Demetri Martin Quotes

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

There's a fraudulent root element of comedy in that we say things night after night as though they are rolling effortlessly from the brain and off the tongue, when in fact they are crafted over weeks and months and years.

You can't be funny if you don't have good material.

What made me a comedian was that I wasn't really a songwriter, I was more of a poet.

I'm always blown away by stand-ups. I'm blown away by people like that who are craftspeople at comedy.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

I find writing is the most fun I have in comedy.

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.

Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar.

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.

I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I'm working at it.

Writing humor for me is more like a watchful-ness. You have to watch. When you say something funny, or someone else does, it's more like you wait for the piece.

When I turned about 12 or 13, I realised that being funny wasn't about remembering jokes. It was about creating them.

Stand-up has the best writers, because it's the hardest writing by a million miles.

So I started to relax and would work on my act eight hours a day, sitting at a desk writing at my grandmother's house, and I would put on Richard Pryor Live on Long Beach and would play it like a loop and think and write.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

Coming up with comedy is hard, man. Those bits aren't easy to think of!

I think so. I can't think of anything that requires more finesse than comedy, both from a verbal and visual point of view.

Comedy writing is taking the brief thought and going with it.

It proved to me, though, that comedy is so much harder.

I'm really bad at writing jokes.

I love to write jokes and that's all I think about.

I don't consider myself a comedian because I don't really concern myself too much with jokes.

All the truly great stand-ups say, 'I go onstage, and I work on jokes. The inspiration will happen while I'm doing my work.' To me, in the end, the surest thing is work.