Kurt Braunohler Quotes

Writing your own jokes, you just kind of keep working on something until you think it might work, and then you try it out and hope for the best.

As an actor, I'm rather hit and miss; I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't.

Films that score very high with test audiences generally tend to not be so great. But, there's a lot of money involved in making movies, and it's a way for people to reassure themselves, who have spent money, and it's also a way to work out how to market a movie.

Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.

I think what's so great about making your first feature film is that you're so naive in some ways; you don't know what to expect, and you don't question things as much because you're just trying to figure it out as you go.

With 'Human Giant,' we tested almost everything live and made tweaks based on what worked and what didn't.

I try something new every night. It's an hour show; if it works I maybe try it a few more times and then move that off and try something new. It's a great workshop for me.

It can take a few months to get a new 10 minutes. Usually it takes like 10 times of repeatedly trying different variations of a joke until I land on one I think is really good.

I know as a writer how valuable a tool is the wastebasket. Perhaps God throws away many experiments before He finds the right expression. Perhaps we are the discards - or we could be the part He keeps. This mystery is what keeps us all going, to see what happens in the next chapter.

The answer to the question "where do good ideas come from" is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.

Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.

I don't know what's funny and what's not so I test out all of my material in front of audiences.

A lot of it's experimental, spontaneous. It's about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.

I can always see ways to improve what I've done. At the same time, knowing it's all an ongoing life's work allows me to be less precious about blind alleys, failed experiments, and misfires.

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

You do stuff that gets a reaction and you think 'that's a winner' and then it never sees the light of day. But the thing with improvisation is that 90% of what you come up with won't be used and for good reason. But you keep going for the occasional gem that you might come up with. You do a scene and a lot of the time. We wouldn't cut. So, you come up with something that might be funny and then you go, 'alright, what else'? So, you kind of throw stuff against the wall and see what happens. But you've got to be prepared to make a fool of yourself.

Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone.

The three foundations of judgement: Bold Design, Constant Practice, and Frequent Mistakes.

I don't have the educated knowledge of what textures, colors, shapes and spaces need to be put together to make something just right. I'm learning it by trial and error, which is something that's slow going.

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

I've recorded at home since I was a teenager, and I'm able to sit here in my underwear and keep trying different things until something works. I think if I did that in a studio the engineer would be like, "What the hell is wrong with you?"

When you're doing a movie, you're in a vacuum, just going, "Well, that's done. Let's see what happens."

The show, like everything we have done and still do, is just one more experiment.