. Either they laugh, or they don’t.
I wish I could have a recurring role on ‘Modern Family’. I think ‘Modern Family’ is the best comedy on television. It’s extremely well written, extremely well acted and directed.
I love doing comedy.
Who knew Rob Lowe was funny? On ‘Parks and Rec,’ we’ve got some of the funniest comedy writers, some of the funniest comedians in the world working there. And if anything, we don’t just effuse to one another and be like, ‘Oh, Rob Lowe’s really funny,’ if he wasn’t.
It’s a comedy thriller, brilliantly written and it’s full of twists and turns at every page. When I was reading it I was desperate to get to the end to find out what happens, it really hooks you.
The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.
When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor.
I think comedy’s something you can’t learn. It’s an instinct, which makes it rather elusive.
In comedy, you have to be unafraid to hang from the tree branch naked in the high wind and you have to be absolutely unafraid to look ridiculous and silly.
In life, there’s a ying and a yang and a balance. And when you don’t have balance, you have comedy.
Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.
I wanted to do comedy because I left Malaysia and went to America. I got bitten by the Western, idealist, opinionated, democracy bug.
At times we were criticized for doing too much slapstick. I don’t believe in mild comedy, and neither does Lucy.
You learn to laugh at yourself, and you also lean on comedy as a crutch to kind of take the edge off because comedians often are self-deprecating, and they cross lines that they shouldn’t. Stuff like that brings a smile to my face every once in a while when needed.
My uncle is a hemophiliac, and my brother is one as well. I am a carrier, and it’s a disease that my kids also deal with. It’s something that has affected my family and I for so long, and I think it’s actually what drove me to comedy as a means to cope during tough times.
And then also I think it’s harder for women because comedy is so opposite of being ladylike.
When I tell people I’m a comedian they say, ‘Oh, are you funny?’ I say, ‘No, it’s not that kind of comedy.’
Hypocrisy is great fodder for comedy.
The word ‘supportive’ has no place in stand-up comedy. I hate when people are like, ‘Support female comedy.’ That’s not a real genre of comedy. I think if you have true respect for women as three-dimensional creators who are innovative, you wouldn’t group them together like that.
I think if I have any kind of unique gift, it’s more in the comedy area than it is in the dramatic area.
Comedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop’s another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you’re talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It’s like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting.
My background is in musical comedy. I didn’t know I was going to be an actor. But all my points of reference have to do with musical comedy and in being kind of a showoff.
I never get offered comedy.
Comedy is surprises, so if you’re intending to make somebody laugh and they don’t laugh, that’s funny.
You can (be a middle-aged comic) if you work very hard at it, because comedy is really hard.
I mean, sometimes… a comedian becomes an actor, and they just don’t deliver, because the bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of acting is to be truthful, and they get that mixed up sometimes, or don’t even notice that that’s the thing.
Comedy is so subjective. You could be in a room with 400 people laughing at a joke and you could just not think it’s funny. You’re just sitting there like, ‘Am I in the twilight zone? Why is everyone laughing?’ It’s such a personal thing. People have such a personal visceral response to comedy.
There seems to be more comedy for comedy’s sake.
More than any other setting – more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel – I’ll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy, tragedy and intrigue.
I think comedy drama is a tricky one. But it’s like in real life: often really tense, dramatic situations can be punctuated with the mundane and banal, and that’s what we try to capture in ‘Stella.’
I had a terrible job letting me do anything that wasn’t comedy.
It proved to me, though, that comedy is so much harder.
I don’t do stand-up anymore. There are no rules in stand-up comedy. Journalists follow plenty of rules.
I’m kind of obsessed with food. I like to eat. When I tour, it’s like, well, like a food tour as much as a comedy tour.
Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
‘Greg the Bunny,’ the comedy television show that I co-created, happened almost by accident. Dan Milano, Spencer Chinoy and myself made a public access show that caught the eye of IFC, and it has had three incarnations since then with a season on Fox.
‘Veerey Ki Wedding’ is a comedy of errors in more ways than one. It’s one of those basic, perky comedies. We’re not trying to give out a message or anything.
The older I’ve gotten, the more the need to exert comedy no matter how tragic a character I may be portraying because they are essentials for presenting truth.
The best comedy and horror feel like they take place in reality. You have a rule or two you are bending or heightening, but the world around it is real.
There’s an art to comedy.
Acting by yourself is pretty darn hard, especially having to do physical comedy.
Nihilism in American comedy came along way before ‘The Simpsons.’ There was a fairly nihilistic point of view to ‘Saturday Night Live,’ for instance, back in the beginning, and a lot of really dark comedy had a really anti-sentimental take on life.
I also want to return to doing stand-up. I’ve become frightened of live audiences. This is a really telling sign that I need to go back on the comedy circuit again.
Comedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop’s another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you’re talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It’s like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting.
Stand-up comedy is not a man’s job. It’s an alpha job: To be the only person in a room with a microphone who’s allowed to talk.
My portrayal of Fagin was all to do with my experience in comedy and revue.
I want to do drama, light comedy, the whole range.
It’s important to remember that life is a joke, and that outlook grants a lot of perspective, but I don’t think comedy should change and become political due to other things. It should just laugh at that cosmic joke that life is all the time.
When I finished my residency in New Orleans, I went to L.A. where I would work as a doctor during the day, and then at night I would actually go to The Improv and do standup, all the while kind of cultivating my comedy resume.
I am a passionate believer that comedy is a way of tackling some of the most dark and difficult aspects of being a human being.
With While You Were Sleeping, it was so much fun and such a Cinderella story, that I didn’t want to do another romantic comedy. I wanted to do the opposite.
First of all, to defend my work, I had to believe that I am doing a totally silly, stupid, innocent comedy.
I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy… It’s a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.
The best comedy audiences in the country and this is tried and true, I’m not just saying it, in my opinion are Boston, Atlanta, and Chicago.
