I will say you could always look at 'Looney Tunes' and learn about writing. I think you can learn a lot about the beats of comedy. I think you can find out about awkward pauses, because I think they did those well.
The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it's so much fun.
I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating - is this the exact right mix? I think that's - to me it's anti-comedy. It's more about PC-nonsense.
Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with 'Hardly Working' and 'Cracking Up.'
That's also why comedy and horror are my two favorite genres of film to write, because you get these outbursts of emotion from people, laughter and shock, and it's really thrilling, and I like to be thrilled.
I believe comedy should be free to go anywhere. I believe that there is tasteful and untasteful, I think they're very close to each other, and it's how you handle it tonally. But I'm an equal opportunity offender.
My philosophy is, it's always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don't mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I'd like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.
I've been pretty well treated by the critics, but the critics who didn't like my comedies hated them with an unbridled passion, and then I would see these same people writing very respectfully about ordinary naturalistic plays.
When I was a child, I wanted to watch things that made me laugh. It's attacking boredom, as simple as that. I was 19 when I first went to a comedy club - I wanted to do it, so I gave it a try and that was it. I found my office.
Sometimes I watch the broad comedies coming out of Hollywood and I think, 'You know, sex is a big part of people's lives, but is that really the only thing men are ever concerned about?' People are more complicated than they appear in film or televis...
I never walked the streets of New York hoping to be a musical comedy star. For one thing, they would have thought I was too tall, because l was five feet eight and a half, and they were all little bitty things running around in the studio at that tim...
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...
If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you...
I know there are fewer women comics, and I think there'll continue to be an inherent sexism in many industries, comedy being one, just because things do take a while to evolve. Things are changing, but it's going to take time. I accept this rather th...
A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why...
If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
Being black, Latino, or Asian is not a genre. Romantic comedies, thrillers, action - those are genres. I think there's a lot of people who want to have the conversation. I don't think people are afraid of it, I just think it's the time to have that c...
As a kid I was short and only weighed 95 pounds. And though I was active in a lot of Sports and got along with most of the guys, I think I used comedy as a defense mechanism. You know making someone laugh is a much better way to solve a problem than ...
Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.
I love movies, of course. 'Terminator 3' and 'Bad Boys II' - lots of action. Sports movies, action movies, comedies - I'll go to those, but not 'las de amor.' Not romance. It's not that I don't like love, but on the screen it bores me.
I've never been that guy who says, 'Ooh, I have to play King Lear'. First off, that'd be a disaster anyway. I tend to read something and see who's involved, and then know I want to be part of it. But I don't think I'm through with comedy. I still lov...
