If the setups take too long, you wind up losing momentum. Momentum is very good for comedy. Not having to do eight setups in a single scene and have it take five hours is very good for comedy.
I think in the world we need more comedy. I wish so much that we could embrace that side of us more. I love to escape through watching comedy, and I wish for more of that in the future.
I think the kick to doing comedy is just to get in a film with really funny people and let them do their jobs. I find that in most comedies, I'm not the funny one, which works out great.
With drama, you know if you're having a true moment, but in comedy, if somebody doesn't laugh, then you know you're not being funny. That's a really fun challenge, and that's what draws me to comedy.
Honestly, 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.
I haven't been offered a lot of comedy. In theater, I've done quite a bit of comedy or dramas that included a lot of funny stuff. But in my TV work, those aren't the roles that I've been offered.
I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.
Comedy clubs were something that came to pass in the '80s, but toward the end of that, in the early '90s, people started doing comedy again in alternative spaces.
I felt audiences are happier to take comedy people who play darker people because there's a link between the psychosis of comedy and the psychosis of being a twisted character.
'The Office' is less a comedy than so many other 'comedies' that have been on the air. It's really about the balance between what is real and what is comic.
Yeah, well I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre and that's really where my training is. As an actor, that's my training.
My background is in musical comedy. I didn't know I was going to be an actor. But all my points of reference have to do with musical comedy and in being kind of a showoff.
I wasn't even a big comedy nerd. A lot of the comedians I know - a lot of my friends are comedians - they knew a lot about comedy growing up.
Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.
For some reason, people with comedy, any time they can detect a pattern, it kind of freaks them out. 'Those guys are always together!' Yeah, they're a comedy team. Anything they can recognize as a pattern they think is a hole.
Everybody says how hard comedy is, but, when it comes time to honor things, whether it's on a weekly critical basis or whether it's award time, at that time of the year, comedy is the poor, dumb child of dramatic work.
25, 30 years ago, that meant something, they were making some money. And they were doing all sorts of comedy, screaming at the audience, basically crowd control. And then there was the whole urban comedy scene.
I've never done an actual Western, and I would love to do that. I've done drama and dark comedy stuff. I've never really done a romantic comedy either. I would do that.
It seems to me that romantic comedies used to be about falling in love, but in recent years they've really become just comedies where the love story is only there as a spine to hang the jokes on.
I love comedy, but it has to be hysterical and really amusing; I'm not really a big fan of romantic comedies, in fact I can't stand them. I'm really more of a fan of 'Team America' and 'Dodgeball.'
It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.
