Robert Orben Quotes

Anybody with a sharp brain and a mic can become a comedian, but there's a need to move beyond it. The audience wants to witness the marriage of theatre, comedy and something more.

I write 'Broad City,' so I connect it to me.

I used to dream about presenting a comedy show and also about directing films.

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

I think writers have become hypnotised by the number of jokes on the page at the expense of character.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

When you have a writing partner and you're writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.

I guess I considered myself just sort of a sketch comedian, you know? Actual screenwriting hadn't really occurred to me as a viable job - I didn't really know anything about it.

When I was in high school I saw Steven Wright, a brilliant one-liner comedian, and I thought: 'That's what I should do; I should write one-liners.' And I did. My first album is mostly one-liners.

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.

Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what's coming.

Sometimes if you do a multi-camera comedy, often there's rules, like, 'We've got to have three main laughs per page.'

Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I've learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could've on my own.

I did a web series years ago where I helped write a kind of a spoof called 'Young Love.'

No, I never really set out to be a stand up. I wanted to be a writer of some sort. I thought I'd do a bit of stand up and hopefully that will lead to stuff and little did I know it kind of snowballed. Before I knew it I was doing stand up 300 nights a year.

The hardest thing to write is sitcom.

The difference when I'm writing a story versus writing a joke is that writing a joke is so much more about the structure and it's less about the conversation. To me, the thing that I love about stand-up is the intimacy between performer and audience.To get it even more conversational was something that really appealed to me and that I really enjoyed doing. My early experiments with it, with just telling a story from my life on stage, it was so satisfying to do. And seemingly for the audience as well. It's a different thing, and it's a different feeling and a different vibe.

My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done.

The three main leads [in Townies] were Lauren [ Graham] and Jenna [Elfman] and Molly [Ringwald], and then Ron Livingston was on it as well. There was a lot of people to write funny stuff for.

Frank Sebastiano is a real write. He has two Emmys, one from 'SNL' and the other from 'The Chris Rock Show' . The only award I have is an FM-mmy.

My first writing jobs were writing Tom Arnold specials for HBO, so I love working there.

I am excited about getting back to what I do best and what my audience likes best, I am writing new jokes every day and soon Ill be telling them every night. Just me, one Jew talking and that's it.

I try to write three jokes every morning, although I don't know what they are. I write them as fast as I can, then I put them away for a month. So I couldn't even tell you what they are, or if they're good. I just assume they weren't.

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.

I was just interested in directing. So I just kept having a go at trying to write little scripts and get things together, and my wife just had a slip of the tongue and said, "Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life" when she meant to say "Frank Capra's." There it is right there. That's a gag that we could make into something.