Comedy's Quotes

#1. There's all sorts of terrible things that happen around the world. And comedy's one of those few things where you can discuss those things.

Hasan Minhaj

#2. I think comedy's something you can't learn. It's an instinct, which makes it rather elusive.

Julie Walters

#3. The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.

Louis C.K.

#4. Live comedy's a very reckless, foolhardy profession. You're only as good as your last gig so earnings fluctuate.

Bill Bailey

#5. A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.

Colm Meaney

#6. I think comedy's just about being interested in comedy and what makes people laugh and experimenting.

Zooey Deschanel

#7. There seems to be more comedy for comedy's sake.

Todd Barry

#8. Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.

Eric Idle

#9. I mean, comedy's hard. If you go back and look at the first season of 'Seinfeld,' it's a work in progress and that's what happens. It just takes time for people to figure each other out, and figure out timing, and to develop creatively with the writers.

Zachary Knighton

#10. Comedy's been really liberating for me because I've been able to sneak the singing part in through the back door.

Ana Gasteyer

#11. I'm not saying writing comedy's brain surgery, but there is a certain pressure to it. It's the equivalent of doing homework that's going to end up on national television.

Miranda Hart

#12. I feel like I came in comedy's side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways.

Carrie Brownstein

#13. I'm comedy's forgotten nearly man.

Nick Frost

#14. Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist making
devastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious or
pompous.

David Foster Wallace

#15. I'm not hurting anybody. Comedy's all about innuendo. I'm putting it out there just like anybody else.

Jeff Ross

#16. Comedy's so subjective, and if someone comes to watch, doesn't get it, doesn't find it funny, then fine.

Johnny Vegas

#17. It's pretty easy in theatre. The comedy's either physical or verbal, and you're looking at the whole frame at once. But TV executives want close-ups. I keep telling them to look at Preston Sturges' movies. He'll do a whole scene without a cut in it, and it's a riot.

Don Scardino

#18. Comedy's really subjective, you know; that's why it's so hard.

Karl Pilkington

#19. Comedy's about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you're saying.

Kevin Hart

#20. My family's always been really funny. I feel like comedy's hard. I feel like it's so important.

Christine Taylor

#21. You know, comedy's hard. With drama, you have a responsibility to the emotional truth, but with comedy, you have emotional truth and you have technique on top of it.

Julianne Moore

#22. For me, I believe comedy's about taking risks, taking chances, working in a safe environment where you're comfortable making a fool of yourself. It's so critical, especially in comedy, to just have all those right pieces in place.

Michael Spiller

#23. I love doing comedy. I find comedy quite hard work. Comedy's underrated, I think, by actors, you know? It's difficult to get it right and get it funny. I really enjoy doing it. I kind of wish I'd done it more. I can't complain. I've had a fair crack of the whip.

Ralph Brown

#24. Comedy's my first love. I love that so much. You play comedy in drama, too. The difference between genres doesn't really change the method of acting.

Emma Stone

#25. Drama is not my passion. If I do it, it's for a check. It's not what I want to do. Comedy's my thing. Stand up's my thing. Everything that comes from that is frosting on the cake.

Gabriel Iglesias

#26. Comedy's easy for me now - it's all about timing and the way you deliver lines. I use facial expressions to get the point across.

Melissa Joan Hart

#27. There's a lot of comedy in Intermission but it's got this depth. It's not comedy for comedy's sake - it's informed by something else. I like stuff like that.

Cillian Murphy

#28. I think the best comedy is tragicomic. Yeah, I suppose if you were to look at everything I've done, there is a bit of a black streak through all of it. It's not deliberate: it's what makes me laugh, and there's a fine tradition of it, especially in Ireland.

Sharon Horgan

#29. You don't want to continue to do one thing and only one thing. You want to keep challenging yourself and if you do well at it, great, if you fall on your face, you tried. Like, she's really terrible at comedy! Who knew? But if you didn't try and put yourself out there you'd never know.

Lucy Liu

#30. I've turned arrogance into an artform, where it's so absurd that it becomes comedy. But I've never done anything to hurt anybody or steal from anyone.

John Lydon

#31. I've always said people say on a dramatic show, 'I was crying. It was so emotional when he went and grabbed that little girl from a burning building and handed her over to her mother.' In comedy, the best thing you can say is, 'I think it's funny.'

Bob Newhart

#32. I think comedy is a good way to deal with anything. I hear about people in the hospital who are ill, and they use humor to help them through it. I think it's a great remedy for many things.

Brian Regan

#33. I give him a skeptical look. "You want to show me your dick?"
"If it'll help convince you." He drains the last drops of his Scotch and stands up. "Come on, let's go.

Kendall Ryan

#34. I have dabbled with action, romance, dance, emotion and comedy. I think I've done well in all.
It's important to keep doing something different and reinvent oneself to avoid stagnation from
creeping in.

Akshay Kumar

#35. I hate trying to analyze comedy in some deep way. If it gets laughs, it's funny.

Rachel Dratch

#36. Comedy has to do with holding and releasing tension; it's very technical. It's more technical than drama.

John Michael Higgins

#37. Comedy is a man in trouble. And without it, there's no humor.

Jerry Lewis

#38. The problem is that I work in more than one genre. It's impossible for me to aim for a single one because, for me, comedy is mixed with tragedy. That's very Spanish, the way in which comedy and tragedy are inextricable from each other.

Pedro Almodovar

#39. There's so much I want to do. I love emotions, I love drama, I love comedy and I also want to take action up to another level, I love comics.

Gina Carano

#40. If I had a choice, I would do comedy all the time. It's just the most challenging thing. To make someone laugh is the most challenging thing, and the most rewarding thing, in entertainment.

Bruce Willis

#41. After I saw a couple of pictures put out by my fellow comedy-directors, which seemed to have abandoned the fun in favor of the message, I wrote Sullivan's Travels to satisfy an urge to tell them that they were getting a little too deep-dish, to leave the preaching to the preachers.

Preston Sturges

#42. I've seen stand up comedy, and after a while you start to notice that a lot of people are doing things that are like a lot of other people. There can be a bit of a herd mentality, and that's obviously less interesting because there's less going on. I'm just being totally frank with you.

Dylan Moran

#43. 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.

David Dobkin

#44. I'd love to do a film with Mariah. But it would have to be a comedy. She's the funniest woman in the world, she just cracks me up all the time.

Nick Cannon

#45. Everyone tells me I need to do comedy. It's never something that crossed my mind, but to be able to do a true comedy and make people laugh, that would be great.

Dexter Darden

#46. Hubert's wife, Mindy, was a tiny powerhouse of a woman with a halo of wild blond hair and eye makeup so complex it took me a while to locate her pupils. She was clearly the brains of the operation, such as she was.

Molly Harper

#47. There is no late-night comedy. You watch comedy, you watch whenever you want to tune on. You can it in the middle of the night. You can it in the morning. It's all comedy. They just label it late-night comedy so they don't have to pay as much.

George Schlatter

#48. Don't get me wrong, there are sometimes if I go and see a really funny comedy, that I wished I had smoked a joint. I'll be honest with you. That's the truth.

Stephen Baldwin

#49. My comedy is different than a lot of people's.

Lindsay Wagner

#50. Comedy is ugly. It's honest, it's raw.

Aisha Tyler

#51. Too much comedy is filthy these days. There's nothing they won't say. I like Jimmy Carr, but I don't like the language he uses. I don't understand why he feels it necessary; I find it extremely offensive.

Bobby Davro

#52. 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

#53. Mankind is immortal
in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature
but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in
death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,
one and one make a brand new one.

Rose A. Zimbardo

#54. Anything has a rhythm to it, comedy or drama. There has to be a musicality to it. And everybody can't play the same instrument, ideally. But I think that we all have the same comedic tendencies, and that's why it works. We all sort of agree with what's funny.

Bradley Cooper

#55. There are two things you can't argue in film: comedy and eroticism. If something doesn't make you laugh, no one can tell you why it's funny, and it's difficult to reason someone out of an erection.

Roger Ebert

#56. My thing was always more character-driven comedies, not sketch comedy - not that there's not room for both or one isn't enjoyable, just my personal taste, I like movies that comedy comes from out of flaws of people, things that are uncomfortable, out of tragedy.

Vince Vaughn

#57. I think that there's a fine line between comedy and drama.

Michael Mosley

#58. America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously.

H.L. Mencken

#59. My very first job was something called 'Nobody's Watching,' that Bill Lawrence who created 'Scrubs,' it was his pilot. It was my very first TV job, and it was a sitcom. Ever since that experience, I've been so itching to get back to that kind of environment and just to be involved with comedy.

Mircea Monroe

#60. It's not a beard, it's an animal I've trained to sit very still.

Bill Bailey

#61. For me, 'Arrested Development' is the cornerstone of recent television comedy. It's so incredibly flawless and perfect.

John Krasinski

#62. Comedy comes from a place of hurt. Charlie Chaplin was starving and broke in London, and that's where he got his character 'the tramp' from. It's a bad situation that he transformed into comedic one.

Chris Tucker

#63. My younger sister's a comedian. She has a sketch comedy group in Chicago called Schadenfreude and I look at her with such admiration and envy because it's such an amazing thing to make someone laugh.

Brian D'Arcy James

#64. No,' the professor replied. 'Her Majesty s alive and well - at least I assume so if she hasn't met a certain van driver from Yeovil.' ~Professor Hamilton

Bryan Davis

#65. I think a lot of the instincts you have doing comedy are really the same for doing drama, in that it's essentially about listening. The way I approach comedy, is you have to commit to everything as if it's a dramatic role, meaning you play it straight.

Will Ferrell

#66. Everyone in comedy thinks if you go to the U.S. you become a global star but, unfortunately, I've always been a bit anti-American - so I never did.

Jo Brand

#67. I would like to explore comedy more. It's not something that I've done a lot of. Obviously, I'm very at home in drama. I like everything.

Jessica Pare

#68. I love the idea of doing comedy, whether it's action comedy or just straight comedy. It's such a big, new world for me that I'm starting to realize that any character that I relate to, in any way, shape or form, or that I have any appreciation for, given enough preparation, I can find that person.

Zoe Bell

#69. The comedy in 'Star Trek' is always very subtle, if it's there at all.

Robert Duncan McNeill

#70. I find that working with friends is always the goal, even if it's just one person. Because the comedy community is kind of insular, it's easy to run into people you've worked with, even if you worked with someone on something for a day, or whatever.

Lizzy Caplan

#71. A lot of people think I'm difficult to work with. It's not like I really want to do that much stuff, so it doesn't really matter. I guess I'm somewhat difficult when it comes to comedy.

Norm MacDonald

#72. I guess I'm sort of spoiled because, most of the things that I get to do, people know that you're a good improviser, so they allow you at least one improv take, and for comedy, that's great.

Matt Walsh

#73. Pryor's comedy isn't based on suspiciousness about whites, or on anger, either; he's gone way past that. Whites are unbelievable to him.

Pauline Kael

#74. 'Jackass: The Movie' is great. I think it's in the tradition of physical comedy, which I'm really interested in. Its relationship to gravity, and how gravity acts on the body.

Matthew Barney

#75. It's a comedy thriller, brilliantly written and it's full of twists and turns at every page. When I was reading it I was desperate to get to the end to find out what happens, it really hooks you.

Louise Jameson

#76. Maybe I'll just become a cartoon character because there's nothing left for me to do in an R-rated comedy.

Seann William Scott

#77. I really enjoyed multicamera comedy. You film in front of a live audience, and it's kind of the best of both worlds. It's like doing a one-act play every week, but if you screw your lines up, you get to do it over.

Alan Ruck

#78. With comedy, it's really hard to tell if something's working on the page - you really need the actors to bring it alive. The scariest part is if people will laugh or not.

Maggie Carey

#79. For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.

David Fincher

#80. I think the Dutch certainly get British comedy. And let's face it; a lot of it is pretty low-hanging fruit for the whole world now. There are probably tribes in the heart of the Papua New Guinean rainforest that know all the words to the Dead Parrot sketch.

Rhianna Pratchett

#81. If you're trying to be an actor, sometimes you get lucky, and you end up on 'The Office', but if you don't, and you know that you have something to say, it's really, really fortunate to be able to get to write and star in your own comedy.

Riki Lindhome

#82. When I was starting out, I always wanted to be able to do everything - comedy and drama and action, and everything in between. Film is so diverse, and it's fun to be able to take advantage of all of it.

Olivia Thirlby

#83. It's so fun because Jason [Mantzoukas]'s one of the smartest people I've met in comedy. So unbelievably fast comedically - so he's quick with whatever, but it's fun to watch someone be so quick and so stupid simultaneously.

Jackie Schaffer

#84. People always talk about how great it is to get older. All I saw were more rules and more adults telling me what I could and couldn't do, in the name of what's " good for me." Yeah, well, asparagus is good for me, but it still makes me want to throw up.

James Patterson

#85. It's so pretentious, but I believe that with comedy, if you have a good story, 90% of it is casting. Once you get the guys and gals in there, it's pretty easy to make a funny movie.

Matt Walsh

#86. We are each the star of our own situation comedy, and, with luck, the screwball friend in somebody else's.

Robert Breault

#87. I never was shy, but as far as telling jokes, I'm the worst. I like physical comedy; it's where I feel comfortable.

Malin Akerman

#88. My life was full of drama, with the highs and lows of Tyler's daily mood swings and my private innuendos with Vandenberg. There'd never been a movie made that could permanently shift my mood away from my disappointment with myself.

J.C. Patrick

#89. I don't see much comedy in the Bible, where people are writing about funny people. It's not there.

Bill Cosby

#90. Some comedians tell nice jokes that you can tell to your kids. Some use bad words - they work 'blue.' If you don't want to hear a joke that's blue, you shouldn't go to a comedy club where a comedian who makes blue jokes is performing.

Gilbert Gottfried

#91. I didn't know how to grab your best material and put it together into a comedy set. I would just choose subjects and do it onstage. That's what I learned. I didn't know how to put a set together.

Felipe Esparza

#92. 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

#93. Laughter is a whip that keeps us in line. It's horrible to be laughed at against your will. Either you suppress unwelcome laughter or you start controlling it.

Keith Johnstone

#94. They are two very different people. It's almost a modern-day 'Odd Couple,' if I had to characterize it, with the two of them portraying pretty close to who they are, which is why it's a hybrid of a reality and a comedy show.

Dawn Ostroff

#95. Will Ferrell is a dangerous man. If he thinks you're in his way in show business, he will crack your head open. He's the Jeff Gillooly of comedy.

Tina Fey

#96. I would love to play the lead in a big romantic comedy. That's definitely a dream of mine.

Rosamund Pike

#97. It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#98. I've never directed before, so I need to make sure that people know that I can. The movie that I've written, 'The Sophisticates,' is a ... small ensemble comedy and I hope it's charming and funny.

Lena Headey

#99. 'Wayne's World' is my all time favorite comedy. I used to watch it on VHS on repeat with my brother when I was ten years old.

James Lafferty

#100. Working on 'Comedy Bang Bang,' we're there from 10-7, and that's a pretty light day compared to most other TV shows. Other shows, it's like 10-10.

Scott Aukerman