Bryan Cranston Quotes

I always told everybody the perfect joke would be where the setup and punch line were identical.

Ironic things are interesting.

For me, if you distill comedy down, it is surprise and the unexpected. That has to be it on its most base level, in any form.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Comedy comes from confusion.

Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.

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

The secret to humor is surprise.

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

I don't think there's a punch-line scheduled, is there?

Comedy is surprises, so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny.

You can analyse a joke and say it's funny because this guy thought this was going to happen, and that happened, and it's surprising. But not all surprising things are funny.

I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation.

The element of surprise - where you think you know where a joke is going, and then you're wrong. Those are my favorite kind of jokes.

When you really boil it down, what comedy does is you expect one thing, and you get a totally different thing that's humorous, and we all laugh. That's generally how, just mechanically - super-distilled - comedy works.

Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory.

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than truth.

I don't like the phrase shock value. Surprise is essential in comedy, and if people are shocked by what I consider merely surprising, then that's their shock. But there is no joke without surprise.

It makes me laugh when you bring two things together which have nothing to do with one another.

The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.

A joke's a very serious thing.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.

It's great extremes which leads to great drama and great comedy.