Will Gluck Quotes

In comedy, if you don't have the right tuning with your co-actor, the humour can fall flat.

Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.

I don't like forcing comedy and people just trying to do things just to find a funny beat all the time.

You really have no idea whether or not what you're writing is funny. In stand-up and sketch comedy, you know right away and you can make your changes accordingly.

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.

You have to give people permission to laugh. That's why they would always cut to the banana peel in the Laurel and Hardy movies.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny, it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can't get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon.

Comedy is the hardest thing to get right. I remember a joke we did in 'What's Up, Doc?' that didn't get a single laugh. So we moved the shot a foot-and-a-half to one side, and all of a sudden, the laugh was there. It drives you crazy; the balance is so delicate.

Rhythm and timing are so important in comedic acting.

Comedy is easy. You have to react to what others are saying and it is all about the timing, the dialogue delivery.

You can't teach standup comedy. You can teach someone how to formulate a joke, but making it funny is different.

I just don't like filming scenes where it's like, that's not how people talk. People aren't saying a joke every five seconds.

You know, I liken it to - when you write a joke for somebody else, it's like you - you know, like the Wile E. Coyote dynamite plunger, where he pushes the plunger down and then you see the fuse go then there's an explosion in the distance? That's like writing a joke for somebody. When you tell the joke, you're in the explosion.

I believe it is tough to be funny and tougher to make people laugh. And it needs to be been done effortlessly. A joke can be comedy, but one can kill the joke if it is delivered badly.

Artistically, I find jokes really satisfying aesthetically, because there's something great about getting an idea down to a sentence or two.

I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.

A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

I enjoy making people laugh. The trick is to tell them jokes against yourself. If you praise yourself, your stories aren't funny.

We didn't choose the joke because it's filthy! We chose it because of the structure!

I have a very high respect for professional comedians. What they do astonishes me. You have to be really smart and absorb everything, repackage it, bring it back to the person, and make them laugh at themselves. I can make people laugh during my talks because they didn't come to have me make them laugh. It's added value. So my job is way easier than that of a professional comic.

I make people laugh hard; I'm a comic, that's just the way it is. And I make them laugh because I'm funny, not because I'm filthy. The subject matter is dirty, but the pictures I paint are really funny. A lot of comics don't understand that that's what it's about. It's just, "I'll be dirty and they'll laugh." Nobody's becoming a superstar that way.

I don't know if I have actually good comedic timing. But I don't think I've worked at any timing. I think timing is probably something you can't work at. Well, I don't know. I definitely didn't work at it.

A good joke provides tension, and then, release of that tension. You build the tension by saying things that are controversial. The release is the laugh. The bigger the surprise or insight in your joke, the bigger the laugh.

Humor is like a rhythm; it's like music. And you throw a couple of extra syllables in, you wreck the beat and you kill the laugh. So I try to follow the writers very carefully because I know how carefully they worked to do it that way.