The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
Usually, comedy shows only influence other comedy shows. ‘M*A*S*H’ is one of the few comedies that influenced dramatic shows as well.
People used to think of me as a comedy actor.
The truth is that I don’t really understand the concept of having an old-fashioned sense of humour, because to me fashion is about clothes not comedy.
I started getting really interested in comedy when I was in middle school.
Stand-up comedy is a really lonely profession: you ‘perform for 2000 people, then you go to a hotel room by yourself and stare at a wall.
As you know it is a comedy so everything is a little bit pushed. That’s what’s funny about this kind of movie is you can laugh about the absurdity, and the bad side of life.
I never walked the streets of New York hoping to be a musical comedy star. For one thing, they would have thought I was too tall, because l was five feet eight and a half, and they were all little bitty things running around in the studio at that time.
The first rule of comedy should be, you must be very lazy. Whoever works should be immediately removed.
I consider a CD or a comedy collection as a record of what I’ve been doing, and I try to wrap it up and start new material.
In the process of looking for comedy, you have to be deeply honest. And in doing that, you’ll find out here’s the other side. You’ll be looking under the rock occasionally for the laughter.
The Comedy Store in LA, it’s a really loose room and it’s really dark and creepy and a great place to explore your own thoughts onstage.
When I started out in comedy, it was common knowledge that it took about 10 years to get good. And that was okay because it took you about 9 years to get on television.
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.
Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can’t have one without the other. I’m of the school that anything can be funny if seen from a comedic point of view.
I never thought of myself in comedy at all… I loved going to the theatre and seeing people wearing beautiful clothes come down the staircase and start to dance.
I like the more community element of comedy. And I hate people pitting other people against each other. Audiences are always judging you, but when you’re being judged for a competition, it just takes away the joy of the job.
It’s a director’s job to tell a story and he’s very well versed in telling stories with a bit of comedy in them and keeping the pace of the movie right and that’s exactly what he did. He was observant of a world he didn’t understand but he told a wonderful story.
The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.
If you are writing comedy and try to please everybody, you’ll please nobody.
I was never really comfortable doing comedy.
The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.
Comedy is still alive, and there are still funny people. Jews are still overrepresented in comedy and psychiatry and underrepresented in the priesthood. That immigrant Jewish humor is still with us.
I was never considered ‘a marketable hero’, and never got promoted to that category. I am not complaining – I found another niche – comedy – which is equally enjoyable and brought me as much comfort as I need.
After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that’s where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.
I loved George Carlin and Dean Martin. I was one of those kids who had every comedy album.
I still believe that the best art – be it music, comedy, painting, etc. – is the art that hasn’t been asked for, or is expected.
I worked with the Groundlings, doing sketch comedy and improv at a theater here in L.A. It was my hobby, but I took classes and stayed passionate about it because it’s what I wanted to do. It just fit. It takes a while before you can actually make money at it. I worked for years.
If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.
Michael Jackson wanted to be in Men in Black II. He told me he had seen the first Men in Black in Paris and had stayed behind and sat there and wept. I had to explain to him that it was a comedy.
You can think of Hollywood as high school. TV actors are freshmen, comedy actors are maybe juniors, and dramatic actors – they’re the cool seniors.
I do like any kind of project that has both comedy and drama in it because in life you don’t have one day where everything is funny then the next day everything is dramatic.
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.
I think hip-hop does a very good job of infusing comedy and humor and wit into music, a lot more than other genres.
You don’t get a chance to take a breath but when you do, you have some really good comedy moments that ease up on the tension that the movie is centered around which is Kim being kidnapped and her son and husband being kidnapped and the jeopardy that they’re in.
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same – dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits – the repetition through the ages is comedy.
I studied theater in college, and I really wanted to be an actress and play a lot of different roles. Then I made landing on a television comedy my main focus.
There’s no idea or concept in comedy you could do that hasn’t been attacked from some angle. But if you start leaving punchlines out so you’ll look cool, I don’t get that. But I don’t watch standup anyway, so I don’t know what they’re doing.
Yes, I’ve been down the pike and back. And through the years, I’ve heard different songs with scatting in it, and it was – always cracked me up as kind of a funny style of music, you know? When I did it, it kind of cracked me up as a comedy kind of routine.
Comedy gives you a shot of euphoria that distracts you from everything that’s awful.
I’ve always hated the term ‘alternative’; I only use it because when I say it, people know what I’m talking about. I always thought it was weird when guys like myself or Patton Oswalt or Dana Gould, these older guys, were called ‘alternative’ comedy.
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.
People see me on the ‘Daily Show’ or ‘About a Boy’. But the reality is that I only got into this business to do standup comedy.
You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.
I do ‘The Howard Stern,’ make me happy. Also I sold out Comedy Store in the Los Angeles for my roast. This way everybody know I make the people laugh and happy. I love it.
Most modern comedy is crap.
The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
I have such a respect for comedy. It’s a lot harder than doing drama, in my opinion; you have to have sort of an innate sense of humor. There are rules to comedy you can learn. But ultimately, it really does require a certain point of view on the world, and that really does appeal to me.
I would love to make a romantic comedy.
I think a lot of the instincts you have doing comedy are really the same for doing drama, in that it’s essentially about listening. The way I approach comedy, is you have to commit to everything as if it’s a dramatic role, meaning you play it straight.
I try not to see myself as anything, as that would be embarrassing. But if I had to label myself, I’d probably say I was an artist due to the fact that I enjoy working within the arts on different platforms, of which comedy is just one.
I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‘Boston Phoenix,’ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‘deadpan.’
People are funny, and in the most tragic situations, when comedy erupts from nowhere, it can turn on its head within the space of a second or a minute. You’re laughing one minute and you’re crying the next and that’s just life for me, and that is what people are like.
