Wendy Liebman Quotes

Bouncing ideas off people when you're thinking up comedy is great.

I'd say any good set or any comedy that I've worked on, that's worked, has been comedians pitching ideas back and forth to each other. A lot of like, 'What if you say this? What about this?'

I'll think of the idea and then I'll write something down, then within that there will be a joke or two which is the original thing which I thought was funny.

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

Comedy is so collaborative. You're going to come up with better jokes with people you like joking around with. It just makes sense.

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

I come up with my jokes by thinking of a topic.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

We sit in a room for months trying to think of funny things.

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

Comedians kind of write what comes to them. You can give yourself little assignments, but it's what inspires you.

I love to write jokes and that's all I think about.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

That's what comedy is like: You have to force yourself out in the world because you're always one experience away from new material.

If you're in the writer's room, in any writer's room in the world, before you pitch a joke or suggest an idea, you first think it's funny and decide to say it out loud. The next step is for the people around you to accept it or reject it, before it ever sees the light of day, on film or in front of an audience.

For me, it's a bigger challenge, it's much harder to do and much more rewarding to do well, then just to think up stuff of your own, hit or miss, because you've got to see to it that you don't torpedo any of his punch lines.

I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.

If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.

I'm not an outliner. I come up with a premise and then take it from there.

One thing will lead to another and somebody will come up with a riff or a line or something we build from.

I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.

I don't sit and write stand-up material; I come up with an idea onstage.

The most fun I ever have is sitting in with Rick writing, and we laugh at our own jokes.

I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I'm working at it.