Comedic Narrative Quotes

The ones [comedies] that I always liked, whether it's Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, or Fast Times of Ridgemont High, they were all about two hours, or a little bit over two hours. With that extra 15 or 20 minutes, you can get to real character and you're not just stuck in plot.

People want to see comedies where characters aren't sacrificed for the jokes.

It seems that two of the most basic forms of comedy are jokes and stories. And, of course, they are not mutually exclusive.

When you do something unusual, the audience doesn't 100 percent know what you're up to in the beginning. And if you're doing a character comedy, they haven't learned the characters yet.

If you only ever heard "Valley Girl," or "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow," or a song that has a comedic narrative, you would get some impression that that was novelty music, but that's the only stuff that ever got on the radio. You can make the argument that that's what has confused generations as to what his music's about.

I think people like musicals. And when done with a modern comedic sensibility, musical comedy can be the most efficient delivery of both storytelling and jokes.

Comedy has bits, has jokes, has stories, and it has characters.

I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.

Comedy always works better when you're tracking the story and you care about the characters. That's why there's a lot of movies where there's not a ton of jokes, but you get huge laughs because there's a moment of relief.

A lot of the times I'm looking at something that I discover is part of a larger framework and not just a couple jokes. I see that it's a set, a story that I'll be telling. Sometimes I get lost in that.

There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind-the humorous.