John Lloyd Quotes

Surprise is not humor. I think that there can be a fine line there.

There's some sort of unspoken license... when outlandish things come out of an inanimate object, somehow it equals humor.

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.

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

Comedy comes from confusion.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there's comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life.

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.

Incongruity, they say, is one of the main ingredients of humor. Maybe it's because everybody can feel superior to me. I honestly don't know.

Believe it or not, there's a lot of humor in 'Mad Men.' Especially in the dark moments.

In general, the straight line of a joke sets up a premise, an expectation. Then the funny ending - the punch line - in a sense contradicts the original assumption by refusing to follow what had seemed a reasonable train of thought. Many jokes involve that simple matter of leaping outside what had appeared to be the rules of the game at the moment.

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.

Ironic things are interesting.

Rob and I both have this strange sense of comedy which always involves us being the butt of our own jokes.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all.

Humour is like violence. They both come to you unexpectedly, and the more unpredictable they both are, the better it gets.

Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Irony is one of my favorite aspects of life.

People have many theories about comedy, but being just plain funny is the one most important thing.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

You're entering dangerous land when you start theorising about comedy.