Ray Santiago Quotes

I call it predicament humor. You don't do anything that cuts the star off at the knees or worse. You make him intelligent; you give him great ideas and great things to do.

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.

You can trust a Neil Simon script. Every dot. Every dash; that pause means something. He takes all the jokes out, practically.

Because I was a television writer for many years, I write very conversationally. I put things straight, and with a lot of humor.

I learned that you don't have to be all over the place, that you can be subtle and you can say what you say. The words that you put together can be just as hilarious as falling all over the place or doing something.

If you play it straight it's funny - the best comedy is always played straight down the middle. The adjustment is understanding from the screenplay that a moment is hilarious.

There's an art to stupid comedy. There's an art to offensive comedy, and I think the key is it's just gotta make you laugh.

I became a specialist at comedic one-liners.

I think comedy is one of the hardest things to pull off. You either have timing or you don't, and that's something I don't have for sure.

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.

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

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

And if you can offer an explanation as to why it doesn't work then you've got to the whole root of comedy.

One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It's much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.

I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

Louis CK knows that just because a joke is using space as a resource instead of something to be crammed like a hamper, this doesn't mean a story isn't happening.

The thing that made Groucho special was the way he used his body parts. He also had a wicked tongue. People didn't realize it, but when Groucho said something, he meant it.

People like light and silly, and they like stuff that's really energetic, and you get a character in a film bouncing around and screaming, people laugh. That's all it takes. I don't find that funny. To me, what's funny is dialogue and nuance of character and performance.

I think so. I can't think of anything that requires more finesse than comedy, both from a verbal and visual point of view.

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

I like smart jokes, I like dumb jokes, and I like dumb jokes done smartly.

I cannot tell a joke. But I can do a situation, that it becomes a joke.

Soon I learned that the worse the puns and jokes, the funnier they could be, if you knew how to deliver them.

Comedy, at least the way I write comedy, is just drama with jokes.