Jeffrey Tambor Quotes

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

Comedy is all about the character. When you're too focused on the gags, the character suffers, and you don't get the laugh. Comedy has to come from the character.

You can't teach standup comedy. You can teach someone how to formulate a joke, but making it funny is different.

Getting onstage and trying out all of my material and what works well with audiences and what doesn't, what works well in different atmospheres, has been the best training.

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well.

You really have no idea whether or not what you're writing is funny. In stand-up and sketch comedy, you know right away and you can make your changes accordingly.

With comedy, it's really hard to tell if something's working on the page - you really need the actors to bring it alive. The scariest part is if people will laugh or not.

I love doing six versions of any joke, so if they'll give me six takes, I'd love to do it.

Whether it's a double take or a spit take or an extra-long pause before a reaction or a line, I try to be as cognizant as possible about the technical end of it. So I think the physical stuff works easier for me than maybe for others who are more just going on instinct.

Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny, it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can't get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon.

It is really hard to do comedy; it takes a lot of energy and focus. It's rather like music: It's a lot of hitting notes precisely.

You learn what can become a good joke and can be repeatable. You have a shorthand about how to introduce a joke to someone.

Bad improv happens with people who are inexperienced with each other and don't know the craft that well. But bad stand-up is something that could happen to someone at any level in their career.

Impressions are still kind of hard for me and not what I love to do the most, but with characters, I think there's an element of fearlessness. You try to figure out the best reading and wording of the jokes before the show, and then you just really have to go hard.

Rehearsals are for gags.

I hate to give myself credit for anything, but I will say I really enjoy, as an actor, and especially with comedy stuff, playing with different rhythms and with different ways around a joke. There's always an obvious route, and there's one that maybe is a little bit different.

I think comedy is very easy. Its all in the writing. If the writing is good and you have good director it is good.

The more you work in this business as a comedian, the closer you get to just being yourself onstage, on camera, the more well received you are.

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.

The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.

I think that's something that people don't realize enough about when they get into comedy - it's not just about sitting back and observing and saying something funny.

In television, there are so many things between you making a joke and the audience seeing it. It's like an assault course.

I believe it is tough to be funny and tougher to make people laugh. And it needs to be been done effortlessly. A joke can be comedy, but one can kill the joke if it is delivered badly.

There is nothing more joyful to me than hearing a live audience laugh. Especially when I planned it that way!