Ricky Gervais Quotes

When I go in to 'Comedy Bang Bang,' I'll go in most of the time with some beats of where we're going with the idea. Everything else is improvised. Nothing is scripted. A lot of times I'll go in there with nothing and it's just conversation with the character.

One of the things that makes any good entertainment, whether it's a play, drama, comedy, television, film, whatever, is that you feel a certain amount of spontaneity.

It's great when improv is encouraged. It's a really fun thing. It depends on who's in the movie and how their process works as well. It takes a director who is open to that because you have a script, but then something funny could happen on set.

At Second City and improvising at iO, you're creating a character in an instant. All of a sudden, you're creating this history and this past for your character, and you're discovering it while you're doing it, and that's part of the fun of it.

As a director and an actor, I encourage improvisation but in character and in the moment of what it is.

I think the goal is to make a well written scene seem like it's improvised and/or to come up with things that you find in the room that you couldn't have known until you get into the real situation, just try to improve things as you go along.

I've never really been a character on TV. I think, if possible, you want to portray yourself. If you're in a situation where you're supposed to react, you need to react.

The main thing with my shows is that I'm professional but not highly polished. I don't like people to think they're just seeing an album in person.

Whenever I come to Ireland, I end up just bantering with the crowd so the show will just be what it is.

Sometimes a busted queen is more entertaining than a polished queen.

The way that UCB taught us to improvise, you always start from an inspiration from your life, something that's happened to you or a friend. And then you put a comic game onto it. It always starts from a place of reality, of truth.

I was kind of lucky that I had done so much theater over the years, because basically a sitcom is kind of like a hybrid between a film and a play.

I let the comedy come through the character and just try to make sure that everything is kind of rounded in a truth, in a reality, because that's what I need to make a character work.

I do subscribe to the maxim that generally comedy is like jazz. Either you get it or you don't. You can't learn it and you can't be taught it. I don't think that if you are not a funny person, you can fake it.

Whatever you see me do is spontaneous reactions on stage. It's nothing planned. It's nothing that I got in the room and tried to think of hard. It just happens through feeling.

I think most of the actors that I know that I think are good are kind of funny people. There's just something about being alive to the truth of a moment that makes a good joke that also makes a good actor.

The artist is very lucky, because in an art form that's spontaneous like jazz, that's when you really see your true self. And that's why, when I put down my instrument, that's when the challenge starts, because to learn how to be that kind of human being at that level that you are when you're playing - that's the key, that's the hard part.

Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character lives.

I'm not playing a comedy. I want to be playing the truth of the moment, and then have the comedy come out.

One take, so you better be ready and you better be good. One take and that was it. It was something that was spontaneous. Both Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason was like that as well.

You set up the look, the visual effects and the sets, and that's awesome, but I enjoy the casting most of all. That's where you really get to define the show.

I believe that comedians do what they do, and then they get credit or criticism for doing it. There's nothing planned about this.

I need to be spontaneous sometimes. Sometimes I find that the little detail or nuance that you add to it that's based on what's happening at the time that's not very rehearsed often ends up feeling like the funniest thing.

I have great faith in the actors. When they improvise, it always sounds better than the stuff I write in my bedroom. When they improvise, they make it sound alive.

I really learned how to improvise at the Groundlings.It's something I've always loved to do. For some reason it feels more honest at times.