Jaboukie Young-White Quotes

Twitter taught me how to become better at writing jokes because it forces you to chip away at all the extraneous words.

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

The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.

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.

Stand-up has the best writers, because it's the hardest writing by a million miles.

Comedy takes a very specific technique, specific skills.

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

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

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

You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn't be when it is literally your job.

I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.

Part of my writing style can be attributed to my mother's impatience with comedy, because whenever I told her a story she would say, 'Yeah, yeah, just tell me: is it good for you or bad for you?' Consequently, I think, I was always afraid to indulge in the time that you need to tell a joke, very nervous about anything that constituted an Act II.

I like to write a joke without any fat on it. The shorter the better. I cater for people with ADD, basically.

Bad improv happens with people who are inexperienced with each other and don't know the craft that well. But bad stand-up is something that could happen to someone at any level in their career.

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.

Twitter is a good medium to lean how to write jokes. It pushes you to write a better joke in that, on Twitter, the first joke about something has already happened. You need to think of the second joke and the third joke.

Twitter is comedy writing. It's one-liners that give way to fully fleshed-out thoughts.

I've never been able to write for stand-up.

I do Twitter, but I'm still not great on it - I'm not good at writing short little jokes, so my Twitter's not really a jokey thing.

It's hard for a comic to be joking when your lines can't be funny.

I love to write jokes and that's all I think about.

I've always felt that in a comedy script the stage directions should also have a comedic value.

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

I think a lot comes from having the experience of doing stand-up comedy. It allows you to figure out the psychology of an audience; what things are funny and not.

We call ourselves comedy writer-performers, and that encompasses everything, and I certainly have a very open mind about it.