Steven Moffat Quotes

It's the hardest thing to come up with an hour of material that can consistently keep people laughing.

It's very hard to write humor.

Coming up with comedy is hard, man. Those bits aren't easy to think of!

I've always felt that in a comedy script the stage directions should also have a comedic value.

The hardest thing to write is sitcom.

I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn't do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all.

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.

Twitter taught me how to become better at writing jokes because it forces you to chip away at all the extraneous words.

I remember going to Bob Preston's dressing room because I was losing a laugh - as you do in a long run. He said, 'Give me the script. That's where you're going off the road.' That's comedy. It's never the line itself; it's in the foundation.

Writing humor is not something every single person can do.

I had written for Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman in the past. Jimmy had a different voice, and different priorities. He couldn't be the bad guy in the joke; he couldn't upset people, really.

Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can't have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.

I think when you dissect a joke too much, you have ruined whatever there is in comedy.

You can't be funny if you don't have good material.

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

You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn't be when it is literally your job.

Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I think that's how I tap into it.

When you have a writing partner and you're writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.

It's hard for a comic to be joking when your lines can't be funny.

Part of my writing style can be attributed to my mother's impatience with comedy, because whenever I told her a story she would say, 'Yeah, yeah, just tell me: is it good for you or bad for you?' Consequently, I think, I was always afraid to indulge in the time that you need to tell a joke, very nervous about anything that constituted an Act II.

Comedy is the hardest thing to get right. I remember a joke we did in 'What's Up, Doc?' that didn't get a single laugh. So we moved the shot a foot-and-a-half to one side, and all of a sudden, the laugh was there. It drives you crazy; the balance is so delicate.

It's hard to write a comedy sketch.

The thing that stand-up does for you is that it toughens you up a bit as far as the business goes. It's hard. If a joke doesn't get a laugh, that's instant rejection. And that's mostly what this business is most of the time: a lot of rejection.

Generating comic material can sometimes get the better of you.

I start with the joke line and write backward.