David Nicholls Quotes

You get sick of jokes, you know. Either I do them on TV, and then you worry, like, "Oh, everyone's gonna see it," so you chuck it, or you just get sick of saying it. After a while, a joke, if you say it too much, just becomes contrived, or fake-sounding.

A lot of comedies are based on the reaction shot. You have one person doing something stupid and one person is generally the straight man, and the laughs generally come on the reaction of the straight man to the funny thing the other person has done.

Humor has the tendency to be funny once. If I tell you a joke, we're going to have a big laugh. But the second time I tell the joke, it's going to be a bit strange, and the third time you're going to ask if there's something wrong with me. So I am very cautious with jokes, but there is a lightness in my work.

There are quite a few very funny people in my life. You know those people who don't mean to be funny, they just come out with these zingers that just make you howl with laughter. Usually you find these people in the road crew. A good crew is a key to a healthy funny bone.

Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

You have more of a responsibility to make the audience laugh. In comedy, we do have to say, "All right, it's been two minutes in the film. We need another laugh here." With drama, there's no pressure in that regard. It's a different kind of pressure, but it's not like we need to make someone laugh.

If comedy is about surprises, about tension, there's a lot of tension and surprise there, in the fact that people are expecting this to be natural.

I'm actually way more funny now, because I'm hungry... If comedy comes from pain, I should be funnier now than I ever was.

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.

I feel like with comedy, the crazy things that happen are never serious you know? Like, rubble being poured onto you in drama would be something that's absolutely terrible, but in a comedy it's absolutely terrible but so funny.

It's a very important skill set for an actor to be able to bring the humor into any moment, whether you're doing drama or comedy.

Comedy is there to basically show us we fart, we laugh, to make us realize we still are part animal.

There's obviously some appeal in scenes for me - there's something I respond to. I keep doing those films where I put myself out there like that. I guess I look for those kinds of moments and I pride myself on being an actor who will do just about anything for a laugh - so long as it's within context of the scene in the movie and it's not gratuitous. I have to feel it'll make people laugh.

Comedy is very strange to me and I don't fully understand it's purpose or function.

Knowing comedy is knowing human nature.

I think the job of a comedian is to make people laugh, but also challenge them to laugh at things they didn't know they could until now.

Comedy - particularly the frothy and frivolous - is notoriously neglected by festivals and awards. But it's bloody hard to get right.

I was always sort of a ham as a kid, just always wanting to entertain and to get people to laugh.

A poet or a comedian can say what's on the mind of people. They should be funny. They should make you laugh. It may be so truthful that it hurts, but it makes you laugh.

Comedy is often about pain.

People think drama drives story, but I think the comedy is really the heart and soul.

Comedy is a noble art. And every comedian who does anything is serving a noble purpose.

Even when I was doing theater it was more comedic. Don't get me wrong, I love doing the dramatic and heavy stuff, but I just want to have fun. I want to make people laugh.

Here's what I really love: I love a funny story that I can tag a serious line on the end of.