Michael Caine Quotes

The victory of the show is in the writing. Coming up with sketches and stand-up bits. The rest is just hitting buttons on a machine more or less.

Comedy is just to me, maybe it's a natural knack, if I can see where the joke is in the writing and I can see where the setup is and I can tell this is the way to make it.

Actually the hardest films to make are comedies. In normal life, funny things happen by accident; to re-create those by design in a film takes real technique.

Every joke is an experiment. When you sit, alone, and write a script, or just a joke, you really have no idea if it will succeed.

I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.

I learned a few things on my own since, and modified some of the things he taught me, but everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from Danny Simon.

Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.

And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.

At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state.

What I didn't realize is that the writing process for comedies is that you do your table read, and if you aren't funny on that first day during the table read, they take your jokes away and give them to somebody else.

Оf course you can only write comedy when you're smoking weed.

Films that rely on their cast to be funny are often episodic and feel like a series of loosely connected sketches rather than a satisfyingly structured script.

I think comedy is the hardest actual form of writing there is.

My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done.

There are a lot of great jokes you can sit down and write, but that's just a written joke, versus the comedy of the situation. Ideally, you're pulling as much comedy out of the situation as you can.

It's much easier to write a solemn book than a funny book. It's harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry. People are always on the verge of tears.

Most of what's tricky about comedy is the perception of it and the audience's expectation.

I remember I used to go to The Laugh Factory and just goof off onstage, and then I'd see Dane Cook. He did a bit about his Mom making the bed in the summertime when he was a kid. He just said "Vroom!" and threw the sheet up in the air and the sheet would just stay over the bed for like a minute and a half. All he had were his arms out, but I could see the sheet. And he didn't do anything. He just kept it there. And I went, "I have to write more."

It's very slow for me to create humor. It takes me a long time to write a humor piece. It takes days.

When we graduated [ from Cambridge], we were grabbed right into television. I was grabbed straight into the practice of writing comedy. It was all writing and performing. You wrote something in order for you to perform it.

I loved the idea that I could write a joke and someone else would have to take the risk of performing it.

That's the best advice I can give - when you're trying to write a comedy, first write a drama, and then make it funny.

Writing jokes for others is like having babies for someone else. It's sad. Like the woman who gives up her baby but needs to be close so she secretly becomes the maid in the household.

Obviously, my stuff has been more in the comedy realm, and I really believe that if I'm laughing behind the camera, then I think the film will be funnier.

I don't write jokes first. I write down topics. I think of what I want to talk about, and then I write the jokes - they don't write me... And even if you don't think it's funny, you won't think it's boring. You might disagree, but you'll listen. And maybe even laugh as you disagree.