The male image has been so pulled down by situation comedy in the last 15 years, it is frightening. I don’t like what has happened to the American male.
Comedy doesn’t really matter that much; I know that. I treat it like an adult – I don’t treat it like a child or a god, which some people do. This might just be in America, but ‘stand-up comedy’ is something very particular that I don’t particularly relate to.
This hiatus coming up I’m looking at a comedy because I need the balance.
You can’t study comedy; it’s within you. It’s a personality. My humor is an attitude.
So it didn’t matter to me whether it was the serious guy or the comedy guy, if I was getting people involved and invested in watching wrestling then it’s a win-win situation for both of us.
It just seems to me that there’s no particular reason comedy albums should be dead. There’s a lot to laugh at. We have very funny people, still.
I enjoy doing all kinds of roles, but I don’t want to be restricted to comedy alone.
When you make a drama, you spend all day beating a guy to death with a hammer, or what have you. Or, you have to take a bite out of somebody’s face. On the other hand, with a comedy, you yell at Billy Crystal for an hour, and you go home.
Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.
I hate being mean. I watch those roasts on Comedy Central and they make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Some comedy has turned into, ‘Donald Trump’s bad, isn’t he?’ That’s a true statement. But where is your joke?
During the day, I was a doctor. At night, you know, I was a comic. And it was really just to let off some steam. It just became my golf, you know, in many ways. Most doctors have golf as a hobby. Mine was doing comedy.
With our hectic lives, a dose of comedy is a must.
Together with script writers Sid Green and Dick Hills, we worked on the comedy ideas for this series.
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.
There is a universality to comedy.
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
‘The Dictator’ – well, that was just a comedy, and I suppose the morality was incidental. It was just something to try and make people laugh rather than being a serious thing.
Partly because the town is just finicky, there are strange Catch 22 clauses in the consciousness of this community and one of them was that you, I found out, you can’t do a comedy unless you’ve just done a comedy.
My school was 90 percent white, but 90 percent of the kids I played with were black. So I got the best of both worlds. I think that is where my comedy developed.
I don’t watch Comedy Central. I don’t enjoy it.
I don’t love comedy but I can watch someone who’s kind of interesting forever. I think a waitress who’s having a bad day is a lot more fun than Robin Williams doing forty minutes of material.
Hopefully there will be a day when all comedy is all robots.
The day of the wedding went like these things generally do, full of anxious moments interspersed with black comedy.
A couple of friends and I started a sketch comedy group when we were teenagers, just for fun and to start creating stuff. It was a blast.
I’ve always been sort of addicted to genre-jumping. I’ve never been in the mood to do the same thing I did last time. Hence, me going from ‘Big Love’ to romantic comedy, to period film… I can’t sit still.
Stand-up comedy is a raunchy profession.
I think one of the big things about comedy is the ability for the audience to identify.
I want my audience to be my friends – that is when they will get the best comedy. If they see me as a performer, they won’t get the best show.
The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.
It’s a fine line between hack and good comedy.
London seems to be a town with a lot of comedy fans and people that really enjoy stand-up.
Comedy, at least the way I write comedy, is just drama with jokes.
Presenting the Oscars was the most nerve-racking job I have ever done in show business. It’s very much a live show: they have comedy writers waiting in the wings, and as you come off between presentations, they hand you an appropriate gag to tell.
What I love about comedy is that it’s unquestionably working. There are varying degrees of that, where there’s something that makes you smile and is funny versus something that makes you hysterically laugh.
A friend once asked me what comedy was. That floored me. What is comedy? I don’t know. Does anybody? Can you define it? All I know is that I learned how to get laughs, and that’s all I know about it. You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.
I have been part of films like Rajamanikyam’ and Seniors,’ which had genuine comedy and I am comfortable with the genre.
I really used to like TVMaxwell, which is a classic, amazing, super-underrated comedy channel. And Cyndago was great.
What I’ve always said about comedy is if you do it in the right way, you can say anything to anybody because they know where you’re coming from. They know it’s not malicious.
I was doing Facebook comedy videos; then I moved over to Instagram, and then I hopped on Twitter. That is where I really was a master. That was the first place where I could go viral.
I think the comedy clubs tend to homogenize the acts a little bit, because they force them to be palatable in way too many environments.
I have an Italian comedy at the Venice Film Festival.
Well, I think that there’s a value to comedy in and of itself.
As an actor, you read so many scripts and parts written for Asian-specific characters, and you see a lot of stereotypes and a lot of one-note characters, especially in comedy.
Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.
Twenty-two years I’ve been doing this comedy lark, so it’s been like a meteoric rise to fame… if the meteor was being dragged by an arthritic donkey across a ploughed field, in northern Poland.
I was a comedy fan when I was a little kid.
I think in life, the sense of humor and comedy always exists.
I don’t like the bullying, do-one-over style of comedy. It’s so cheap.
Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.
Every movie I do, or when I’m on the sketch comedy show, I don’t really get into it until I have an outfit or something funny with my head or face or something.
Friends applaud, the comedy is over.
When I was in Canada I shot a romantic comedy that I’m looking forward to having people see, it’s called ‘The Weekend.’
If you are a great dramatic actor then you often don’t know if people are enjoying your stuff at all because they are sitting there in silence. But with comedy it’s a simple premise. If it’s funny, people laugh. If it’s not, they don’t.
In comedy, though, it’s good to get feedback from the audience about what they find funny.
I’ve made a lot of crazy comedy videos and said a lot of crazy things. If it’s too offensive, I apologize and move on, but I do comedy.
Once you start classifying and trying to identify your own comedy style, you’ve ceased to be funny.
The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it… try to fake three laughs in an hour – ha ha ha ha ha – they’ll take you away, man. You can’t.
John was the smartest and most amazing comedian I’ve ever worked with. I think more than teaching me about acting or comedy, he taught me about life and the love of people and respect of people.
Now people want what the movie was about, which is violent comedy. And that’s really what The Aristocrats is based on – what will a family do out of desperation.
The key to a happy marriage is myself being absent for long periods of time. My wife Leesa and I will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary next year, but if my comedy gigs petered out and I was around the house more, we’d 100% be getting divorced.
Me and my roommate wrote and directed a little short comedy called ‘The Elevator.’
Back in the mid ’90s, I went to a film festival, and they were airing ‘Central Park West’ at the same time as this cute little romantic comedy movie called ‘French Exit,’ and I got to go from one theater where I was goofy, falling over myself, to this kind of evil vixen kind of character.
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.
But long story short, I didn’t start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up.
When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.
Timing is crucial for comedy.
