Sean Lock Quotes

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

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.

Stand-up has the best writers, because it's the hardest writing by a million miles.

I think sketch writing is a good spot for everyone to start because it requires you to develop characters, have a beginning, middle and end and have a bunch of jokes in a short amount of time.

Your average sitcom writer is a very intellectual person.

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

Well, usually, when you're doing a sitcom, you get a script and every word or for the most part, is written. So, you know, if it's a 30-minute sitcom, then it's a 35-page script or something like that.

If someone said, 'Sit down and write a 'Community' episode,' I would be panicked.

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

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

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms.

I wrote for 'The Sopranos' and worked on big, blustery characters for quite a while.

Generating comic material can sometimes get the better of you.

The kind of scripts I have read for web shows have been outstanding.

Everyone talks about the gags, but the most difficult thing is coming up with the stories. You have to learn to do that for sitcoms.

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

I have tried many times to write a TV sitcom - with little success.

Because I was a television writer for many years, I write very conversationally. I put things straight, and with a lot of humor.

You know, 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young, and it was a show about old people, and it was a very traditional show, but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.

I like the sitcom, as a structure.

It's very hard to write humor.

I always felt that it was easier to take a funny person and teach them to write television than to take somebody who was a television writer and make them funny. And I discovered a lot of great writers that went on to do a lot of great shows like 'Seinfeld,' 'Friends,' you know, 'Three and a Half Men.'

I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.

I do think comedy needs to be a living thing, but I think without a great script and fully realized characters, you cannot keep it living. Otherwise, it just becomes long and rambling, indulgent. So I think you need both, frankly.