Comedy Theater Quotes

#1. I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.

Christopher Walken

#2. I acted in high school and studied at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford for one summer. I minored in theater, and I was always acting growing up, but really, I was just more interested in the comedy of it all.

T. J. Miller

#3. One thing I'm a big fan of is the theater of the absurd. That's what I come from, that's what I love to do more than anything. What I love about absurdity is the words "comedy" and "drama" get thrown out the window and it's just life, which is absurd.

Michael Shannon

#4. I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it's been something that I've always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.

Aasif Mandvi

#5. I did a lot of theater in school. I thought maybe I wanted to go to law school or be a judge or a politician. And then I just kind of got smitten by the process of rehearsal and working with other actors and those kinds of challenges. And then comedy.

Rashida Jones

#6. Egyptian comedy has a very, very old tradition. Our theater and our movies are just, like, amazing. And Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.

Bassem Youssef

#7. I was sort of trained in drama. I went to theater school. I started on the stage. Comedy is absolutely an essential part of what we do as actors. But I think in the grand scheme of things, comedy was born from tragedy. First there was tragedy and then there were the comedies.

Alex O'Loughlin

#8. If you ordered up a whore here, you'd probably get a theater major doing Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson. I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a Hershey bar?" His eyes lit up for a moment. "I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a whore and a Hershey bar?

Kage Baker

#9. I guess you get pigeon-holed in Hollywood, but I'm ok with that because I've been able to do a lot. I started in the theater, then I went to stand-up comedy, and then when I went into the movies to do comedy and drama and big movies and small movies.

Denis Leary

#10. I was obsessed with movies when I was younger. During the summer, I would go by myself to a theater down the street from my house. I saw every comedy or science fiction movie that came out. My kids love going to the movies, but 3D scares them.

Allen Covert

#11. Combining music, theater and comedy is a new and broader form of expression. In certain combinations you can make people laugh one moment, cry the next, and then be astounded by the beauty of the music.

Aleksey Igudesman

#12. 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.

Mireille Enos

#13. So my humor, I'd say, comes from a mixture of lowbrow comedy shows and highbrow theater. It's an interesting mix.

Jasper Fforde

#14. I can work every day of the year. TV is easy. My call's at 8:30 a.m. I'd like to break out of the comedy thing and take a shot at something serious like theater. The off-season allows me to do movies, but I'm not tired of TV yet. There's nothing like it. I've got the best of both worlds.

Scott Baio

#15. My oldest brother used to take me to the theater. The first play he took me to see was 'Black Comedy,' then he took me to see 'Butley.' We'd see all these British plays. And 'Hello, Dolly,' with Pearl Bailey. I was unconsciously thinking, 'Gee, I would love to be able to do that.'

Nathan Lane

#16. 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.

Whoopi Goldberg

#17. I did stand-up for a long time, and I did classical theater. As much time as you could spend on a stage will always inform you and your job, as you evolve. I feel the freedom of being able to find comedy in the darkest moments because it makes it way more interesting, I think.

Kevin Durand

#18. Even though I have fond feelings for comedy clubs, I enjoy the focus you get in a theater. Comedy clubs are a different animal. People are being served nachos and there's a blender going off in the background.

Brian Regan

#19. We're passionate musicians, but we felt classical concerts were more like a funeral because nobody talked and everybody was dressed so conservatively. We thought that's kind of strange, because music is full of life! We thought we could break through that barrier with theater and comedy elements.

Aleksey Igudesman

#20. With female-oriented movies, unless it's something like 'Bridesmaids' or a romantic comedy, you've got to really worry about your opening weekend. And I'm always telling stories about women, not younger women, and it's just a much tougher audience to get to the movie theater.

Callie Khouri

#21. The way I view comedy clubs is, people are drinking, they're ordering food, they're out for the night, and there's also a person onstage talking. And with the theater, they came to the theater, and they're waiting to hear what you say. So you'd better have something to say.

Mike Birbiglia

#22. I'm really eager to go back and do some theater. I would love to do some more comedy as well because I think that's really the hardest thing to do; it's what I grew up doing, and I would love to go back and do that. I did a lot of theater growing up - musical theater.

Bridget Regan

#23. Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, women - we're all trying to find our place in this world of cinema and television and theater. And the great thing with comedy is that most of the time, you could be orange. It doesn't matter, as long you're funny.

Sandra Bullock

#24. There's nothing like the energy in a small comedy club room or a small theater when it's going really well. I can see everybody's face practically in the whole room. There's no cameras in the way, and it's just me.

Drew Carey

#25. I believe people leave a theater bonding with characters. Story is the vessel that carries character. Comedy is a very important component of expressing character.

Chris Meledandri

#26. 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.

James Roday

#27. Judith (sadly): A change has come over my children of late. I have tried to shut my eyes to it, but in vain. At my time of life one must face bitter facts!

Noel Coward Sir

#28. I love musical theater so much. When done right, I think comedy songs can be the most efficient form of joke delivery. Songs can be the most efficient and the best forms of conveying emotion. Music is universal. It's worldwide.

Rachel Bloom

#29. Everything changes once you start trying to market the film. Part of you feels like everything is slipping away from you. For me, I don't want people going to the theater thinking it's going to be a laugh-a-minute comedy, like a Will Ferrell film or something. Because it's not.

Taika Waititi

#30. It's funny, because I was trained as a dramatic actor at New York's Colonnades Theater Lab in the '70s, along with Jeff Goldblum, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. People I worked with there saw a comedian in me. I'm still most at home in comedy.

Peter Scolari

#31. I always loved acting and improv and sketch comedy and theater, which I did at a local youth theater.

Emma Stone

#32. I eventually became an actor, starting with doing stand-up comedy in New York and then theater wherever they would let me. Finally, I moved out here to Los Angeles and got on a show.

Nolan North

#33. I did theater before I got into TV and everything I did was serious, so it was definitely fun for me to pull out those chops, I definitely wanted to do a movie that just wasn't comedy.

Amanda Bynes

#34. I always wanted to be a journeyman actor. I wanted to be able to do comedy and drama, classical and contemporary. I like to do film and theater. And I pride myself on that diversity of being a journeyman actor.

Wendell Pierce

#35. In the future, I would like to do more films with contemporary themes. Perhaps comedy, which is something I have done in theater but not in cinema.

Luke Evans

#36. Nothing against comedy clubs, they work. But when you're sitting with a tablecloth and a candle and an appetizer menu, three-drink minimum, it can feel more like a dinner theater than a live experience.

Doug Stanhope

#37. What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

Justin Simien

#38. I think I've definitely found a niche working in comedy, but dramatic films are what brought me here. After I saw 'Titanic' in the theater, I got the bug.

Carly Craig

#39. I worked with the Groundlings, doing sketch comedy and improv at a theater here in L.A. It was my hobby, but I took classes and stayed passionate about it because it's what I wanted to do. It just fit. It takes a while before you can actually make money at it. I worked for years.

Fortune Feimster

#40. Everybody grows up with comedy. I mean, Egyptian comedy has a very, very old tradition. Our theater and our movies are just, like, amazing.

Bassem Youssef

#41. I think the things that I enjoy most about directing theater, or works that are really visceral in terms of comedy and have a sort of rock and roll aesthetic.

Alex Timbers

#42. When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.

Leslie Easterbrook

#43. Most people haven't seen my dramatic work, but I did 10 years of theater before I ever became a comic. I'm just better known for comedy.

Deirdre O'Kane

#44. My experience is at The Groundlings Theater, where we created different characters and did sketch comedy. And sometimes the characters were outrageous, but they always came from a real place. So even working there, we had to create characters from the people that we knew.

Cheryl Hines

#45. I've been very fortunate. I've been in theater, films, television, radio, tragedy, comedy, farce - I've been in a musical and in music halls, in pantomime. I was once ringmaster in a circus.

Donald Sinden

#46. I studied theater in college, and I really wanted to be an actress and play a lot of different roles. Then I made landing on a television comedy my main focus.

Jenna Fischer

#47. 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.

Lily Rabe