Steven Michael Quezada Quotes

It's very hard to write humor.

You can't be funny if you don't have good material.

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 used to like writing for comedians - I enjoyed the challenge of making other people funny.

That's the easiest job you can have in TV comedy, being the guy who just delivers the funny.

I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I'm working at it.

Writing humor for me is more like a watchful-ness. You have to watch. When you say something funny, or someone else does, it's more like you wait for the piece.

It's fun to deliver material on live TV because it's more off-the-cuff, but I like writing better. You really can measure the joke, think an extra second and nail the right reference.

Writing humor is not something every single person can do.

The only time I get sick of making people laugh is when I'm in a non-writing-joke mode, and I just can't seem to come up with anything new that's funny. That's a tough place to be as a comedian.

Coming up with comedy is hard, man. Those bits aren't easy to think of!

Anything where I get to write a lot of jokes and have a lot of creative control - that's all I want.

Comedy is not funny. Comedy is hard work and timing and lots and lots of rehearsals.

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

Everyone can write jokes and makes things clever.

Doing stand-up takes the fun out of being funny.

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

Melissa and I both say we don't write very good jokes.

That's what's great about standup comedy: the instant feedback. You get up on stage, you tell a joke, if it doesn't work, come back the next day with a better version of it.

The hardest thing to write is sitcom.

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

At one point, I wrote 20 jokes a day, and I had a commitment to send them to the same three people. Now, I just write down what my husband says in his sleep. He's the funniest person, even unconscious.

I've been too funny in my life to have to play a character who's... moderately funny.

Generating comic material can sometimes get the better of you.

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.