Jon Lovitz Quotes

Comedy is more difficult. You can look at scenes when you're doing a drama like, “Maybe it works,” but in comedy, when you're doing it, either it works or it doesn't. You have to keep doing it until it does, and the requirement is more.

It's a very important skill set for an actor to be able to bring the humor into any moment, whether you're doing drama or comedy.

The secret to comedy is not playing the comedy, but actually playing the situation, playing the drama of it.

Comic timing... is how to have a relationship with the camera and deal with the camera without looking like you are.

There are people that have only seen me in dramatic stuff and they go, "Oh, I didn't know you could do comedy," and then there are comedy people that go, "Oh, I didn't know you could do drama." I want to try to do both.

With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.

Comedy is much harder, it's a lot more exacting. You can't just be real and you can't just use the same kind of techniques you use to fill up a regular scene.

Judd Apatow, Conan O'Brien ... taking what you think is funny, and then adding another layer to it. That's kind of my sensibility. Those are the guys that make me laugh.

I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.

There are many different ways of being funny. I'm not sure that there's so many different ways of being dramatic.

The real challenge in acting is in comedy. It's easier to get that gasp in a drama. Not easy, because you still have to find that emotional pitch. And when you do something in drama and you hear that sob from the audience it's so fulfilling. But as a comic actor, when the laugh is supposed to come and you punch in that line and nothing happens it is dreadful. It's horrific and you feel like dying right there.

I love physical comedy. Comedy that comes from an emotional place is amazing too and lets me develop in a new way as an actor.

I really wanted to do a comedy. I've done a lot of drama, and comedy was the one genre I was not being offered. So I became obsessive about getting one. I tried with two little parts in comedies that were more mainstream, I was kind of fumbling around, and then I read The Brothers Bloom and knew it was the one I wanted to jump into. Did it take adjusting? Actually, it's not really any different from doing drama.

I like comedy, but I like comedy as a device in drama. It's more interesting for me to use comedy to seduce people into thinking about something serious. If you want to hit a beat in a drama, you can distract people with a little comedy, and you can punch them in the gut with some emotion.

Woody Allen - nobody has been a better joke teller than him - and even in his great films, it's always coming out of the character. If you don't have that, jokes are just empty and I think that people rely too much on jokes.

Mel [Gibson] could stage physical comedy and put the camera in such a way... I mean, we did some really funny stuff, and he had some great ideas about how to do it. It was a delight to work with him in that regard.

I would love to do comedy. I'm actually really animated and goofy. I talk with my hands so intensely.

I'm not a broad comedy guy. I've been funny in movies, but I'm not a comedian. I'm an actor who's sometimes funny.

I'd love to do comedy. I'd probably have to get my laughing fits in check, because generally if I've done comedy, I'm usually the straight character that plays against the very obviously funny character, so that's really hard when the person is really hilarious.

All jokes aside, it's a very difficult job playing the straight man. Jason is potentially the most brilliant straight man that ever was because he's also really funny while doing it, which is even harder. I've always seen myself playing characters who are flawed. We use comedy in our lives to obscure the drama.

When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest.

All you really have when you're acting is the confidence and your ability to manage and tell a story by creating a character.

You get to have some bigger comedic moments with some very real dramatic stuff. All that in one makes for a fulfilling artistic job.

The whole idea of comedy, there is nothing normal about going up on stage to make strangers laugh. But I'm also not an exhibitionist like other comics. I'm not up there talking about masturbating.