Brad Hall Quotes

It's always been said that comedy comes mostly out of the dark side anyway.

Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.

The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.

I've played comedy before but not that much. I mostly do get drawn to darker material.

Stand-up came out of three things. Frustration, necessity and arrogance. I didn't have a great career ahead of me in anything. Someone literally said to me, 'You should try stand-up,' and took me to a venue.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy... It's a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.

A lot of comics aren't their on-screen personas; Chris Rock isn't always ranting and raving. What I do is make myself this over-the-top character that people either find endearing or they think is a joke. Then I can do anything I want.

I'm glad I'm a comedian. Otherwise, my life would just be a series of undocumented low points.

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

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

Comedy chose me. I always had this urge to be silly that I couldn't control. I remember my father having me read 'The Three Little Pigs' to him, and I would improv all around the story, like when one pig's house got blown over, he put on his gym shoes and took off.

Comedy is only funny when there's real pain.

I started comedy in 2006. I didn't even think it was a thing I could do.

As with anything that involves emotional pain, comedy isn't too far behind. There's that element of no matter how painful something is - as long as it is not you that is going through it - it can be funny.

Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.

I'm super happy to say that it's not that hard to write bad stand-up. I guess the trick is to write bad stand-up that sounds like you're trying to be good.

I don't think comedy comes from hotbeds of doing shtick. I think it usually comes from some kind of childhood humiliation or darkness.

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]

Every time I wrote a sketch that was in my voice, Ferrell would just do it better.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

In my first stand-up acts there wasn't material even. You know, I'd go on stage and cry and read a Dear John letter or gut fish on stage. I could be odd - and it's what interested me as a comedian.

A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.

Musings The little poets sing of little things: Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings; Lovers who kissed and then were made as one, And modest flowers waving in the sun. The mighty poets write in blood and tears And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears. They reach their mad blind hands into the night, To plumb abysses dead to human sight; To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled, Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world. [click on the thumbnail by Jack "King" Kirby]

I don't write my standup on paper or anything; but I just organically do it on stage, have an idea, chat it up a little bit. I'm keeping notes. I'm trying to keep up with this world and try to bring out a special every year.