George Carlin Quotes

The most important thing in comedy - apart from empathy, which I think is important even if disguised - is surprise. I like surprising people with the fact that something's even a joke at all.

Humor does depend on surprise, and the things that people remember as the funniest things in the world, you look at later and you go, "What? What was that all about?"

I'd like to make you laugh for about ten minutes though I'm gonna be on for an hour.

Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

But with comedy it's a simple premise. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't.

The comedian just wants to get a laugh.

One night in a club in Boston, I tried the name Roger Duck. No laughs. The next night, I tried Orson Bean, putting together a pompous first name and a silly second name. I got laughs, so I decided to keep it.

The thing with the comedian is you can make all the jokes you want and not every joke it going to be a winner, and not every joke is going to land, there'll be some that somebody doesn't laugh at, but that's just part of the deal.

I am a comedian: that means I laugh at things other people don't laugh at and also annoys my wife sometimes.

A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

I started out in stand-up, so it's very satisfying to make people laugh, but it usually means at your own expense.

The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.

The whole thing about working in front of the camera is to make people laugh when they're not supposed to.

Humor is based on surprise, and surprise is a milder way of saying shock. It's surprise that makes the joke.

For me, if you distill comedy down, it is surprise and the unexpected. That has to be it on its most base level, in any form.

In comedy, though, it's good to get feedback from the audience about what they find funny.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to have someone in a seat in a theater laughing so hard that they're making weird sounds.

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

Comedy is such a personal thing. Everybody can cry at the same thing, but it's a lot harder to get everyone to laugh at the same thing.

I love physical comedy. I love Oscar Wilde, I love Shakespeare comedies, I love improv.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.