Paul F. Tompkins Quotes

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

When you have a writing partner and you're writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.

Generating comic material can sometimes get the better of you.

I come up with my jokes by thinking of a topic.

Writing humor for me is more like a watchful-ness. You have to watch. When you say something funny, or someone else does, it's more like you wait for the piece.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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 start with the joke line and write backward.

What I love is getting a new joke, or a premise like a sketch idea or a movie idea. That's the best feeling for a comedian.

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

I don't really write jokes down. I tend to have a premise that I work out and test on stage.

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

Writing humor is not something every single person can do.

I'll think of the idea and then I'll write something down, then within that there will be a joke or two which is the original thing which I thought was funny.

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.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

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

The moment you think of a joke is the best moment.

When I was in high school I saw Steven Wright, a brilliant one-liner comedian, and I thought: 'That's what I should do; I should write one-liners.' And I did. My first album is mostly one-liners.

Comedians kind of write what comes to them. You can give yourself little assignments, but it's what inspires you.

When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes 10 hours a day, your mind starts going to strange places.

With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn't respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.

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

It's hard to write a comedy sketch.

Melissa and I both say we don't write very good jokes.