Mmmm... the comedy that matters is the comedy you pull out of thin air. It's a bit like when something funny has happened and you try to explain it to someone else and end up saying, 'You had to be there.'
I love to do comedy, and I don't think of things as drama or comedy. I think that if it's a funny line, it's a funny line. If it's a funny moment, it's a funny moment.
I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that an...
When I was in improv workshops or doing stand-up or writing comedy with others, or just doing comedy, I just laughed. Funny was funny; I loved to laugh. I always liked people I found generally funny.
It's funny, because when I was in college, all my professors said, 'You should do comedy.' And I was like, 'No! No!' But I was able to get my foot in the door through comedy. I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to do it.
I'm not at all funny. I can do dark comedy pretty well, but straight-up comedy, I don't know. I'm much darker. I've been like that since I was 3 years old.
It's funny because I think a lot of it is simply... We've never considered ourselves satirists, but because we're on Comedy Central and because we're South Park on Comedy Central, we can do any topic we want.
It's a tremendous feeling walking on to a set with a live audience and making them laugh, but I love drama, and I love drama where there's the ability to bring comedy into it because in a lot of tragic circumstances in life there is comedy to be had.
I think the most important thing about learning comedy is to start from who you are. If you begin the process by imitating what you perceive to be a comedy rhythm, you will get laughs sooner, but you will not be unique.
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.
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.
Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.
I moved out to L.A. to be a filmmaker or director. I didn't even think about doing comedy or even acting. I wanted to be like Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, but I wasn't going to a lot of comedy.
Yes, I would say my comedy is grunge, evidenced by the fact my jokes have put an end to big-hair glam comedy.
Sometimes I would like the opportunity to do character-driven comedy and that's really what I was trying to do in Meet The Parents. I think in a way this is a more old fashioned type of comedy.
I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.
I just liked stand-up comedy so much. I used to memorize Bill Cosby albums and other people's albums, George Carlin, Flip Wilson.
Improv seemed to replace stand-up, which was very big before that. Stand-up comedy was real hot in the late '80s and through the '90s.
Comedy, when it works, is light on its feet and has the illusion of complete spontaneity: as if there is no film, no camera. You are standing there experiencing it all in real time. This illusion, I believe, is why so many people think comedy is easy...
The scariest thing about screening a comedy... if you screen a drama, you know, there's no real way to tell in real time if people are enjoying it or not. But in a comedy, it's like, if people aren't laughing, it's sort of scary.
