Kayvan Novak Quotes

I could never sit down and write jokes.

I found, especially with stand-up, that if a premise works, you can make the joke work. If a premise doesn't work, you can't force it to.

I don't really write jokes down. I tend to have a premise that I work out and test on stage.

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

I can't write a joke. I could never write. I do a lot of stories and I call them stories, but they're just comedy recitals on a given subject.

What I love is getting a new joke, or a premise like a sketch idea or a movie idea. That's the best feeling for a comedian.

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.

Writing humor is not something every single person can do.

I definitely script things out. I definitely write things down and try to write jokes. Often, they're terrible. I often write terrible, terrible jokes.

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

I usually work from the inside out but sometimes in comedy it's fun to work from the outside in.

Stand-up keeps you alive. It is definitely the most specialized field in comedy because you need to stay sharp and well-tuned every night.

So many times I've done a CD, and then the week after I record it, I've got this new tagline that's killer. And it makes the whole bit better. It happens all the time. But that's just the process of comedy.

There aren't any concrete steps to becoming a comic.

When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes 10 hours a day, your mind starts going to strange places.

Some comics have long routines to get them in the mood - I just prefer to sit down, write out the same jokes in a different order and then have a little prayer that I won't be met by silence.

People don't understand how much time and work it takes to make somebody laugh, and how hard it is to write a script, to put together the story, the characters. When everyone laughs simultaneously, there's no greater feeling.

I write these shows one joke at a time. There's no continuity. I do try to figure an order to the stories, but there's not continuity.

What I love about sketch is that the writing of it is idea-based. It's not story-based. It's like, 'This is a behavior, and we're going to write, in a small sample, the funniest way to heighten this behavior.' Sitcoms or movies are about story.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

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.

I think that's something that people don't realize enough about when they get into comedy - it's not just about sitting back and observing and saying something funny.

I certainly tried to talk about less complex things, but I've had to accept that it's just not what I do. That isn't to say that my shows are depressing - they aren't. At least, I hope they aren't! The problem I have with stories about happy things is that they don't require any skill from a comic - they just repeat the details verbatim.

When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.