Richard Russo Quotes

I think comedy, so much of it comes out of the strange sort of golden instant 'cause you don't know why it's funny, but you captured it.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

I can't not write funny. It's literally the only way I know how to do it.

I think if you're trying to be funny, sometimes you're bending a piece of metal in a direction it doesn't want to go. And sometimes comedy just needs to find itself.

George Carlin is brilliant with words, and Johnny Winters is very creative. It's taking something common and drawing out the humor, being clever with words.

Humor writing is something that comes naturally to me.

I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

What most readers do not realize is that it takes a particular genius to write funny, to satirize.

You just try to be true to your idea of what is funny and what is also interesting.

Everyone can write jokes and makes things clever.

Comedy is surprise. Comedy is not something that you can, necessarily, do twice.

Anytime there's originality and comedy combined, it's very potent for people who love comedy.

The things that make me laugh are considered smart or whatever, I guess. But stuff that's self-consciously intelligent or self-consciously hip or cool, that doesn't do it for me either. You just try to be funny.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

Comedy is not something that a person can fake or learn how to do.

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

To do something funny, you have to have experienced it in real life and digested it in a way that amuses you.

Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with.

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.

It takes intelligence to make real comedy, and it takes a reality base to create all that little stuff I like to do that makes you giggle inside.

I have a good sense of humor. I think everything we do should have whimsy in it.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

Irreverence is easy - what's hard is wit.

A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.