Vanessa Bayer Quotes

I don't really write jokes down. I tend to have a premise that I work out and test on stage.

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

We sit in a room for months trying to think of funny things.

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?'

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

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

When we are in pre-production, this is the best job in the world. Working 10 to 7, sitting around and brainstorming with the other writers, making things funnier and writing and rewriting scenes - that's as fun as it gets.

Twitter is a good medium to lean how to write jokes. It pushes you to write a better joke in that, on Twitter, the first joke about something has already happened. You need to think of the second joke and the third joke.

I think writing in a group, even though it can be a challenge - you have to be on your toes all the time - is the way the best comedy gets written. It's very, very collaborative. A lot of comedy writers are definitely introverted nerds.

The original Dean Martin Comedy Hour handed me some hysterical sketches. I've got highlights on tons of these variety shows, given to me by their great writers. I'd love to be doing all that again.

Royal Canadian Air Farce, and I was in three sketches there. And they wrote some really great stuff for me.

I do a lot of brainstorming with my editors.

We call ourselves comedy writer-performers, and that encompasses everything, and I certainly have a very open mind about it.

It's hard to write a comedy sketch.

I got into stand-up because I love stand-up. Specifically in stand-up, I love jokes. I love short, structured ideas and a punch line.

What I love about sketch is that the writing of it is idea-based. It's not story-based. It's like, 'This is a behavior, and we're going to write, in a small sample, the funniest way to heighten this behavior.' Sitcoms or movies are about story.

How to do half-hour comedy innovatively is something I do pride myself on. We invented it with 'I Love Lucy.'

When I give notes on a script, I say, 'Guys, I may drift, but it's part of the process.' So I'm aware that I'm drifting, but I'm grabbing a lot of stuff.

In comedy, you work with people so often that they just become familiar faces - it's like a fraternity.

Every script always goes through rewrites so that everyone loves it.

Every scene is on the table to collaborate on, to pick apart, to try a million different ways. Usually, what ends up occurring in the end is something that no single person knew would happen or had planned for.

I tend to develop my rambling anecdotes by actually getting up and performing them. That's the joy/horror of stand up - if you have the germ of an idea that you think might be funny, there is a way of finding out if it's funny very quickly.

People are either funny or they're not, and you can't teach that - but you can teach people to work together to make an idea better.

That's what's great about standup comedy: the instant feedback. You get up on stage, you tell a joke, if it doesn't work, come back the next day with a better version of it.