Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

To be a comedian, you gotta jokesmith, there's no way around it.

The shortest distance between two jokes makes a perfect speech.

The most important thing in comedy - apart from empathy, which I think is important even if disguised - is surprise. I like surprising people with the fact that something's even a joke at all.

Jokes do finish themselves. I really do see them as ongoing conversations about personal themes that I ruminate on.

Hopefully, underlying all my jokes is an element of surprise.

It's too difficult to start right from scratch and try and be funny out of the blue.

It's funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it's fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh.

I think comedy is one of the hardest things to pull off. You either have timing or you don't, and that's something I don't have for sure.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

I was the kid who always hung back and then dropped the jokes when you least expected it. Timing was everything. My mouth sort of developed over time.

Comedy is surprise. Comedy is not something that you can, necessarily, do twice.

There's an art to comedy.

Comedy is not easy to do - where you make someone laugh out loud in their living room.

The thing with the comedian is you can make all the jokes you want and not every joke it going to be a winner, and not every joke is going to land, there'll be some that somebody doesn't laugh at, but that's just part of the deal.

I always loved jokes. It's such a dumb, facile thing to say, but it's true. I remember being a kid and getting those joke books from the Scholastic Book Club and loving comedy from a very young age.

I believe it is tough to be funny and tougher to make people laugh. And it needs to be been done effortlessly. A joke can be comedy, but one can kill the joke if it is delivered badly.

The first obligation I have is to be funny; it's my first impulse and an instinct. I like being funny and finding the jokes.

Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.

The next best thing to a very good joke is a very bad one.

I don't feel any pressure to be funny at all. I'm funny because I want to be funny. I could sit here and be serious for an hour and you would go away and make me much funnier than I am.

I don't like the phrase shock value. Surprise is essential in comedy, and if people are shocked by what I consider merely surprising, then that's their shock. But there is no joke without surprise.

With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.

Being funny is a gift, and, when done well, is an art form.

The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.

Being funny in life is a lot more like judo. It's using the energy.