Bruce Robinson Quotes

Actually the hardest films to make are comedies. In normal life, funny things happen by accident; to re-create those by design in a film takes real technique.

I think when you dissect a joke too much, you have ruined whatever there is in comedy.

A lot of the jokes had some build-up to some nasty stuff. But most of it was all character situations leading to what the ultimate payoff would be for that character.

A lot of the time, a comedy script is just dialogue, and that's the main thing you have to worry about.

You know, I liken it to - when you write a joke for somebody else, it's like you - you know, like the Wile E. Coyote dynamite plunger, where he pushes the plunger down and then you see the fuse go then there's an explosion in the distance? That's like writing a joke for somebody. When you tell the joke, you're in the explosion.

A lot of comedies, I think, make the wrong choice of having the straight man being this bland emotional conduit for the audience.

A standup set ends on a buildup of tension and subsequent release for a big laugh.

Although in Abbott and Costello, and straight man was first. That's a very interesting concept.

I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.

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

A straight factor is important in any comedy, because you need something to tee it up and also to ground it.

There is nothing - nothing - like writing a great joke and having that joke kill onstage.

The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it.

I think any kind of comic sequence is as easy and as difficult as it is written. So, if it is written well, then it becomes easy. Sometimes you find it difficult because the humour is not coming out.

Writing humour certainly involves pain. A sitcom is 6 months of writing pain!

I don't play comedy as comedy. That would be the biggest trap. I think about the characters and their situations. Then you don't have to worry where the laugh is going to be. But comedy is harder than drama.

Especially with a comedy, you've got the clear cut goal of trying to make a scene funny. It's not like drama where you're trying to achieve some kind of emotion or trying to further the story along. You're trying to figure out what's the funniest way to do something.

It's hard to write a comedy sketch.

I think sometimes in comedy the characters are often sacrificed for the joke, and it's more important for it to be funny than for there to be love.

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.

There is no 'magic water' that you can rub on a script to make the jokes funnier.

The first thing you start with when you're trying to write something funny is it has to - it really has to come to you first. I has to be an idea that you have that first makes you laugh, that strikes you as funny.

The hardest thing to write is sitcom.

And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.

You have to know you are in a comedy. You have to know that you are actually allowing the audience to participate on some level. When you go dark and mean it, then you don't let them in.