Judd Apatow Quotes

It's very slow for me to create humor. It takes me a long time to write a humor piece. It takes days.

I loved the idea that I could write a joke and someone else would have to take the risk of performing 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.

I've never sat down and written jokes. I wouldn't know how to.

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.

I try to write three jokes every morning, although I don't know what they are. I write them as fast as I can, then I put them away for a month. So I couldn't even tell you what they are, or if they're good. I just assume they weren't.

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.

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'm not as incredibly prolific as Louis C. K., and I'm definitely not doing a completely brand-new hour probably by the beginning of the tour.

When I was starting out, I was just bringing a garbage bag of jokes onstage, pulling them out like, 'What about this? No? Alright.' I was just trying to be funny about anything.

The first thing you start with when you're trying to write something funny is it has to - it really has to come to you first. I has to be an idea that you have that first makes you laugh, that strikes you as funny.

It's way more fun to tell jokes for an hour than it is to sit in a room and bash your head against the wall trying to think of sketches.

I think most people that do comedy write for themselves. I don't think there is any other way you can do it, really. Otherwise it would be quite cynical.

Writing the record for me - every record is almost a surprise. When people ask me, what are the themes you want to grapple with on this one? I have no idea until the record's finished.

To sit down at a computer every day and write a script is commendable. I don't have the patience for it, but I have some fantastic ideas.

And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.

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?"

At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state.

Harry [ Hannigan] and Chris [Ellis] are sitting there while we're doing [ Fresh Hell], and Chris is directing, obviously, but if we start fooling around a little bit, Harry comes in, and he's got some addition that makes it even funnier. But we start with a complete script.

Оf course you can only write comedy when you're smoking weed.

The victory of the show is in the writing. Coming up with sketches and stand-up bits. The rest is just hitting buttons on a machine more or less.

You never have any idea where your movie's going to go when you're shooting - you're in this little bubble. Everything you care about is getting the next step right: getting the script right, finding the right actors, shooting it.

All of a sudden Mindy [Kaling] was writing on The Office and had sold a TV show. When we'd try to write shows, we'd jokingly call the word documents "Hit Show." We just couldn't crack the code.

As far as outlining is concerned, I don't outline humor. I might right down a word or two to remind myself of a punch line I thought of, but the actual structure of a piece I really don't. I don't think it would really help me because for me the process is joke, joke, joke, joke.

I write my scripts short and they develop on the set, which I have found a far better premise both economically and practically.