Roseanne Barr Quotes

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

A good comic explores the imagination, but it's always got to have those notes of truth running through it.

I don't write punch lines.

For comedy, timing is key.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

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

Comedy is hard to do. All the cliches about it are true.

Comedy is surprise. Comedy is not something that you can, necessarily, do twice.

There's an art to comedy.

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

Comedy is easy. You have to react to what others are saying and it is all about the timing, the dialogue delivery.

Do you know what the key to comedy is? Timing.

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

You can be funny and say what you mean; these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Some of the best jokes came from people who meant it. See: Pryor, Bruce, Carlin, etc.

I can't not put humor in a book.

Sometimes a witticism has no truth behind it.

To be a comedian, you gotta jokesmith, there's no way around it.

Anybody can make jokes. But unless they come from conviction, and there's truth in them, you haven't nailed it. They aren't as funny as they could be, and they don't make a point.

Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.

You shouldn't get too close to the truth, because then maybe you stop being funny.

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

Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.

Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it, or you don't. You can't attain it.

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.