Joshua Malina Quotes

One of my greatest inspirations for stand-up was Jonathan Winters. He was a genius. One thing about him, and also Lenny Bruce, is that they were in the tradition of the one-man show. That's why Richard Pryor was so great, and George Carlin, too. They prowled the stage, they used voices, they were really talents.

All these movies are observational comedies. I see somebody, maybe a dry cleaner, and notice how they are. Maybe I'll decide to turn a person with those traits into a studio chief.

Doing a format parody is one of my favorite things to do in comedy.

'Scary Movie' was a different type of comedy than I'm used to. I've mostly done sitcoms, so working with David Zucker, who wrote the film and who directed the last two 'Scary Movie's and 'Airplane' and 'Naked Gun,' was a lot of help.

My personal favorite is Woody Allen, who is just amazing as a comedian.

I would like to explore comedy more. It's not something that I've done a lot of. Obviously, I'm very at home in drama. I like everything.

I was a huge fan of comedy and movies and TV growing up, and I was able to memorize and mimic a lot of things, not realizing that that meant I probably wanted to be an actor. I just really, really amused myself and my friends with memorizing entire George Carlin or Steve Martin albums.

I think comedy is more my instinct and more what I'm geared towards.

To be honest, I'm probably more of a comedy person, actually. I really enjoy the comedy stuff, and I've got some things I'll be working on that I think are just different ways of combining genres in comedy and drama and action.

Chris Farley, I was a huge fan of his growing up. I would love to do something kind of slapstick and funny, maybe where I could change my look even a little bit.

I'd like to do plays, maybe a one man show.

That's what I hate about a lot of comedies, when you're hitting a line or making it funny.

Comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write.

Comedy is not funny. Comedy is hard work and timing and lots and lots of rehearsals.

Comedy writing is taking the brief thought and going with it.

Certainly early on, I kind of modeled myself after Steve Martin and Bill Murray. I would imitate them sometimes.

I love '30 Rock' because Tina Fey allows me to fly over the cuckoo nest once a week.

When you saw Jon Lovitz or Dana Carvey or Phil Hartman doing something, they were acting. It was real acting. Like, they were acting like that person. They weren't like - it wasn't even like they were really trying to go for a laugh, especially in Phil Hartman's case.

It's very difficult to make comedy work; I think it's a very underrated genre.

I really just love making comedies; I love doing characters.

I think my strongest suit is comedy. I certainly have limits in other areas.

You know, comedy's hard. With drama, you have a responsibility to the emotional truth, but with comedy, you have emotional truth and you have technique on top of it.

I've seen other comics, with great pleasure, watching their own specials, and I don't know how or why they do it.

The first rule of comedy should be, you must be very lazy. Whoever works should be immediately removed.

My family's always been really funny. I feel like comedy's hard. I feel like it's so important.