Matt Berry Quotes

I don't write punch lines.

Using humor as a wedge into different kinds of stories is my go-to. I think anything I do would have some sort of streak of humor in it.

The thing I try to get across to the writers - and I do a lot of writing, too - is that when I do stand-up, nothing I talk about is funny. Everything is really sad and tragic and then I make it funny.

I love funny women. I love writing funny women characters.

I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke.

When I was a little kid, I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there, and a mummy. When they were all hassling him, this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them, 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.

I'm probably not very funny. The scripts just don't come in, or the ones that do aren't that good. I suppose I'm just an old drama queen, really.

Writing comedy is a superpower.

I think I'm funnier in my writing than in person.

I think it would be exhausting and depressing, to write, to watch and to live, if it was just focused on drama. It's heavy. Also, I think the humor really highlights the pathos and the struggle. You can slam it up against drama, and it makes both shine.

I wasn't a class clown, I just found at an early age that I was able to make people laugh. So I mostly wrote funny stuff instead of writing what I was supposed to be writing.

Comedies always need to be provocative and catch your attention in a way that dramas don't have to.

Even with college, the reason I wanted to go so badly is because I wanted to major in film. I want to take screenwriting classes and learn more about behind the scenes stuff, because I love people like Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig who are able to write a lot of their own material and be so involved in everything they do.

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

I would say 80% of the scripts I get are dramas and not comedies or romantic comedies, which is funny because that's what I do every week.

I can't not put humor in a book.

There's something that's really fun about the challenge of making the mundane funny, too, I think.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

I love the idea of things being strict and things being uniform. That's the reason why I surround each collection with humor or irony. I want to make sure that it's not too serious and that there is some element that throws it off because otherwise that would make it really boring. There's always a story that's somewhat fantastical.

The more life experience you have, the more comedy you can write.

Comedy will always be central to what I do, it's just an instinct for me, but I am a writer and always have been.

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

Humor writing is something that comes naturally to me.