Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A comic book and a straight drama all have the same elements. If you're playing tragedy, you have to be aware of the comedy; if you're playing comedy, you have to be aware of the tragedy. If you're playing comic book, you have to be aware of the reality.
I think the worst thing you could ever do is label comedy. I'm a fan of the broadness of Lucille Ball, the subtlety of Peter Sellers and the oddballness of Fred Armisen and the wittiness of Marty Short. I'm a fan of all of it, and I want to do all of it.
I'm not a comedian, I'm not a stand-up and I don't come from a comedy background. I am an actor, but I've had a very fortunate foray into comedy, and it seems to have become a bit of a strength, and you can't complain when you become known for something.
I did a guest shot on a comedy series where they did 20 to 30 takes of everything. It's just gone by then. The joke is over. It's not funny anymore, and then of course, the editor's the one that has to figure out the timing. I think a lot depends on that.
What I love is the comedy of the body. It's a little highfalutin', but you can even say pre-verbal comedy. People laugh differently at stuff that isn't brought to them via the spoken word. It's from a different place; it's a different quality of laughter.
We have no blasphemy laws these days but with that freedom comes the responsibility which should always attend the exercise of free speech: truth, courtesy and an awareness of impact. It is the last of these which is so neglected by so much modern comedy.
The film I did with Bobby De Niro, 'The King of Comedy' - an awful lot came to me out of that movie because De Niro never allowed me any room to be crazy. If I had tried to play it the way I would normally play it and get hysterical, Bobby would punch me.
Most comedy is based on getting a laugh at somebody else's expense. And I find that that's just a form of bullying in a major way. So I want to be an example that you can be funny and be kind, and make people laugh without hurting somebody else's feelings.
In Miami, I was studying improv as well as acting. Improv is a great tool to have, just for the comedic timing that you get. When I moved to L.A., I started taking classes with The Groundlings, and I loved it. I'm definitely in love with improv and comedy.
My hopes and aspirations haven't changed since I started in this business. They've been to be able to play drama, to be able to play comedy, to be able to play leading men, and to be able to play character roles. I have no other aspirations in this regard.
I would say I've actually done a lot more comedy than I've done drama. It's weird the way that worked out, because when I came out of theater school I took myself way too seriously, so it's kind of ironic that I ended up sort of going down the comedy path.
There are a lot of comics at the top end making staggering amounts of money and selling out stadiums. I think stand-up is a more intimate thing than that. Maybe because of the kind of comedy I do. It's like a discussion, but I'm the one with the microphone.
'Gutur Gu' is a silent comedy, which I had never done. I wanted to do something out of the box. It's exciting, tough, and fun. Dialogues are very important for actors, and to emote without them took some getting used to. It's giving me scope to learn a lot.
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 is best when it's a reaction to something. When you're talking about a topic, and when your friend says something funny naturally, that kind of points something out and puts it on its side, or whatever, then everybody laughs. Because it's unsuspected.
I had always fancied a go at the comedy and when it started to go reasonably well and the opportunity arose for me to move into it full time, I just couldn't turn it down. I just took the risk, and I just wanted to see if it would work and thankfully it did.
I'd played a lot of best friends, and/or bad guys, which seems to be my lot in life. In romantic comedies there's always a best friend and the woman has a best friend and they always antagonise each other and then they end up together at the end of the movie.
His (Lloyd Kaufman) string of low-budget, lowbrow horror comedies stretching back to the ’80s has been cited as influence by Peter Jackson, the Farrelly Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Takashi Miike, and Guillermo Del Toro, just to cite a few prominent examples.
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.'
I'm from New York, and I started in New York, which I think is a huge advantage because I wasn't overwhelmed by the city. I understood the city. All of the distractions that could come with somebody that started comedy in New York didn't really happen for me.
It's funny - almost every comedian that I started out with moved to L.A., except for my two friends Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer. And my two friends that are doing the best in comedy, the most successful friends I have, are Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer.
There's something outrageously funny about the bold-faced lying that's going on, in a general way. Just the blatant denial of facts, whether it's climate change or crowd sizes. Every day, there's another blatant lie. I think there's comedy in there somewhere.
Comedy doesn't really matter that much; I know that. I treat it like an adult - I don't treat it like a child or a god, which some people do. This might just be in America, but 'stand-up comedy' is something very particular that I don't particularly relate to.
I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.
I think I was the only person in my experimental film class doing comedy. But my sense of humor and a lot of comedy that I love is quite surreal and strange, you know? You could argue that 'Monty Python' is experimental film. It just happens to be really funny.
With YouTube streaming and Twitch and all that, you can just hop on on any given night and play videogames and have people come watch you. And even if you've only got 400 people watching your stream, that's more people than would see my comedy if I went to UCB.
If you think of the people who are funny in your life, you'll note it's not because they tell jokes, it's because of their character. If you develop characters, then you'll know them, and you'll know how they'll speak. The comedy will come out of the character.
Oh man, there's no shortage of craziness happening on the American landscape right now. I'll turn on the TV every day or check out the newspaper, and there is something to find humor in or something to find absolute fear in. Either way, it makes for good comedy.
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.
When I was growing up, I was really into comedy. I listened to a lot of comedy albums. I loved Richard Pryor, but the comic that had the most impact on me was always my brother Chris, who was in the next room. It was tangible. If Chris could make it, I could try.
As someone who's been doing a lot of classical theater recently, I loved the idea of getting to run around in Steven Alan, and not be in a corset and a wig, and not have a dialect, and get to be in a 90-minute play with no intermission, and get to do real comedy.
My idol growing up was Charlie Chaplin. I was obsessed with him. I mean, while other kids were watching Jim Carrey and the likes in the '90s, I was watching Charlie Chaplin films, because I was a bit of a geek. I became obsessed with this idea of physical comedy.
Chris Columbus, who directed the first two Harry Potter films and was the family comedy king through the '80s and '90s - 'Mrs. Doubtfire,' 'Home Alone,' etc. - has acquired rights to 'The Cypress House' and is working on the script himself, with intent to direct.
I very rarely laugh. I remember I used to have a joy at comedy. I remember going to see Sean Lock for the first time live, just in some comedy club when I was 18, and again, just guttural, pure laughter. I didn't know what he was doing; I couldn't see the tricks.
When I did comedy I made fun of myself. If there was a buffoon, I played the buffoon. And people looked at me and said, "Gee, that's like Uncle David", or "That's like a friend of mine.". And they related through that. I didn't make fun of them. I made fun of me.
My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate, which had a commentary track that wasn't even the filmmakers, it was a professor, some film criticism guy who just happen to be this amazing commentator who went off into the whole theory of comedy.
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.
A lot of time with comedy stuff, half of the stuff on my feed is: 'Haha, good for you!' 'Hey, thanks for making my day!' And the other half is: 'Defund the CBC!' 'All Newfoundlanders are hoagie-hogs!' It's just left and right and there's never anything in between.
I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.
Nobody is here without a reason. I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy - from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated - but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.
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.
The great thing with comedy is that I don't memorize ahead of time like I did on 'Breaking Bad.' With 'Breaking Bad,' I wanted to know those words inside and out, really have my lines down so I could say them verbatim. But with comedy, you keep it a lot more loose.
When I was filming 'Premium Rush' in N.Y.C., I flew to L.A. to have a few general meetings. I sat down with Peter Cramer at Universal Studios and spoke about my life and career, and being that I'm such a goof, we spoke about how I really wanted to do a comedy next.
Who knew Rob Lowe was funny? On 'Parks and Rec,' we've got some of the funniest comedy writers, some of the funniest comedians in the world working there. And if anything, we don't just effuse to one another and be like, 'Oh, Rob Lowe's really funny,' if he wasn't.
Growing up as a comedian the most influential person on me was Jon Stewart. He showed that comedy could have a real tangible effect on the world. He showed that comedy could move the needle of society and that a comic can do real things and make a real contribution.
As a card-carrying space nerd and NASA's chief scientist, I love space movies, from 'Star Trek' to 'Star Wars' to my all-time favorite - 'The Dish', an Australian comedy that celebrates that first moment when Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of our moon.
Few years ago [Donald] Trump was being roasted by Comedy Central. They always have rules about things that you can't joke about. Donald Trump's rule at that time, the only thing that you couldn't joke about was a suggestion that he has less money that he claimed to.
Comedy is so subjective. If you trip and fall down, some people will laugh, and some people will say, 'Oh, physical comedy is so pedestrian.' Some people look at Three Stooges as lowbrow; some people consider them artists. No one is wrong. It's just a personal take.
Something that is funny, that I use sometimes if I'm doing comedy, is the fact that I'm now often mistaken for the rapper Rick Ross. And I don't know that I've ever corrected anyone - like I've never said, 'No no, I'm not Rick Ross, I'm Black Thought from The Roots.'
I always found the dramatic side of things easier than the comedy, because there's so many ways to do comedy, and it's also subjective. Someone might not laugh at what you do, whereas if you're going to do a dramatic scene, there's usually only one way you can do it.