Top 80 Sitcoms Quotes

You can’t erase Bill Cosby’s contributions. That’s the conflict. He’s one of the most influential comedians of all time, and ‘The Cosby Show’ is one of the most influential sitcoms ever. When I watched as a kid, I wanted Cliff to be my dad. Everybody did.

I realised I had spent the majority of my adult life doing two characters – Maude from 1972-’79 and Dorothy from 1985-’92 – and I really didn’t know what I wanted to do after ‘Golden Girls.’ I knew what I didn’t want to do – any more sitcoms, or wait for the next great role that might never come.

I wish there was more for minorities than sitcoms. I’d like to see a soap opera about blacks. People don’t live in isolation anymore.

I’m on the playstation, or else I go out and play football. I enjoy movies and sitcoms. I love reading motivational books too.

Sitcoms are designed for normal people who just want to turn on their TV and get a laugh. It’s not high-brow, you don’t have to work so hard, and it’s meant to be a relatable genre. That’s why I love it so much – my fans are from 8 years old to 80 years old, because everybody can relate to what’s funny.

Tina Fey is part of a generation of women who have changed the face of comedy at ‘Second City,’ ‘SNL,’ in sitcoms and in film.

I love film and I love sitcoms, and I was one of those kids that would just go to the movies on the weekend and spend my whole weekend watching all of the movies.

I’ve tested for I-don’t-know-how-many pilots, and I didn’t get any of them. I would always try to go off the top and make it as spontaneous as possible, but acting in sitcoms is such a skill set, and I didn’t have it. I wish I did back when I was younger.

And you can be in real danger of judging people based on their reactions to what you love. If I recommend ‘Modern Family’ to someone and they return saying it wasn’t for them, I finish their sentence with ‘cos I hate brilliantly written and hilarious sitcoms.’

The striking thing about ‘New Girl’ is that under all the comedy, there’s something about the emotions and reactions that feels very real – much more real than other sitcoms. Like – maybe everybody is sort of laid bare in different ways.

In British sitcoms, you can get five minutes of nothing before the story starts.

People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms – for love.

There are lots of comic bosses and fathers in sitcoms, but the comic landlord remains rare.

Sitcoms are what got me excited about show business.

The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.

When I was growing up, my mom didn’t let me watch a lot of TV. She said I couldn’t watch ‘Friends’ or that era of sitcoms.

I don’t watch sitcoms. I really don’t. My problem with them is they take so long to film them that there’s no spontaneity. I want to see that.

‘Leave It to Beaver,’ which ran from 1957 until 1963, was one of the strangest, sweetest, most distinctive domestic sitcoms of television’s celebrated Golden Age.

I mean, sitcoms shouldn’t be doing ‘Saturday Night Live.’ You can’t just do bit after bit after bit. You have to string it together with tight writing and performances. Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to do this.

When I was growing up, I never saw couples fight on the family sitcoms I loved to watch. Subsequently, when tough times arose in my own relationship, I wasn’t prepared and felt so isolated and alone. Marital issues weren’t a part of the narrative that television told me was a ‘working relationship.’

I don’t think anybody in my graduating class would have figured that I would be doing full-on single-camera comedies or sitcoms, or anything like that, but it certainly has been a part of my career.

I was auditioning a lot in L.A., and I was actually getting called back a lot for sitcoms. But I wasn’t getting jobs. I even tested for ‘Saturday Night Live’ and didn’t get that.

I’m more inclined to linger in the science pages of ‘The Week’ magazine. But my principle obsessions are still watching sitcoms and football.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be doing sitcoms.

Norman Lear is my all-time, ultimate hero. He’s an amazing man. That’s one person I’m looking forward to meeting. What he did, with shows and sitcoms, he’s my hero.

I think I get way too much credit for making what people consider to be smart choices, but it’s only because I made a decision to stop worrying about making money. I had done network sitcoms. I had a nest egg.

When I first started, they were trying to get me into sitcoms – I think because I had that kind of Wonder Bread look and my hair always went into place. I kept saying, ‘I’m not good at sitcoms. I don’t know how to do that.’

I loved doing sitcoms.

Most sitcoms and cartoons, especially, you can rely on, because they go back to square one at the beginning of every episode.

There was a time when I couldn’t watch sitcoms for a while because it was just cacophony, it was just noise.

What they do in America in all those sitcoms is hire glamorous girls and they’re never that funny… that’s because they’ve never had to develop a personality because they’re hot.

I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That’s my tasty junk food.

‘Fresh Off the Boat’ will be syndicated. This show and these characters will live forever in the pantheon of classic family sitcoms.

‘The Simpsons’ from the very beginning was based on our memories of brash ’60s sitcoms – you had a main title theme that was bombastic and grabbed your attention – and when you look at TV shows of the 1970s and ’80s, things got very mild and toned down and… obsequious.

A lot of times people who write sitcoms for the 18 to 49 crowd think writing for kids is easy. It really isn’t. First of all, you’re very restricted in what you can do.

Whenever I did sitcoms, that always happened on your show. Once the show was on the air, it takes on a life of its own. It develops, and it becomes something else.

Sitcoms are usually given short shrift by the acting profession, but it’s quite an amazing job.

Cable is a great medium. It’s something I respond to. I’m not doing sitcoms. People don’t find me funny. That’s just the way it is.

I grew up doing sitcoms and theater and even playing with the Beach Boys, where you’re programmed to perform, your body gets into a rhythm and you know it has to perform.

I was obsessed with New York early on. I was watching sitcoms that were set in or around New York, like ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show.’ I was always very fascinated with the people who were on ‘What’s My Line?’ and I always had an incredible obsession with the city.

It feels like animation has a little more independence than traditional sitcoms ever did.

TV family sitcoms have always been about fathers who know best and mothers who are so enchanted with everything they do. I wanted to be the first mom to be a mom on TV. I wanted to sent out a message about how us women really feel.

Sitcoms are usually sweet with no viciousness.

When I first got out to Hollywood, they were pushing me for sitcoms, and I didn’t really have an interest in them. I wanted to do films and slowly worked that way. And then it became, I guess, this curse of the leading man.

OK, so we all know that ‘Borat’ is humiliatingly, career-endingly unfunny (one trick too many for one-trick pony Sacha Double-Barelled) – but can anyone explain why the ‘character’ isn’t roundly condemned for being as unacceptably racist as the one-dimensional stereotypes from 70s sitcoms such as ‘Mind Your Language?’

I do have a regard for the musicality of language that came from BBC sitcoms like ‘Fawlty Towers.’

Television is a powerful medium that has to be used for something better than sitcoms and police shows. On the other hand, if you don’t recognize the forces that play on what people watch and what they don’t then you’re a fool and you should be in a different business.

I sleep five or six hours a night, then crash at the weekend. I’m learning to eat properly and exercise. I relax by watching silly sitcoms like ‘Scrubs’ and ‘How I Met Your Mother.’

‘Scary Movie’ was a different type of comedy than I’m used to. I’ve mostly done sitcoms, so working with David Zucker, who wrote the film and who directed the last two ‘Scary Movie’s and ‘Airplane’ and ‘Naked Gun,’ was a lot of help.

Sitcoms are making a comeback, but you’ve got to have a little quirkiness in there now.

Sitcoms, I always figured that would be an easy gig, but man, it is not.

Sitcoms are bad in so many ways it’s hard to say why. They can hype things as much as they want, but it’s all crap, no matter how many TV Guide cover stories there are.

Definitely for myself, I find myself gravitating towards dramatic work. In terms of sitcoms, you know, I always tell my agent I don’t want to be seen.

Everyone talks about the gags, but the most difficult thing is coming up with the stories. You have to learn to do that for sitcoms.

I’m an actor first and foremost, who happens to do improv. I’ve also done sitcoms, I’ve done stage.

I used to enjoy bad television, like really bad quiz programmes or sitcoms.

We have a great time on that show, and we enjoy one another’s company on stage and off. And sitcoms don’t have bad schedules. We started out working five days a week, but now we’re down to three.

So often in sitcoms, it’s like, ‘Oh, that husband of mine. He just screwed up again.’ They just have to tolerate each other. It’s not the most fun to play from my perspective. But by the same token, you can’t be like, ‘We’re just like Romeo and Juliet, always in love.’

I get one hour, really 25 minutes in a sermon on a weekend, to combat all the hours of the week that people are told you are what you have through billboards, commercials, and sitcoms, and so forth.

I sort of have open invitations from a lot of people to do TV. But it’s very hard for me to do roles in sitcoms and movies because I’m not a great actor, so if the material isn’t good, I’m in torment while I do it.

When you watch some old sitcoms, however charming they are, they have often lost speed over the years. The speed of ‘Fawlty Towers’ has lasted the distance.

I love doing sitcoms. I love doing comedy. I love the whole shooting match.

The success that I have in sitcoms comes from the fact that 60 percent of the writers are Jewish guys in their early to late 40s.

Being Orthodox Jewish is kind of like being raised on like network sitcoms.

Sitcoms are more like stage drama than anything else on film – more than a one-hour and certainly more than a movie. You get a script on Monday. You rehearse all week. And on Friday, you’re on.

‘The Simpsons’ basically – and ‘Futurama’ – are really smart shows. They’re kind of disguised as these goofy animated sitcoms, but the references within the shows, if you’re paying attention, are pretty smart and pretty sophisticated.

I was raised on the purest comedy there is: ‘I Love Lucy.’ I was raised watching ‘Three’s Company’ and sitcoms of the ’70s and ’80s.

I really hate sitcoms on television with canned laughter and stuff. What really makes me laugh is the real-life stuff. I’ve got a dry sense of humor.

I did a lot of sitcoms, and being funny isn’t about being beautiful. Usually, beautiful people aren’t the funny people.

Though the contemporary shows are good, I prefer sitcoms like my father’s.

I watch sitcoms like Seinfeld, and here’s a newsflash, but what a great show.

I think that the way forward now is more schemes and much more disabled people on TV: in sitcoms, in soaps. A disabled person reading the news would be the dream.

I will not be doing any more sitcoms, unless it’s my own or a movie or I’m directing.

Sitcoms are fun. The whole multi-cam genre is always a lot of fun. You throw a live audience in the mix, and it’s even better.

When I first started directing, I could have chosen a more lucrative path, with sitcoms and things like that. But I knew enough after the experiences I had in front of the camera that I was not going to do that, because I was just going to work on my own things or work with people I respected.

It’s something that’s almost taken for granted in sitcoms about white families. Like, ‘Oh, we’re going on a summer vacation!’ As if that’s something that everybody does.

There’s a real sense of camaraderie with sitcoms.

I can’t even look at daily comic strips. And I hate sitcoms because they don’t seem like real people to me: they’re props that often say horrible things to each other, which I don’t find funny. I have to feel like they’re real people.

Sitcoms are incredibly limiting. When you do a sitcom and it becomes a signature part for you, it’s harder to do something else; but if you do a drama, you can get lost in it and have a role to do other things.

There are only about three really, really good sitcoms on the air.