Robert Picardo Quotes

I love drama - I would say more than I even love comedy - but I like in One Mississippi that I can go from a very moving moment to a Willy Wonka tube up my ass. I like the silliness as much as I like drama.

Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.

The one thing that makes 'Torchwood' work so brilliantly and makes it a little bit above the rest of all other sci-fi dramas out there is that we have a sense of humour.

I've always said people say on a dramatic show, 'I was crying. It was so emotional when he went and grabbed that little girl from a burning building and handed her over to her mother.' In comedy, the best thing you can say is, 'I think it's funny.'

I think that there's a fine line between comedy and drama.

It's a fine line we walk on 'Warehouse 13.' We really earn our dramatic moments, but our tongues are always firmly in our cheeks. If we take ourselves too seriously, we get into trouble.

Believe it or not, there's a lot of humor in 'Mad Men.' Especially in the dark moments.

I think everything benefits from a little comedy. The worst thing to me is to see a great drama or a great thriller with no laughs.

Mike and I like a balance of tones. We never set out to make an overtly silly show or an overly serious dramatic show.

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

I feel like with comedy, the crazy things that happen are never serious you know? Like, rubble being poured onto you in drama would be something that's absolutely terrible, but in a comedy it's absolutely terrible but so funny.

I think you gotta have some humor [in your story]. People gotta have a moment to laugh and feel that it's not taken 100% serious. That's important.

I think that you can make a drama and have it be intensely funny, and vice versa.

Here's what I really love: I love a funny story that I can tag a serious line on the end of.

It seems like the original 'Star Trek' could have gone on longer.

The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way you can break the ice.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

My favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning.

I think Georges Feydeau said comedy is just tragedy speeded up.

All jokes aside, it's a very difficult job playing the straight man. Jason is potentially the most brilliant straight man that ever was because he's also really funny while doing it, which is even harder. I've always seen myself playing characters who are flawed. We use comedy in our lives to obscure the drama.

The secret to comedy is not playing the comedy, but actually playing the situation, playing the drama of it.

You can't have good comedy without drama in it.

It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

I was known for being a bit of a clown. I remember my dad got me aside and said, "Just remember, everybody likes a clown, but nobody pays him." I've often been tempted to call him and say, "Remember how you told me...?" "Yeah?" "Yes, they do."

With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.