Top 100 Quotes About Comedy
#1. Pretentiousness is a comedy vein filled with riches.
Torry Martin
#2. Please, please, please - I would love to do some comedy. Once you have a reputation for one thing - in my case, crying and dying - you are typecast.
Emily Watson
#3. I believe singing should be like being an actor. People shouldn't have any problem buying an actor being in a comedy or a drama or a horror film. That should be the same way with music.
Darren Criss
#4. Diplomats willing to sit for an interview usually prefer the terra firma of CNN over the whoopee cushion of Comedy Central.
Kevin Bleyer
#5. I want to do comedy films, serious films - I admire the actors who fly under the radar but get loads done, pop up in a lot of good films.
Craig Roberts
#6. In comedy, you have to do all of the same stuff you do in drama and then put the comedy on top of it. You, the actor, are aware of the comedy but the character is oblivious. And you have to have a sense of humor.
Jon Lovitz
#7. What begins with comedy ends with comedy ... in my short view of the matter.
Gore Vidal
#8. I had always been - everybody kind of likes comedy. I was very interested in comedy, beyond just liking it. I had friends that took apart radios; I wanted to take apart jokes.
Chris Rock
#9. I feel like L.A. is more of a showcase, and Chicago is a pure comedy scene where you're doing comedy for comedy. You're doing comedy actually for the audience that's there.
Jake Johnson
#10. I think comedy is on an organic upsurge right now because when I started, it was 1978 at The Comedy Store and Letterman had just stopped emceeing his morning show.
Bob Saget
#11. I think it's probably much easier to do political comedy from a two-party point of view, in that the majority have some sense of what it means to be one or the other.
Doug Stanhope
#12. I'm from New York, and I started in New York, which I think is a huge advantage because I wasn't overwhelmed by the city. I understood the city. All of the distractions that could come with somebody that started comedy in New York didn't really happen for me.
Michael Che
#13. Comedy writing is taking the brief thought and going with it.
Chris O'Dowd
#14. I'm sure I've all but lost friends by maintaining that, despite their love for it, I always saw Stanley Kramer's 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' as more of an exercise in anti-comedy than humor.
Dick Cavett
#15. The lumpiness of 'The Good Lie's progression - from infancy to adulthood, and from ethnic horror to gentle social comedy to a heroic gift of freedom - proclaims the film's respect for facts and truths that can't be squeezed into a smooth narrative.
Richard Corliss
#16. Well, I have since seen you at Tinkle. It's a comedy show started by David Cross, me and Jon Benjamin. It features a wide variety of acts for all tastes and seasons.
Todd Barry
#17. I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it's less good than what I do, there's no point in reading it, if it's better than what I do it makes me depressed
Douglas Adams
#18. One of my pet peeves is that sometimes the talents of my band get overlooked because, and it was the same problem that Frank Zappa had, with a lot of groups that use humor, people don't realize there's a lot of craft behind the comedy.
Al Yankovic
#19. I don't do comedy so much although I would like to do a comedy.
Aaron Eckhart
#20. I've been producing for 13 years. I've made a string of joyful movies with positive messages about comedy, love and romance.
Drew Barrymore
#21. I would start off with a lively rag, then would come a ballad, followed by a comedy song and a novelty number, and finally, the hot song. In this way, I left the stage with the audience laughing their heads off.
Sophie Tucker
#22. I'm not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.
Dick Cavett
#23. I'm not a broad comedy guy. I've been funny in movies, but I'm not a comedian. I'm an actor who's sometimes funny.
Matthew Lillard
#24. I'll go back to comedy clubs when they get a real no-camera policy, the same way they did with smoking.
Chris Rock
#25. Okay, so how, exactly, did I get into this mess - up onstage at a comedy club, baking like a bag of French fries under a hot spotlight that shows off my sweat stains( including one that sort of looks like Jabba the Hutt), with about a thousand beady eyeballs drilling into me?
James Patterson
#26. I got written out of 'G.I. Joe' and was like, 'Welp, I'm going to go back to what I do: writing and producing comedy.'
Marlon Wayans
#27. I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.
Hector Elizondo
#28. All this world's noise appears to me a dull, ill-acted comedy!
Abraham Cowley
#29. 'Wings' was a blessing, but it was also very difficult. Whenever you do situation comedy, no matter how excellent the execution - and we had a great cast and great writers - but the format is somewhat limited.
Tim Daly
#30. There's a certain truism that you can't be self-conscious in comedy. If I'm in it and if there's a scene that has a great set-up, I will go as far as somebody will let me.
Ari Graynor
#31. We call ourselves comedy writer-performers, and that encompasses everything, and I certainly have a very open mind about it.
Robert Webb
#32. Barbara Stanwyck, in particular, was peerless in everything from high and low comedy to drama to musicals to film noir. She never took a false step.
Eve Golden
#33. Life is a double-faced creature; one face is tragedy, the other one is comedy. We have no way but to face the first face with dignity!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#34. The comedy of the wicked,
Is the tragedy of the saint;
But the saint's comedy,
Is the wicked's remedy.
Stephan Attia
#35. I would love to do a comedy spoof, like a Spinal Tap kind of thing.
Matthew McGrory
#36. I'm trained as an actor for the stage - classically trained, believe it or not - and I worked closely with Stella Adler for years. People don't know that much about it. They just think I am these people. But I've been in this comedy racket, because it's just how everybody wants to see me.
Michael Richards
#37. Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.
Jasper Fforde
#39. Comedy is a group activity, a verbal orgy.
Chris Rock
#40. People will remember a good comedy song a lot longer than they would some of the so-called straight love songs.
Ray Stevens
#41. Right now, I'm hankering for new adventures ... Ninety percent of the time I'm having romantic-comedy fantasies in which I'm wearing little pencil skirts and hurrying down to the subway.
Mindy Kaling
#42. Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty.
Steve Martin
#43. I don't know what it must be like to be a writer in general, but to be a comedy writer, it's got to be something - it's a very special kind of talent.
Edie Falco
#44. 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.
Ivan Reitman
#45. At its core, comedy is an act of rebellion. Evidence shows that compared to the norms in the population, comedians tend to be more original and rebellious - and the higher they score on these dimensions, the more professional success they attain. After
Adam M. Grant
#46. I would call it a comedy variety show. We have some people just doing straight standup. We usually try to have one musical act of sort. So its just people being funny in different ways, not just sketch, not just standup, not just characters, all of those things.
Todd Barry
#48. I hate to force anything. A lot of people say that comedy is twenty percent truth, and eighty percent fallacy. I believe that you have to have lived through something to write about it.
Tone Bell
#49. Nobody is here without a reason ... I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy - from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated - but I always
wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.
Lily Tomlin
#50. I like the idea of the comedy of resilience.
Oscar Isaac
#51. Timing and pace are important in any film, whether it be comedy or drama. And how better to learn the fundamentals of these show show business ingredients than by dancing?
Charles Walters
#52. Comedy Central made their own awards show. They were named best comedy channel.
Andy Kindler
#53. There's a sort of magic and music to comedy. Some words, some numbers even, are funnier than others. A Caramac bar, for instance, is funnier than a Milky Way.
David Walliams
#54. Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, comedy, farce, or tragedy, by a dramatis personae, the 'self', and so it will be until the curtain drops.
Charles Scott Sherrington
#55. It's a no-win situation with politics; it's always going to be stressful. I'm more into the comedy of life.
Jordan Peele
#56. I do love comedy, I have to say. That's one of the greatest things about being an actor: You get to try new things and play around in different genres.
Stuart Townsend
#57. As an entertainer, a comedy guy, whatever, you're never gonna be truly 100-percent happy with anything.
Corey Feldman
#58. I'm not interested in parts where they are looking for a good-looking guy. I want to be a weird little sidekick in a crazy comedy and then play like a dark drama or a thriller.
Alexander Skarsgard
#59. When you do a movie as opposed to a TV show, it's always tempting to think everything has to be big and exaggerated and spectacular. And in fact, a lot of the funniest comedy films have been very intimate.
Armando Iannucci
#60. Comedy today is not what it was years ago. It's always changing, in particular to female comics. No longer are certain subjects considered to be a male preserve. Women can talk about sexuality and their bodily functions and it can be very, very entertaining. It's changed the impact of comedy acting.
Patrick Stewart
#61. Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
Horace Walpole
#62. I'm a 'Bridesmaids' type of girl. I love silliness. That's who I am at heart, and I know I can do it. If my career path takes me elsewhere, that's great. But comedy is my forte.
Kaley Cuoco
#63. If you're a man who works in comedy full-time and you aren't aware of what your female colleagues go through (if you have female colleagues at all), stop assuming that their experience is the same as yours, and start wondering why they aren't talking to you. The
Lindy West
#64. I thought 'Borat' was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn't some studio-produced script with 14 writers.
Steve Martin
#65. My tutors at drama school commended and criticised my use of comedy in my acting for a long time at drama school. They said I had a tendency to somehow perform the most tragic of scenes in a slightly flippant way.
John Bradley-West
#66. That's the nature of comedy - you always want to be improving and growing and changing with what's happening in the world. That's when comedy is most effective.
Margaret Cho
#67. I basically did comedy there for about a year, and then moved to New York. If I had it to do over again, I would have booked myself on the road for at least a year.
Todd Barry
#68. I think it sort of dawns on you that if you're not gigging constantly you're not actually relevant. You may be relevant to a different part of the media now, to television commissioners and editors, but to a young live-comedy audience you're not, really.
Johnny Vegas
#69. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren't laughing anymore.
Roberto Bolano
#70. I don't have that kind of Southern experience, of the fire-and-brimstone preacher type of thing. Certainly not in my comedy. I come more from the guilt-ridden, neurotic type of [ - ] I have more in common with the Jewish brand of comedy.
Larry Wilmore
#71. I grew up in Iowa, and the improv comedy club Comedy-Sportz across the river in Illinois held auditions. They took me even though I was only 16 - you really had to be 18, but they never checked me for ID.
Eric Christian Olsen
#72. Well, a lot of politics is communicating with people, and obviously comedy has something to do with that. I've been a producer and led people. Also, being a comedian, you're under pressure.
Al Franken
#73. I love a lot of comedy actors and actresses like Kristen Wiig and Tina Fey and all those women who are really brilliant and funny.
Saoirse Ronan
#74. For me, if I were to be at home in any kind of style, it is more comedy than anything else.
Rufus Sewell
#75. Comedy is, of course, closely associated with eggs.
Harlan Tarbell
#76. I think some people's comedy IQ's aren't as high as other people's, so they don't really know what's going on. Or they think they know what's going on, but they don't really.
Judah Friedlander
#77. Basically, I was always very interested in comedy, but I was much more sort of academic. And then, after college, loaded with my art history degree, I decided to go work at Comedy Central as a temp.
Jessi Klein
#78. I hate being mean. I watch those roasts on Comedy Central and they make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Julie Brown
#79. I have a side of me that doesn't care. I really enjoy physical comedy, thinking of an idea and pitching it to the director.
Isla Fisher
#80. The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.
Mike Birbiglia
#81. Comedy comes from pain, and no one knows that better than this woman Roseanne Barr - who was molested as a child. Uch. That poor molester. Roseanne never got over it. She felt violated. She had trust issues. She never got the candy he promised her.
Jeff Ross
#82. I was always worried with comedy - what if I came to work and I wasn't in a funny mood? That hasn't been an issue.
Jeremy Sisto
#83. You do develop a taste as an actress: Chekhov, Ayckbourn: it's the combination of comedy and human drama. I would never want to do anything without comedy.
Katherine Parkinson
#84. I think the comedy clubs tend to homogenize the acts a little bit, because they force them to be palatable in way too many environments.
Bo Burnham
#85. I'll always come back to comedy. Doing drama can feel satisfying, but day to day, it's just not as fun as laughing.
Reid Scott
#86. The best comedy is always played straight down the middle.
Tom Hiddleston
#87. I was named Class Clown in the high school yearbook, so I was always turning to comedy and laughter to heal and to get me through things.
Guillermo Diaz
#88. I've always been a fan of physical comedy. It kind of hits you in a different way; it bypasses the intellect and hits you in the gut.
Stephen Merchant
#89. 'Sightseers' started off as a character comedy double act.
Alice Lowe
#90. I probably prefer comedy. Why? I'm not sure. I feel like the energy of a comedy is a better fit for me. I try to be a happy guy! It seems that most of my life has the energy more for a comedy than for drama. I'm grateful to do both, but I would have to lean towards the comedy side of acting.
Cameron Mathison
#91. Life is much more smooth when you have your story complete, be it a tragedy or a comedy.
Upasana Banerjee
#92. The entire New York comedy scene has moved to L.A. - it's bled the New York comedy scene dry.
Kurt Braunohler
#93. I love period dramas and language, but I love comedy as well.
Robin McLeavy
#94. I would love to do a comedy, but comedy probably in the sense of a dark comedy like 'Californication,' that sort of thing. Yeah, sure, I think I'm funny.
Jason Wiles
#95. I don't deliberately go into comedy or go into indies, but I do deliberately try to keep changing tact, because I think that is the key to longevity in a career.
John C. Reilly
#96. On MySpace ... the whole demographic of the stand-up comedy fan has changed. It's like an indie band thing. People think they've discovered you.
Jim Gaffigan
#97. When I started, there was no comedy community, no comedy industry; there were comedians.
Robert Klein
#98. An old mind is a thing to fear
The truth, in its purest form is boring
Through comedy, a person can hide his/her shortcomings and reach high ground.
Alberto A. Arcia
#99. I want to entertain people, whether it be with a comedy, a drama or a movie. An idea's an idea.
Bruce Nash
#100. The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.
Bjork
