Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You learn quite a bit about your film from test screening audiences. With both comedies and movies that are intense, you need to calibrate the film and see how audiences react.
The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.
Comedy is a very delicate business, especially comedies that sort of attempt to do things in an honest way and in a very naturalistic way the way that 'No Strings Attached' is.
When you've been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don't know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be.
This is my chance to get out there and appease the fans of my music as well as show people that I do do standup comedy because a lot of people don't know that's where I started.
I can pretty much guarantee that if I do a show in a comedy club, there will be someone who will come out of the audience and tell me the worst joke ever. It's just a guarantee.
Comedy is a tool of togetherness. It's a way of putting your arm around someone, pointing at something, and saying, 'Isn't it funny that we do that?' It's a way of reaching out.
I've seen Don Rickles up at the Montreal Comedy Festival. Don Rickles was doing jokes in a wheelchair, and he was headlining a show. Do you think they would let a woman do that?
I always loved comedy, but I never knew it was something you could learn to do. I always thought that some people are born comedians ... just like some people are born dentists.
I would love to continue to challenge myself by trying different things. Action, Drama, Comedy. I would be grateful to do any and all of it if someone is kind enough to hire me!
I pay a bit more than lip-service to health: I don't eat chips or pre-prepared food, and it might be a comedy sacrilege to admit I do like vegetables, fruit and salad and stuff.
I've got a lot of nervous energy and I trip a lot. I don't have a good equilibrium. In the places where the physical comedy was necessary, it came very naturally and it was fun.
I do a lot of comedy and I like that. I am happy doing funny films. I am often the straight person in a comedy, which is great as long as there are talented people to work with.
With a comedy, it's so important to see it with an audience and an audience who really wants to be there and is enthusiastic, otherwise it can be quite a traumatizing experience.
I think 'Paper Moon' is a comedy-drama. 'What's Up, Doc?' was the most severe comedy, but my favorite film of my own is 'They All Laughed,' which is a kind of bittersweet comedy.
I wish I could have a recurring role on 'Modern Family'. I think 'Modern Family' is the best comedy on television. It's extremely well written, extremely well acted and directed.
I have always survived with comedy, in that I grew up very dyslexic and did not get good grades. I always thought I was dumb, and there are many people out there that would agree
There used to be an art form called the 'comedy of manners.' Why aren't comedies of manners made now in this country? The answer is simple. We no longer have manners to speak of.
People seem to want to give 'Flowers' a comedy or a comedy-drama label. I suppose it's closer to comedy-drama, but it feels like it requires a whole new definition all of its own.
Comedy, sometimes if you think about it too much then it becomes a bit boring. If you start thinking about striking the right balance sometimes it takes the spontaneity out of it.
Universal Orlando may have the new Harry Potter Wizarding World, but Disney World has the Hari Puttar Experience, based on the Bollywood movie, 'Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors.'
I wish I was writing something much more heavy each time I did a film, and that the comedies just occasionally come out. But unfortunately you're stuck with what you're born with.
Since so many romantic comedies vary little in their storyline, the success or failure of such movies depends largely on whether we believe in the relationship of the protagonists.
Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble.
Stand-up comedy had an interesting effect on me in terms of how I started to think about constructing things, because I really loved the interstices, the linkages, or lack thereof.
I learned a few things on my own since, and modified some of the things he taught me, but everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from Danny Simon.
Well, I started trying stand-up before I joined Google, actually. And then I went broke because that's what happens when you try stand-up comedy. You're actually paying to perform.
I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy. Making people laugh one moment and the next making them feel really uncomfortable.
When comedy is good, it's jazz. The beats of it, the looseness, the improvisational part, the music-the way you hit the inflection, the high notes of a joke. It's all melody to me.
All kinds of things have gone into my shows - cajun and rock bands, Bollywood, Kraftwerk tributes, effects and so on. As long as it services the comedy, everything is up for grabs.
Before I went to a meeting at the 'Harvard Lampoon,' I had no idea that there was even a comedy magazine at Harvard, let alone that you could write comedy potentially for a living.
Comedy isn't necessarily all dialogue. Think of Buster Keaton: the poker face and all this chaos going on all around him. Sometimes it's a question of timing, of the proper rhythm.
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 I was doing ensemble theater and comedy work, I felt I had some talents. But when I started doing my shows in Berkeley and found that I could be funny on my own, I was shocked.
I never go about a new project as if I'm trying ot redefine myself. I just like to work, and I'm excited by material I find challenging and - if it's a comedy - exceptionally funny.
I'm gonna play this game the way I want to. It might be serious, it might be a comedy, it might be a dramedy, it might be variety, it might be a talk show, whatever. There's no box.
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.
When you're in comedy, people always come up and say, 'Oh, it must be so hard.' It really isn't hard unless you're not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.
I'm not afraid to take on somebody or say something that somebody will find offensive because unfortunately in comedy, you can't say anything really good without offending somebody.
Yet there are some people - Steve Allen would dissect comedy forever; he's a really funny guy, but he would love talking about comedy. I'm doing it right now and you all seem bored.
I was very young when 'The Carol Burnett Show' came out, but that kind of comedy and the spontaneity of her, I think it really deeply affected me within just the joy of performance.
I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.
I have an affinity for comedy because I like to watch them. It's an honor to make comedies because I love being able to pop something into the DVD player and laugh. I love doing it.
As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy.
What's interesting about Laurel and Hardy is that in most comedy teams, there's a straight man, and then there's the funny guy. And with Laurel and Hardy, they're both the funny guy.
If I were given a choice between two films and one was dark and explored depraved, troubled or sick aspects of our culture, I would always opt for that over the next romantic comedy.
Every week for me was the same audience, and every week they heckled me. The better I got at comedy, the better the audience was at heckling me. But it helped me with my joke writing.
Young stand-ups, we ought to do comedy in George Carlin's spirit, in Richard Pryor's spirit, in Jackie Gleason's spirit, in Lucille Ball's spirit, because they did it with the spirit.
When I got the script for 'The Art of Seduction,' I realised I'd never been in a comedy, so I decided to experiment. What the character went through could never happen in my own life.
It's hard to learn about comedy from comedians. Comedy is not something that you necessarily learn or can imitate. You're funny or you're not, and you hope what you're doing is funny.