Comedies Quotations

I've always loved the '40s romantic comedies and the idea of those mistaken identities and lovers' misunderstandings.

I get tired of comedies where there are a bunch of funny guys and a beautiful woman who doesn't do anything funny. And I don't like books where there's a rough-and-tumble boy and a really clever, snotty girl. That's just not my experience with teenagers.

I could go my whole life and say, 'I'm not going to do anything with a love triangle,' but whenever you have a romance, there has to be some obstacle, and even the dumbest romantic comedies have a love triangle or something.

I think the best romantic comedies don't have villains.

I think any decent comedy worth its salt has to have heart, otherwise it's just a bunch of jokes. I think people enjoy comedies that have a heart and soul to them.

A lot of romantic comedies are just light romantic dramas, or the comedy comes off second-best.

The greatest comedies that were made by anybody were made in two reels; I don't care who it was.

I'm fascinated by failure, and I'm fascinated by finality. Shakespeare's historical plays are more universal than his comedies because they relate to the finality of life. Without finality, life would not be beautiful.

One of my favorite comedies is 'Groundhog Day' and 'Scrooged.' I love Bill Murray, and I think he's a great example of an actor who is funny.

For me, the romantic comedies I love are the ones that pay homage to the genre, but also find their ways to twist it and tweak it.

In point of fact, I'm not sure there are too many comedies with laugh tracks anymore. Most of what you hear is live studio audience laughing as a show is filmed. If this prompts you to wonder who those actual human beings are who are laughing at some of this stuff, that is a mystification I share.

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.

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'm really not a TV junkie... OK, I kind of am a TV junkie, but I'm much more of a movie junkie - my junk food is romantic comedies I've seen a million times.

I don't claim that our TV comedies are highbrow in anyway, but I think there's a basis to them, and that's why they're more popular than other TV comedies. There's a basis of truth in them, a gut feeling.

Comedies are just never that expensive quite frankly. They really aren't. We aren't doing green screen shooting, so even Hangover II in Bangkok might seem like it's expensive, you're flying over and back, but they're just not that expensive to make when you do it the way we do it which is very focused and I've done it before.

There are so many romantic comedies made, but very few dramas or love stories. And with a love story, you have to take time to develop three-dimensional characters.

You know what? At the end of the day, funny is funny. I hope to see the end of all the female cliches that are written in a lot of comedies that are named chick flicks.

To me, there were comedies that should go up for Oscars. I think Eddie Murphy in 'The Nutty Professor' was one of the greatest acting performances of all time, but it'd never be recognized that way. They always go for De Niro and Pacino, but Eddie Murphy played seven different people!

I don't want to be typecast as a heroine who does a certain kind of cinema, which is why I experiment with the types of films that I do. But yes, I won't deny that romantic love stories or romantic comedies are what I enjoy doing the most, because as an audience those are the kind of films that I like watching.

When you step out and do a song in a musical, the easier thing to do is make it funny. But when those transitions become necessary, when they aren't camp, that, to me, is magic. I've done musical comedies and enjoyed them, but subject matter that's deeper and more realistic is always what's appealed to me most.

There's like a shift in the paradigm about every 15 years in movies because one would slip through the cracks. I think if they were more inexpensive you would see many more eclectic comedies being made.

I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns.

We always thought we wanted to do a show that you could both laugh and cry in thirty minutes, and I don't know that there are that many comedies that try for that.

And even Moonstruck - for some reason the audience were just in the mood for a very romantic film, because it's one of the few romantic comedies to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Usually, comedy shows only influence other comedy shows. 'M*A*S*H' is one of the few comedies that influenced dramatic shows as well.

Most of my comedies were low on budgets - certainly by American standards.

I've been really fortunate to do so many comedies and then so many dramatic roles and then television and movies and stuff like that.

I believe how you measure a good movie is how many times you can see it. With comedies, I like to be a producer, because comedies can get corny and go off track real fast. I'm always the 'less is more' guy when it comes to a scene. So I'ma be the one who will keep it grounded.

I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant.

I always find it actually funny that the analysis is that the characters I play in comedies are the manchild, the adolescent, characters that refuse to grow up. And yet, if you look back in the history of comedy all the way back to the Marx brothers, that's a big part of comedy.

One of my favorite comedies of all time is 'Terms of Endearment;' that's my pace.

I'd love to become like Bill Murray, who was so funny on Saturday Night Live and has gone on to do some of the landmark comedies people like. And then to add this whole other phase to his career with Lost in Translation and Rushmore. I always felt to be able to have something similar to that would be great.

There aren't many romantic comedies anymore that star just a female lead without being paired with a male lead,

My roles in comedies from 'Austin Powers' to 'Tommy Boy' to 'Wayne's World,' were sort of comedic 'straight man' parts. My character on 'Parks & Recreation' is the comic relief in a comedy. To play a character that appears strictly for laughs is sort of new for me and really fun.

Our racy little R-rated comedies are making a hit this year.

Maybe if people are getting worn out with reality shows, which they don't seem to be, comedies will start reasserting themselves.

I went to drama school. I'm classically trained; I studied Shakespeare, blah blah blah. But I always preferred to do Oscar Wilde, or Shakespeare's comedies over his dramas.

It is nice to do an independent film that can be a commercial hit. I think comedies do really well. I wish more independent films were comedies.

I think in troubled times, we're going to see the same genre that worked during the depression -- comedy. People need to escape, they need to laugh, they need to forget the grim realities of the world. Comedies are going to become king at the box office.

I would love to do a small indie comedy, like a Wes Anderson movie or, like, an ensemble comedy like 'The Royal Tenenbaums' or 'Little Miss Sunshine.' I like comedies like that, that have a lot of heart and are about family dynamics.

Well, it's actually funny and romantic, unlike many romantic comedies these days,

There are as many great superhero movies as there are comedies and dramas and cartoons. People just want to see good movies.

We plan to make three feature-length movies for theatrical release this year, probably comedies because that is what works well for local production and we already have a stable of good comedy writers from our television sitcoms.

We find it disturbing that the networks in question seem to have no problem exploiting gay persons through mindless comedies or titillating dramas, but when it comes to a church's loving welcome of committed gay couples, that's where they draw the line.

The strength of the ratings and performance and the quality of these two shows make this a very easy decision. We are confident that these comedies will only continue to increase in popularity.

There are just too many of these adult-oriented comedies out there that audiences were sort of pulled in a lot of different directions.

The original 'Caddyshack' with Chevy Chase and Bill Murray is one of the best comedies ever made.

There is so much cross-pollination between the U.S. and Britain in terms of comedians. British TV comedies work well in the U.S. American stand-ups make it big in Britain.

We didn't have the largest marketing budget for the comedies to begin with, and what we had, we split between two shows. In that respect, 'Sunny' didn't get its own real launch. But we love the show and think it's only going to get better.

Americans have always been excellent at making romantic comedies - but dramatically, we don't really try to do it.

Romantic comedies seem to take over where the fairytales of childhood left off, feeding our dreams of a soulmate; though, sadly, the Hollywood endings prove quite elusive in the real world.

Sometimes I watch the broad comedies coming out of Hollywood and I think, 'You know, sex is a big part of people's lives, but is that really the only thing men are ever concerned about?' People are more complicated than they appear in film or television.

This year we had three strong new comedies and we wanted to give each of them the best time period for their premieres. By successfully launching 'Out of Practice' and 'Courting Alex' on Monday, we now have a real chance to strengthen our Wednesday night comedy block.

This is one of the easier comedies to understand.

This is an idea whose time has come. It's a scheduler's dream to have successful and critically acclaimed dramas ... comedies ... and reality series. We are going to have quite a schedule.

I've enjoyed the time I've had working on films. I've enjoyed television movie-of-the-week format. I've enjoyed the few comedies that I've done, and I've enjoyed one-hour television.

I've frequently said that fall is a bad time to launch reality programming. The audience has a real hunger to check out the new dramas and comedies this time of year, so we elected to not launch any new shows.

I love movies, of course. 'Terminator 3' and 'Bad Boys II' - lots of action. Sports movies, action movies, comedies - I'll go to those, but not 'las de amor.' Not romance. It's not that I don't like love, but on the screen it bores me.

The best part of my job is that we can be making shows like 'Boardwalk', 'Thrones', 'True Blood' but also female-centered comedies like 'Enlightened', 'Veep' and 'Girls'.

That's exactly what it did on BBC2. The people that get onto focus groups are force-fed big, broad comedies with laughter tracks and guest appearances. They're not going to like 'The Office' the first time they see it because they're not going to know what they're watching exactly. But if you stick to your vision and auteur it the way you think it should be done, there are enough people in the world that are like-minded and they're going to find it and it's going to be their favorite show.

They are looking to us to create a legitimate comedy scene at Warner Bros.. What they are hoping from us is to develop broad comedies which are PG-13 or R, and they want to make our Broken Lizard movies. It's a classic 'make one for us, make one for them' kind of thing.

In the best traditions of American comedy, from its beginnings through the crash-bang comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, Leslie Nielsen skewered the otherwise proper, did it with mischievous delight and convulsed audiences mercilessly.

I personally think the best ideas for TV shows - at least comedies - are very low-fi ideas. High concepts often sell pitches in movies and TV, but, especially in TV when you're talking about hopefully a 100 or 150 episode proposition, those concepts just burn off, and then you're stuck with nothing.

Generally comedies and family movies have a harder time on sequels than action or science fiction films, ... That would explain the problems of 'Analyze That' or 'Stuart Little 2.' This year, 'Legally Blonde 2' could be in trouble. It doesn't have the hard core fan base of 'The Matrix' or 'X-Men.' And it opens opposite 'Terminator 3.'

The big story coming out of this year was that comedies did really well,

All those zany comedies have instilled a sense of pace in me.

It's not the Olympics that are the problem, it's these big, horrible, formula, factory American comedies that are out there bashing our tiny, little film industry and when you're trying to celebrate the Australian culture you've got all this trash coming in there.

It's too bad that there aren't as many light comedies around in the movies as there were when I was making pictures like 'The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.' The boys are just not writing them. Many writers are more serious now than they used to be, and that's showing up in all phases of entertainment.

It's awesome, because in live-action, most of my comedies have been rated R, so I'm trying to make adults laugh. While animation is a completely different world where you're trying to make children laugh. So that difference is a blast to do.

It's been a struggle to find that next evolution of comedy. Earl was our highest-testing show in 15 years, which was kind of a surprise. But we definitely need cutting-edge comedies like that.

I’ve been offered a lot but I want to stay away from romance, comedies and fluffy work. I met Stephen Spielberg at a breast cancer benefit and he explained that he’d seen me on Saturday Night Live and thought I was ready for a movie. He said, ‘You go to the ledge and are unafraid to jump off.’ That was the biggest compliment to me because he was saying I was free.

I believe that all romantic comedies can trace their origins back to this play. It's a good February thing to do.

I'd love to do a really juicy drama that's just really real. On the comedy side, I'd love to do something like '21 Jump Street.' I cannot stop watching that movie. Really funny, really extreme comedies are definitely my favorite.

I call it Bosnian minimalism. I was somehow thinking of the Roman comedies where it all happens in the square.

How television and the culture are absorbing Katrina is certainly different than how they absorbed Sept. 11. Four years ago, all culture was put on pause. But people have continued to watch comedies and dramas and reality shows throughout, even when things were at their grimmest.

They make these outrageous comedies and just use these kids as props. They're not beings who are transforming.