Chris Rock Quotes

I don't write punch lines.

I think a good dollop of sadness is quite a useful thing in comedy sometimes. I think if everyone's happy all the time, it's a bit dull. It's like salt and caramel - you wouldn't imagine they would go well together, but they do.

It's a different world: when I'm writing 'Toast,' I've got one foot in 1974 and one foot in the modern day, because the modern day is nowhere near as funny or interesting.

I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.

I think any decent comedy worth its salt has to have heart, otherwise it's just a bunch of jokes. I think people enjoy comedies that have a heart and soul to them.

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.

When I used to watch comedians with my dad, he laid it all out for me. He wanted to be a comedian himself, and he was so funny. We'd watch stand-up on TV, and he'd tell me the subtext of what they were saying.

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.

I love funny women. I love writing funny women characters.

I don't think that there's necessarily a side to drama that has to be completely bleak. You have to have a flicker of humor 'cause everyone has a flicker of humor, something they find funny in life.

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

Lewis Black taught me stand-up.

I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.

My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

If you want to reach any kind of poignancy or meaning a lot of times, coming from comedy is the best way to get there.

Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.

You cannot have the drama without comedy.

I find Spike Jones' movies to be really very inventive and funny, but they're really sad and touching and really key into the different facets of the human experience.

That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?

That's what sort of fascinates me - what's funny as well as what's sad.

There is something irresistibly funny about a funeral. More basically, I think the point is that beyond the deepest tragedy, there is laughter. Even in the midst of tragedy, there is always the possibility for it.

I don't have any writers. I never get a laugh with somebody else's jokes. I can't do it justice.

Look at Sam Beckett. Most depressed man who ever lived, but he sure was funny.

Using humor as a wedge into different kinds of stories is my go-to. I think anything I do would have some sort of streak of humor in it.