Writing Comedy Quotes

#1. Everyone who has ever met me for at least five minutes knows I'm a really funny person. I love to laugh and to make people laugh, so writing comedy comes naturally to me.

Simone Elkeles

#2. 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

#3. When I was in improv workshops or doing stand-up or writing comedy with others, or just doing comedy, I just laughed. Funny was funny; I loved to laugh. I always liked people I found generally funny.

Michael Keaton

#4. The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it.

Robert Orben

#5. At the end of the day I'm writing comedy. If you get too realistic as a comedy writer with your disasters, it stops being funny.

Simon Rich

#6. At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state.

Steve Martin

#7. I think that's part of being a comedy writer. You have to be confident. If you're sitting around worrying about, like, oh my God, what are people going to think, then you're not writing comedy. You have to write what makes you laugh, and then the world hopefully laughs as well.

David Mandel

#8. If you are writing comedy and try to please everybody, you'll please nobody.

Brendan O'Carroll

#9. Writing comedy is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to anybody anytime.

Adriana Trigiani

#10. I realized that I really enjoy writing comedy, and how important comedy is when you feel like total crap.

Kathleen Hanna

#11. If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.

Robert Benchley

#12. I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose - short pieces for my blog - because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy!

Megan Amram

#13. Writing comedy is an exposing thing because you're putting yourself on the line with every joke you write, and although you can't second-guess an audience, if you want to be successful, you have to write stuff people like.

Catherine Tate

#14. That's the thing I love about sports: sports force you to quit. You can't pursue your dream till you're 46. When it comes to acting, writing, comedy, nobody ever stops you.

Adam Carolla

#15. I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire.

Stephen Gaghan

#16. There are lots of actors, and you need a way to stand out. Writing comedy sketches was a way of doing that.

Sharon Horgan

#17. I really love writing comedy. Writing romantic comedy is even nicer because you get to write about how insane we all act when we're falling in love.

Pearl Cleage

#18. When writing comedy, you have to have the confidence to believe that there is only one type of relationship in the world, and we are all having it, that all men behave in the same way and so do all women.

Steven Moffat

#19. I do all these various activities like painting and writing, comedy and films probably because not that I'm good at everything but because I'm not good at any of these things.

Takeshi Kitano

#20. I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.

Steven Moffat

#21. Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn't interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don't think in terms of comic dialogue.

Jim Parsons

#22. I just always wrote songs as a side hobby. So it was sort of a natural thing to write comedy songs. But when I started writing songs, I wrote very serious songs. Or things that a 13-14 year-old would think are very serious issues.

Kyle Dunnigan

#23. I said, "Is there!" I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math - if Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?

Joan Rivers

#24. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.

Bill Hicks

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

Bill Cosby

#26. The rest of the morning would consist of checking on a pothole in the parking lot of the village clinic and writing up a schedule for the community centre that might finally settle the ongoing feud between the local quilting group and the bridge club.
It was good to be queen.

Molly Harper

#27. I'm writing a political comedy that takes place in Canada in Quebec. It's funny. Saying political comedy is a little redundant but it's a first. I've never done any comedy per se.

Philippe Falardeau

#28. People need to write articles and they need to have angles in them and I'm grateful when people are doing articles, but I always say there's not a great mystery to stand-up comedy.

Jim Gaffigan

#29. I write most of my stories the way people talk, complete with an occasional run-on sentences and stuff that seems to go around in a few circles before making its point. In a comedy, you can do that.

Dan Alatorre

#30. As an author I'm in my head all day and I worry that I lose touch with reality. But then my dog pees on my shoe and I know I've found it again.

Michelle M. Pillow

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

Colm Meaney

#32. I love '30 Rock.' It's one of my favorite shows. It's certainly the gold standard of comedy writing.

Dan Harmon

#33. Every week for me was the same audience, and every week they heckled me. The better I got at comedy, the better the audience was at heckling me. But it helped me with my joke writing.

Felipe Esparza

#34. I learned a few things on my own since, and modified some of the things he taught me, but everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from Danny Simon,

Woody Allen

#35. The strongest should come first in comedy because once a character is really established as funny everything he does is funny.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#36. There is a whole genre of funny travel writers - that's very popular. There's Bill Bryson and people who follow that route and sell travel writing through making people laugh. It's a very difficult group to take. The line between comedy and mockery is sometimes a bit thin.

John Gimlette

#37. It seems to me that they only seem to mention things in the Bible that are within a 5 mile radius of the guy writing it.

Jim Jefferies

#38. After 9/11, I changed a lot of the ways I viewed the world. I realized my comedy and my politics and my view of the world did not match. I had to start writing from my heart.

Hari Kondabolu

#39. My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done.

Woody Allen

#40. My neck and shoulders are killing me. Hard to focus on writing about murder, doom, shagging, our hopeless future & other comedy etc etc.

Warren Ellis

#41. In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.

Cathleen Schine

#42. Once I was in college, I was actually trying to write a comedy screenplay and I wrote basically the worst movie ever and just threw it away and never showed anybody. Everyone needs to get that first bad screenplay out of your system before you start writing other stuff.

Scot Armstrong

#43. HARV, can you help at all here?" I asked, spinning downward.
"I am writing your obituary. Well, not so much writing it as updating it," HARV told me.
If I lived, I was going to kill HARV.

John Zakour

#44. 'Writing' always means 'not writing' to me because I will do anything to put it off. I think this is mainly because writing anything down and then handing it over to a third party - especially in comedy - is such an exposing act that you naturally want to delay the process.

Catherine Tate

#45. Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.

Zack Love

#46. I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

Ba Jin

#47. Does talking to yourself in the voice of your fictional character count as being social?

Michelle M. Pillow

#48. With comedy, I think it's so important, especially in TV, to know and trust what the writers are writing and just have it down.

Jay Harrington

#49. I learned that comedy is born out of strong characters. I won't begin writing a character until I have a clear take on them.

Maria Semple

#50. I always felt that my way into comedy would be through my writing rather than my acting.

Simon Bird

#51. When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.

John Cleese

#52. The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.

Joan Rivers

#53. Some people think it is difficult to be a Christian and to laugh, but I think it's the other way around. God writes a lot of comedy, its just that he has so many bad actors.

Garrison Keillor

#54. I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.

Ann Brashares

#55. I'm not a comedy writer, I'm a comedian, so I only write stuff that I would want to say.

Anthony Jeselnik

#56. Ryan Stout, a straight-arrow-looking kind of guy, shocks the crowd into laughter with his inventive interplay between innocence and a jarringly twisted point of view. He goes from loony to weirdly logical. With him, it's more than clever writing; his comedy is based on clear and clever thinking.

Ben Fong-Torres

#57. Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

David Ives

#58. What it is is that comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write. Anyone can write; and then you leave it to special effects to make it look good. But comedy, you've got to do some writing.

Michael Caine

#59. And if you have great writing, it's really easy, but if it's not so great and you have to work a little harder, I could tell where the work needed to be done but comedy is just fun.

Matt LeBlanc

#60. There can be a science to joke writing, there are certainly rules and patterns that can be followed, but I think most of the best comedy goes beyond the rules.

Robin Ince

#61. I think writing in a group, even though it can be a challenge - you have to be on your toes all the time - is the way the best comedy gets written. It's very, very collaborative. A lot of comedy writers are definitely introverted nerds.

Megan Amram

#62. 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

#63. I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.

Mike Birbiglia

#64. 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.

Jim Rash

#65. To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.

Julia Quinn

#66. There's sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy. But I do like the idea of being an auteur in the sense of writing and being in your own stuff.

T. J. Miller

#67. There are a lot of great jokes you can sit down and write, but that's just a written joke, versus the comedy of the situation. Ideally, you're pulling as much comedy out of the situation as you can.

John Mulaney

#68. I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn't do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all.

George Lopez

#69. Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world like dust.

Joan Rivers

#70. I love acting but I also love writing, especially comedy.

Sally Hawkins

#71. The table was covered with food like roast chicken, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, roast turkey, roast liquorice and, the centrepiece, a roasted knight.

Elias Zapple

#72. I had a blind date with a dentist - and he told me to come back in six months.

Joan Rivers

#73. I have admired Melissa Pritchard's writing for several years now for its wisdom, its humble elegance, and its earthy comedy.

Rick Moody

#74. I'm writing a record of comedy songs. I'm doing all these collaborations with artists. I bring them lyrics and they write the music to it.

Margaret Cho

#75. One thing we do really well on Archer and one thing I've always tried to do in my comedy and my writing and my podcast is to never speak down to my audience.

Aisha Tyler

#76. Breaking records is not something you expect to be doing. That's like a sports thing, it's not usually a comedy and writing thing.

Louis C.K.

#77. I think comedy is the hardest actual form of writing there is.

Michael Hirst

#78. Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#79. I wasn't disciplined at all. As good of an athlete as I was, I was not disciplined. Had I had the drive that I have in comedy, and acting, and writing, that's why I knew it just wasn't right for me.

Bernie Mac

#80. I asked Mr. Vann which O levels you need to write situation comedy for television. Mr. Vann said that you don't need qualifications at all, you just need to be a moron.

Sue Townsend

#81. I love a good laugh as well, I think that's so important in life, which is probably why I've dabbled in comedy writing as well as horror. I think if you can make someone laugh or smile it's the most special thing in the world.

Paul Kane

#82. I met Jon Lovett, who was just coming off of three years of being a presidential speech writer and had just arrived here to be a comedy writer in Hollywood. I thought he was super green, in terms of this world, but he knows so much about the world that we're attempting to write about.

Josh Gad

#83. Most of my comedy writing happens through improvisation on stage; doing it in the moment.

Marc Maron

#84. Like all teenagers in the early '60s, I put down my hockey stick when the Beatles got big and picked up a guitar. We all thought we'd be rock stars. Then I got into comedy, but I'd always find a way to use my guitar, such as writing songs and doing musical parodies.

Rick Moranis

#85. I wish I was writing something much more heavy each time I did a film, and that the comedies just occasionally come out. But unfortunately you're stuck with what you're born with.

Woody Allen

#86. I found out I had a real love for comedy and comedy writing. The logic was, there weren't too many female comedians, so I thought I might as well try a field that had fewer competitors than the field I was in, which was acting, singing and dancing.

Rita Rudner

#87. Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.

Mel Brooks

#88. Deeply funny musings and adventures elevate Paul Rudnick to the highest level of American comedy writing.

Steve Martin

#89. Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn't it like taking a bite of something lovely? If only we could eat words.

Sol Luckman

#90. When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.

Joan Rivers

#91. That's the best advice I can give - when you're trying to write a comedy, first write a drama, and then make it funny.

Jason Segel

#92. I had my own insecurities, which a lot of my comedy would come from, about not being able to live up to their academic expectations. Acting out those insecurities was a way of confronting them, like, "Let me just lean into being a guy who can't read or write."

Charlie Day

#93. I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.

David Chase

#94. Right now I'm sick of acting, so it's like, maybe I'll do writing for a bit. Then, when I'm tired of writing, I'll go work on my music. When I'm sick of music, I'll be like, I'm going to start performing comedy now. So it's good. It's not like I want to be famous or anything.

Charlyne Yi

#95. Some of the subject matter is a little less weighty. When we were writing for Mr. Show, we were talking about how is this going to stand up to the test of time. Every little piece had to be this brilliant comedy jewel.

B. J. Porter

#96. The spectacle of a judge pouring over the picture of some nude, trying to ascertain the extent to which she arouses prurient interests, and then attempting to write an opinion which explains the difference between that nude and some other nude has elements of low comedy.

Thurman Arnold

#97. And as their penile pain began to subside, the two men were able to form more complex thoughts, resulting in a collaborative work: the development of a worldview that might be described as penilosophy.

Zack Love

#98. My acting has always been in the world of comedy, but in my writing, other than writing sketches, I really am drawn to the balance between comedy and drama. I like things that sort of toe that line of one minute you're in this emotional space and then all of the sudden something happens.

Jim Rash

#99. When I graduated, I was director of my school's sketch comedy group, and I knew that I wanted to be writing and performing my own sketch comedy. It kind of made me want to do my own one-person sketch group.

Rachel Bloom

#100. He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.

Paula McLain