Dave Barry Quotes

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

I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

I come up with my jokes by thinking of a topic.

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.

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

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

When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes 10 hours a day, your mind starts going to strange places.

I never really write the jokes. I just sit down over a week or two and try to figure out what I want to talk about. Once I narrow that down, then I start working on the material, like "How do I make this stuff funny?"

When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.

Usually the beginning of a story that people hear a lot. For example, "My girlfriend is upset about her new haircut" or "My dad keeps losing his car keys." And then I just think of different ways the story could end. "My girlfriend is upset about her new haircut. I don't understand why she's crying. I'm the one who has to get a new girlfriend." Then I try it out on stage. I don't do a lot of re-writing. My jokes either work or they don't. The trick is just to write a ton of jokes.

I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing.

If you think it's easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you've probably never tried.

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

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

I think writers have become hypnotised by the number of jokes on the page at the expense of character.

I try to give all my characters a sense of humor, so I guess I feel like I have done comedy, but maybe I'm better known for drama.

When you have a writing partner and you're writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.

I'd say any good set or any comedy that I've worked on, that's worked, has been comedians pitching ideas back and forth to each other. A lot of like, 'What if you say this? What about this?'

I'm not good at narrative; I'm really a gag writer, and that comes from being in the newspaper comic strip world for a while in college. What I do is I just write tons of jokes, then I sort them out in terms of quality and then pick the best of the jokes and then try to form them into a plot. If I get a good theme going, I feel lucky.

There aren't any concrete steps to becoming a comic.

It's hard for a comic to be joking when your lines can't be funny.

And, you know, I liked writing humor. Well, I should say, I wanted to write seriously, but it kept turning funny.

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.

I use a method approach to all my sitcom work.

Your number one job as a comedian is to be aware. You're supposed to understand the temperature in the room more than anyone on the planet - that's the whole craft of comedy.