Brett Gelman Quotes

There's an art to comedy.

There's a difference between being a comic and a comedian. A comic is a guy who says funny things, and a comedian is a guy who says things funny, and he has a style and point of view that will last much longer.

The funnier the material, the funnier I could make it.

Comedy is hard to do. All the cliches about it are true.

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

Comedy is very difficult. You've got to have a perfect sense of timing.

Comedians are always narrating the story of the people. Always.

With comedians, you have that understanding that we're trying to get laughs.

Comedy is much more challenging, because you have to have the same level of belief but you have to make people laugh, and that's definitely a challenge.

For comedy, timing is key.

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

Stand up is really fun because if I think of a joke or a funny idea, then I can just go and tell some people and if they laugh, they laugh right away.

I remember going to Bob Preston's dressing room because I was losing a laugh - as you do in a long run. He said, 'Give me the script. That's where you're going off the road.' That's comedy. It's never the line itself; it's in the foundation.

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

I've been a stand-up comedian for years, and I can be silly.

A joke is a way to say, 'I'm going to do something funny now. If I don't get a laugh at the end, I'm a failure.'

Kind of the exhausting thing about doing pure comedy, or something that's broader, is you're kind of a slave to the laugh. If it's not funny, then there's not much point in doing it. The kind of ueber-objective is to make people laugh. You always have to have that in the back of your mind, 'Eh, I've got to figure out a way to make this funny.'

Comedians don't laugh. They're too busy analyzing why it's funny or not.

If you have the right voice and the right delivery, you're cocky enough, and you pound down on the punch line, you can say anything and make people laugh maybe three times before they realize you're not telling jokes.

In order to be able to write a good joke, you have to find the truth.

Comedy is wonderful when you really nail it and you hear people laughing, but it's not always that easy.

I like to approach comedy from character, to have the stakes for the individuals in the story be very high.

Comedy is all about the pause.

I think the greatest gift your parents can give you if you want to be a comedian is good taste.

Comedy is one of the toughest genres. It is so essential to get the timing right, failing which the humour can fall flat.