Lucy Davis Quotes

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

In point of fact, I'm not sure there are too many comedies with laugh tracks anymore. Most of what you hear is live studio audience laughing as a show is filmed. If this prompts you to wonder who those actual human beings are who are laughing at some of this stuff, that is a mystification I share.

Sitcoms, I always figured that would be an easy gig, but man, it is not.

With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.

That's the easiest job you can have in TV comedy, being the guy who just delivers the funny.

I think if you look back at all those great comedies on television in the past, it's all lovable losers that gathered together - 'Taxi' and 'Cheers,' 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends.'

'Monty Python' and 'The Simpsons' have ruined comedy for writers for the rest of our lives.

And of course Marc Cherry heightens it and makes it hilarious. But there's so many universal themes in the show, and he made it so funny. We knew he was onto something if he could keep it up and, thankfully, he did.

Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what's coming.

I use a method approach to all my sitcom work.

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.

The cool thing about 'Transparent' is that the show is funny but not like a sitcom is funny. It all comes down to the writing... The writers on that show are so good that you don't have to worry about anything. There are so many things that can go wrong making a TV show or a movie, but if the writing's good, that's, like, 95 percent of it.

I'm a big believer in comedy writers. I've always defended the honor of all comedy writers. It's extremely difficult, but I've always felt that comedy writers far more easily can move toward drama than vice versa.

The hardest thing to write is sitcom.

I'm often asked for advice on how to go about making comedy shows like the begrudgingly accepted 'IT Crowd'.

It always seems to someone outside the business that it is very difficult to write for a comedy show because it must be done quickly. Actually, it is much easier to write this humor than to do a joke or a show from scratch, because the audience knows the plot. Just mention what is going on and then deliver the punch line.

I watch the comedy shows like 'Married With Children,' 'Friends,' 'Family Guy,' and 'Everybody Loves Raymond.'

I've requested Anand Raghav to write a full length comedy for me.

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

The best comedies are the ones where the person who's in charge is the one with the vision who's said, 'I'm staying with this till the very end.'

I want to see better quality of comedy on TV.

I'd been writing sketches since high school, but 'Friends of the People' really taught me about structure - how to wait out a joke, how to stick with it for a while. It also made me more confident onstage as a performer.

I really used to like TVMaxwell, which is a classic, amazing, super-underrated comedy channel. And Cyndago was great.

Your average sitcom writer is a very intellectual person.

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.