Dave McCary Quotes

When you people have a set up joke and the joke is set up straight and the words are just well written, I always say "C'mon, humans don't speak that way."

There's a sense of spontaneity, and no emphasis on jokes in this show. People generally talk the way they talk in life if you were in this particular situation.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

I think one of the highest compliments you can give a person is that when you are talking to him, you are not thinking about the fact that you are talking to him. That is, your thoughts and words all exist on a single, engaged level. You are being yourself because you aren't bothering to think about who you should be. It is like when you talk in a dream.

I'm always in situations where you can't be funny, and yet I want to do it anyway.

I never know when I am being funny, and the other way too. I don't think you can think about that. I don't think you can try to be funny. Some people are just funny.

I do feel like guys feel pressure to be funny with me, which is kind of annoying. It's a turn-off if someone's trying hard to be funny because it feels like they're auditioning for a comedy job or something. It doesn't feel romantic to me. I get so much comedy from my life that, from a guy, I'm more looking for something sweet or romantic.

I don't like forcing comedy and people just trying to do things just to find a funny beat all the time.

In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page.

Comedy needs to happen naturally and be in touch with the character. When you see that guy in your office that everybody laughs at, he doesn't think he's funny. He's just being him, and that's the joke.

There's nothing less funny than trying to force funny.

If you try to be funny, you're not being funny.

After a while, a joke, if you say it too much, just becomes contrived, or fake-sounding.

I don't want to write lines where characters tell me exactly how they feel; I want to see people talk about anything but their feelings, like they do in real life.

As soon as you are trying to be funny or dramatic, that's when things start feeling fake and boring.

Scenes change all the time. Scenes will change while you're shooting them, and you just have to roll with it 'cause that's what makes it funny. It's not being stuck in your character and how you're gonna do something, but to react to other people and to really have a real-life conversation.

From the very beginning, I always tried to make dialogue flow comfortably; I always did that to make it seem more authentic.

I've done network shows. A director will call me and say, 'Do you want to do this with me?' and I'll say, 'Sure,' but I couldn't do it forever because there's no real expression. That's not how people talk.

I find that dialogue is bad in most scripts. I just think there are very few writers that can capture the natural way people talk.

Our comedy was light-hearted amusement that seemingly tripped naturally off the tongue. That's why I don't think it will date.

The unique selling price (USP) of 'Sat Shri Akaal England' is its jokes and punches that come so naturally that we didn't have to put in additional effort.

I have an aversion to comedy where everybody speaks in punchlines.

After doing 'Life After Beth,' which I think had one line that wasn't scripted, everything was scripted so that it sounds natural, and I went to such great lengths to create dialogue and to come across the way that people wouldn't sound like they were on the nose.

Dialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. When you're writing lines you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.'

As an actor going into screenwriting, I was able to understand what type of dialogue feels natural. A lot of the time, as an actor, you don't have the freedom to change what your lines are, and they can often be very unnatural or difficult to portray in a real light.