Judd Apatow Quotes

For comedy, timing is key.

Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.

It's very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that's not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It's a gut feeling.

Comedy is all about the pause.

Comedy is one of the toughest genres. It is so essential to get the timing right, failing which the humour can fall flat.

With comedians, you have that understanding that we're trying to get laughs.

A lot of comedies are based on the reaction shot. You have one person doing something stupid and one person is generally the straight man, and the laughs generally come on the reaction of the straight man to the funny thing the other person has done.

I'd like to make you laugh for about ten minutes though I'm gonna be on for an hour.

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.

Let's not call physical comedy falling down and pratfalls. All humor is physical, no matter how you dish it out. It's timing, like a dancer or an athlete would have.

I became a specialist at comedic one-liners.

Comedy is not something that a person can fake or learn how to do.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

I was the kid who always hung back and then dropped the jokes when you least expected it. Timing was everything. My mouth sort of developed over time.

A joke is a way to say, 'I'm going to do something funny now. If I don't get a laugh at the end, I'm a failure.'

I wish I had a funny story.

My job is to bring the tickle. I know what's funny.

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

Whenever I go on a show with a comedian I just counter punch.

Comedy is so hard; it's so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it.

Kind of the exhausting thing about doing pure comedy, or something that's broader, is you're kind of a slave to the laugh. If it's not funny, then there's not much point in doing it. The kind of ueber-objective is to make people laugh. You always have to have that in the back of your mind, 'Eh, I've got to figure out a way to make this funny.'

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

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.

Comedy is ridiculously hard. And if the rhythm is not right, if the music or the line is not right, it's not funny.

Almost anything can be funny if said the right way - but it has to be said the right way.