Rob Thomas Quotes

A lot of comedies, I think, make the wrong choice of having the straight man being this bland emotional conduit for the audience.

Writing a comedy script is a difficult thing. I think if someone is attempting a comedy and then they fail then it's understood.

I always have humour in my action movies. I think characters that make jokes under fire are more real. It somehow helps put you in their shoes.

I can't not write funny. It's literally the only way I know how to do it.

I think comedy is drama, often. It's hard to have comedy over a period of time - commercials are one thing, but over a period of time - comedy and tragedy go hand in hand.

Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with.

The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it.

I think comedy is so specific, so hard. I'd audition for comedies and think, 'I can't pull this off.'

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

Especially with a comedy, you've got the clear cut goal of trying to make a scene funny. It's not like drama where you're trying to achieve some kind of emotion or trying to further the story along. You're trying to figure out what's the funniest way to do something.

I'd love to do a comedy - something where a character has to use humor to navigate the absurdities of life.

Actually the hardest films to make are comedies. In normal life, funny things happen by accident; to re-create those by design in a film takes real technique.

Rob and I both have this strange sense of comedy which always involves us being the butt of our own jokes.

Woody Allen's 'The Complete Prose' - It's just the best selection of comic writing by one author. You know it's good comedy when you get quite demoralised about yourself.

I find as a viewer, when I go to see comedies, the strain to be funny throughout the whole thing. I start to lose my sense of reality, and it ends up feeling like an empty experience; there's funny stuff in it but I've lost the emotional connection to the characters because it's just so bananas.

I like that feeling of discombobulation that comes in creating an absurd world that doesn't make sense. 'Monty Python' does a good job of it; 'Bugs Bunny,' too.

I don't write punch lines.

It's hard to write a comedy sketch.

I think sometimes in comedy the characters are often sacrificed for the joke, and it's more important for it to be funny than for there to be love.

The first thing I ever got my hands on was Andy Griffith's 'What It Was, Was Football.' I was fascinated with the fact that every syllable made it funny, and I would laugh even though I didn't know what any of it meant.

There's some sort of unspoken license... when outlandish things come out of an inanimate object, somehow it equals humor.

I'm not funny ha-ha, but I look for real humour in just about everything I've ever played.

That's the thing, you see, we were never good enough to write proper punchlines.

For me, comedy was deftly terrifying.