Comedy Quotations

I'm still a geek on the inside, that's the important thing.

I think it's great training for any comedian to start on cows. Because with cows, you expect them to be bored and just stare at you blankly. And that's exactly what you'll get at a comedy club. If you can toughen up with a cow audience, then you'll never be worried with a human audience.

Comedy is my first love; that's my main goal in life - to keep doing comedy.

I don't just want to be a cute girl in a comedy or the actress who just does the same thing over and over again. I want to play roles that are distinct. I want to have a more varied career like actresses Viola Davis or Angela Bassett - those are the people that I grew up watching and admiring.

'Saturday Night Live' was actually started with a show that Lorne Michaels and I did at a summer camp called Timberlane in Ontario when we were 14 and 15. We would do an improvisational show with music, comedy and acting.

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

Comedy always pushes some buttons, because it wouldn't be comedy if it didn't.

Anyone who thinks they can write the perfect comedy that everyone will love is a fool. I can only write what I think is funny and hope that there is a likeminded audience out there.

The only thing I would unequivocally say is that I have never had any interest in romantic comedy I just couldn't do it. I think I'd be terrible.

Comedy is my passion. I'm going to do this until I drop.

I love to bring humour into my work. Because comedy is not a huge part of the art world. And big-business film takes itself very seriously.

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.

I'm just calm under fire. I'm not intimidating at all.

I drank the Kool-Aid of being a network star. Once it didn't happen, I realized it wasn't the best version of my comedy.

I would love to do some more comedy. I would love to do some silliness. I would love to do some characters that have greater vulnerability.

Comedy is surprises, so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny.

I've never had prejudice against me because of being a woman in comedy, I've never felt any sort of unfairness because of that - but I do think it is naive to think that it doesn't exist.

It wasn't that no one asked me to the prom, it was that no one would tell me where it was.

It's both funny and sad which seem to me to be the two basic ingredients of good comedy.

I've played such serious characters that no one sees me the way I actually am, which is completely cheesy and goofy, so it would be fun to do a romantic comedy and just have a good laugh.

To all my soap fans out there, my horror fanatics, comedy lovers, I will tell you this: 'Death Valley' is an action-packed drama, comedic, horror TV series that has a non-stop adventure in each episode. It's like a huge pot of Texas gumbo. If you like all four of those genres, then you'll love this show.

I'm always doing comedy and will never hit up a 9-to-5 desk job.

'The Bill Engvall Show' is a comedy about a middle-class family in the Midwest. It's a great family show to watch if you want to laugh and unwind.

That's the great thing about a tractor. You can't really hear the phone ring.

Vince Vaughn is a genuine person, awesome guy. He'll come to a lot of my shows. It's not that often that you can meet someone as cool as Vince.

I don't think I could compare myself to Macaulay Culkin, because we're pretty much two different kinds of actors. He's done a lot of comedy. He does mostly just comedy like 'Uncle Buck' and 'Home Alone' and 'Home Alone 2.' And I've done a lot of different stuff, like sad movies, like the movie about the kid with AIDS.

Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.

I think it helps in any comedy room for a woman to have very strong, respected convictions, because then it opens the door up a little bit for other women to have that.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

I'd like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn't know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy.

A lot of our favorite comedies in general are usually directed by writers, whether or not they wrote the original script themselves.

Being a family in general is a comedy of errors.

That's my opportunity to hide behind that old lady and say what I want to say.

The great thing is that the funny side of getting old is fuel for my comedy.

They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we're not 100 per cent human, that we're always letting ourselves down. We're constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.

There's sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy.

The one that was most fun was That's My Bush; the part that I did for Comedy Central. That was a hoot. That was more fun that one should be allowed to have.

The Divine Comedy' is very sophisticated but also very popular.

The stuff I did in 'Rescue Me' was great. It gave me the opportunity to play comedy, and Denis Leary was the first one to take a chance with me. And from that experience, we had a comedy pilot that we did that I was going to play the lead in. And then 'Person of Interest' came along. They're all new experiences.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

Laughter is a way of really letting out all this pressure that you could face in your daily life in the suffering of your people, and comedy is almost like a medicine to your soul in a way.

I'm currently working on a romantic comedy between me and Philip Seymour Hoffman. So my next step is to write something so mind-blowingly spectacular that he has no other choice but to agree to do it! Wish me luck.

I worked at comedy clubs - if I can use the term 'work' - for several years. I middled at one point. I never made it; I was never a headliner. I never made enough time to write enough good material, in my opinion.

A sign now of success with a certain audience when you do a short comedy piece, anywhere, is that it gets on YouTube and gets around. It's always something you're thinking about unconsciously.

I did stand-up comedy for seventeen years. I need to explore other things.

When I was a little girl, the only real form of entertainment I was exposed to was theater, being raised in St. Louis, and I still love theater, and I think sitcoms are similar to that, in there's a live audience, and you know, I definitely like the comedy of it, too. I like to make people laugh, and I definitely think laughter is healing.

There's a fraudulent root element of comedy in that we say things night after night as though they are rolling effortlessly from the brain and off the tongue, when in fact they are crafted over weeks and months and years.

I'm a big fan of Albert Brooks, Nichols and May. I'd like to follow in their footsteps and do comedy films.

I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.

Comedy is like music. You have to know the key and you have to find players with good chops.

Drama comes more naturally to me. It's the comedy you really have to delve into.

I put the cameras on her and told her to be obnoxious as she could possibly could be. She was.

And Barry Levinson is insanely funny. I don't know if you know this, not everyone does, but he and Craig T. Nelson were a comedy team back in the coffeehouse days of the late '60s.

When you do a comedy, the goals are much clearer to me.

I always loved acting and improv and sketch comedy and theater, which I did at a local youth theater.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire.

In my new IFC comedy game show, 'Bunk,' we actually use our intern Patrick as a human timer - giving contestants the time it takes for him to wade through a bag of broken glass for a razor blade, to get gum out of his hair, to pick up every strand from a box of spaghetti I spill on the floor, etc, etc.

Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail.

I see parody as another form of comedy.

Comedy is so hard to do, so it was very cool to do dead pan humor.

I do want to make powerful works of art with people, but I also just want to have fun. I've never done a romantic comedy - I'm sure it would be a blast.

I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.

I started writing this feature comedy in New York - a Chris Farley vehicle. The script was decent. When I got to LA, I met some new friends in film school and had them read my script and give me notes.

Every day is a surprise. There are confirmations of an interconnectivity and synchronicity which inspire, titillate and confirm the inherent comedy of the universe.

Editing and post-production is so important with comedy.

Between us and the writers, it was comedy hour the whole time. We could hardly get through it.

Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it's use of language. We have at our disposal a great language... and the imaginative, creative use of that language can be at the service of humour.

I think comedy is funnier when it's real.

What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.

Whether it's corporate investigations or comedy, there are certain inherent truths to trying to get what you want while trying to be a decent person doing it.

Comedy to me is all about the bumps and bruises and weird tics.

I did sketch comedy, but I never did improv. So I've just tried to learn as I go.

Most of the comedies I've done have been rather farcical and extravagant.

Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.

I really enjoy comedy. It's a real challenge.

I love acting but I also love writing, especially comedy.

The real reason for comedy is to hide the pain.

Why should I be feeling tension? It's The Daily Show.

Theres nothing more difficult to do than comedy.

All the great game show hosts have a signature 'look,' from Bob Barker's year-round Brazil Nut-hued tan to Monty Hall's oversized lamb chop sideburns. As the host of IFC's new comedy game show 'Bunk,' I, too, have worked to develop a style signature by being the first man or woman in TV history to host every show in my bare feet!

I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic's best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he's doing is easy is an occupational hazard.

I feel like if I consider myself comfortable in something, then that's not exactly where I want to be. And in 'Jane the Virgin' specifically, I feel like I don't have to choose... We get to do drama and comedy sometimes within the same thirty seconds.

I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality.

People need to be peppered or even outraged occasionally. Our national comedy and drama is packed with earthy familiarity and honest vulgarity. Clean vulgarity can be very shocking and that, in my view, gives greater involvement.

In comedy, though, it's good to get feedback from the audience about what they find funny.

I liked comedy as a kid. When I was a kid, I'd go to sleep to, like, Bill Cosby albums every night. I'd listen to 'Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow... Right!' and 'Wonderfulness,' which are two of his most famous albums. Then the next night, I'd flip them over, 'cause it was the old stackable turntable.

Comedy was my sport. It taught me how to roll with the punches. Failure is the exact same as success when it comes to comedy because it just keeps coming. It never stops.

I definitely prefer working in comedy over drama, but at the same time, when it comes to comedy, I tend to prefer comedies that have a great sense of truth to them and that come from an honest place.

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.

I don't like forcing comedy and people just trying to do things just to find a funny beat all the time.

I think the first rule of comedy is that it has to be funny and I find a lot of the broad comedy which is sent to me, painfully unfunny.

I don't set out to offend or shock, but I also don't do anything to avoid it.

I guess as you get older you sort of see the mechanics, even with the best comedians. There's admiration for people I admire, but it's not guttural laughter. It's a wry 'Oh, well done, sir.' But I sort of miss that slightly; I miss the raw joy of comedy I used to get.

If you are writing comedy and try to please everybody, you'll please nobody.

Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible.

You never get tired unless you stop and take time for it.

My friends once told me I remind them of the main character from the American comedy series 'Curb Your Enthusiasm.' I thought they must mean a sunny, affable girl-next-door, but instead I was confronted with Larry David! Crabby, moody, perversely neurotic Larry David. And the thing is, my friends were right.

I don't like the bullying, do-one-over style of comedy. It's so cheap.

I have been a director who has starred, participated on both sides of the filmmaking process.