Ron White Quotes

I think when you write something as standup material, it forces you to think about how you're gonna tell that story in one way, and then, when you get the opportunity to shoot it, you almost have to reframe how you go about it and rethink the entire process.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

Coming up with comedy is hard, man. Those bits aren't easy to think of!

I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

I can't write a joke. I could never write. I do a lot of stories and I call them stories, but they're just comedy recitals on a given subject.

I certainly tried to talk about less complex things, but I've had to accept that it's just not what I do. That isn't to say that my shows are depressing - they aren't. At least, I hope they aren't! The problem I have with stories about happy things is that they don't require any skill from a comic - they just repeat the details verbatim.

Usually the beginning of a story that people hear a lot. For example, "My girlfriend is upset about her new haircut" or "My dad keeps losing his car keys." And then I just think of different ways the story could end. "My girlfriend is upset about her new haircut. I don't understand why she's crying. I'm the one who has to get a new girlfriend." Then I try it out on stage. I don't do a lot of re-writing. My jokes either work or they don't. The trick is just to write a ton of jokes.

The beautiful thing about stand-up is you can create and immediately deliver, perform, and get paid for what you do.

I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.

Stand-up has the best writers, because it's the hardest writing by a million miles.

If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

As a comic, I think I'm very verbally oriented about a lot of the stuff that I've written or thought up and how I say it.

You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn't be when it is literally your job.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

People don't understand how much time and work it takes to make somebody laugh, and how hard it is to write a script, to put together the story, the characters. When everyone laughs simultaneously, there's no greater feeling.

We call ourselves comedy writer-performers, and that encompasses everything, and I certainly have a very open mind about it.

Everyone talks about the gags, but the most difficult thing is coming up with the stories. You have to learn to do that for sitcoms.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

I've never sat down and written jokes. I wouldn't know how to.

A lot of people get into stand-up as a back door into acting or something. But I really like writing jokes and telling jokes.

What I love is getting a new joke, or a premise like a sketch idea or a movie idea. That's the best feeling for a comedian.

I'm not making comedy albums. That's too much effort for one joke.

I was always cutting words. I even would write my jokes in my notebook. I still do this, almost like a poem.