Betty White Quotes

I always feel so pretentious talking about comedy and deconstructing it. It always feels somehow self-centred to talk about any sort of process.

As soon as you start to talk about your own mannerisms, you are screwed. Because if you are aware of your own mannerisms, or beyond that even what makes any one thing funny to people, I really ascribe to that that if you start deconstructing it too much, it is immediately not funny.

I remember my dad turning to me - my dad loves to turn to me and explain why things are funny. He used to do that with Seinfeld all the time. He did it with Colombo, too, set the scene.

I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of percieving humor.

There's a sort of magic and music to comedy. Some words, some numbers even, are funnier than others. A Caramac bar, for instance, is funnier than a Milky Way.

There is nothing worse than annotated humour.

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

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

Jokes are a lot about meaning. I think if we understand what jokes mean and why they work, we'd understand everything else. Genuinely I do.

I think what is important for things to be funny is if you the listener, or the reader, get a chance to supply the humor of it yourself.

A friend once asked me what comedy was. That floored me. What is comedy? I don't know. Does anybody? Can you define it? All I know is that I learned how to get laughs, and that's all I know about it. You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.

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 a lot comes from having the experience of doing stand-up comedy. It allows you to figure out the psychology of an audience; what things are funny and not.

I never have been able to understand where the humor comes from.

I feel like I don't really have a sense of humor... I don't know if I could characterize it dark or light. I just - I do like humor.

I want to know why people are getting laughs. Why this joke works and why that one didn't work. It all comes back to helping me be a better WWE Superstar. So I love it.

Woody says I can make jokes, but I don't get them - I'm always looking deeper for the meanings.

I don't aim it at anybody specific, I don't aim my characters to make old people laugh or young people or professionals or blue collar, just whatever I think is going to be funny and it just so happens that.

Anxiety and hostility seem to be a great part of good and bad humor. Examining humor too closely does seem to destroy it.

Comedians dissect jokes all the time. Comedians are beautiful structuralists. But ultimately it's an athletic endeavor.

The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.

I think of my job on television as explaining things.

Teaching someone that doesn't know something forces you to think about almost every single aspect of it, including parts of it that you could sort of take for granted.

I don't really think of myself as quirky; I have sort of an unusual sense of humor.