Raphael Bob-Waksberg Quotes

Since it's based on my parents, it's more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny, but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them.

Walt Disney always said, 'For every laugh, there should be a tear.' I believe in that.

'Friends' played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful.

I am a big fan of the TV series 'Taxi' which combined comedy and pathos better than any other show I've seen.

The things that I gravitate toward in film and TV are things that make me laugh but then break my heart.

Not often is there as much of a vulnerable side as there is a funny side.

If you're doing a drama that has some comedic elements you can't forget that it's primarily a very serious film that has some light relief.

The best comedy, I feel, comes in a drama because it balances each other out.

The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry.

The next time I write a play - in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I'll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that - that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop.

I learned a great lesson early on, even before I was really an actor, from that movie 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles' that John Hughes made: that you could make a movie that's really, really, really, really funny, and sometimes you can still achieve... making the audience feel very deep emotions as well.

I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they're so universal.

'Hill Street,' because of the wacky nature of many of our characters, really allowed us to indulge a kind of cheek-to-jowl juxtaposition of high drama with very low humor.

I think comedy is drama, often. It's hard to have comedy over a period of time - commercials are one thing, but over a period of time - comedy and tragedy go hand in hand.

If you can have heart as well as the comedy, it takes you a lot further. I think that that's what we were trying to do with 'Gigi.'

We always thought we wanted to do a show that you could both laugh and cry in thirty minutes, and I don't know that there are that many comedies that try for that.

I like the rhythm of comedy in dramas, if that makes sense. In other words, I don't want to write setup, punch, setup, punch, where the joke dictates the scene; I want to find comedy in which the drama is actually driving the moment in the scene.

I'm a huge fan of Jack Lemmon, he was someone who managed to tread that line between comedy and tragedy and sometimes give very big performances, but they were never over-demonstrative and they were never not based on a kind of real truthful human being.

I think on 'Third Watch' that I was the comic relief on a lot of that. I mean, I definitely had dark moments, but people tended to think he was funny even if the character himself wasn't having a fun time.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

Chuck Lorre and everyone else on 'Mom' did such a great job of balancing that line that rides tragedy and comedy. They make you cry, and then they make you crack up about it.

In college, I learned that my favorite parts were the sad clown parts. Those are the ones I love because you get to do everything. You get to be funny, make them laugh one minute, and make them cry the next minute.

I like to be able to feel as many parts of myself while watching a movie at one time. I think that's what 'Super' is - it's funny, but it's also sad. It's very touching in certain ways, and it's also got a very dark sense of humor. So it's allowed to go anywhere.

Most of my films - if you look at the tone, apart from 'Shadows,' which is straight-up comedy - the tone is a mix between comedy and pathos, and I really love that.

'Bridget Jones' is meant to be a funny night out, but with emotional truth. I wanted to make it a classic that you can pick up in 10 years and not cringe over.