Comedic Surprise Quotes

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

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

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 of shock as kind of an uptown form of surprise. Comedy is filled with surprise, so when I cross a line... I like to find out where the line might be and then cross it deliberately, and then make the audience happy about crossing the line with me.

There's a tremendous amount of humor... in very unexpected places.

The improv stuff, that's always surprising so a lot of times that's really funny.

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

Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people.

At the shock of a joke, everything disappears but the present moment.

I love jokes that come out of nowhere. The ones where people look at the screen and go, 'What the Hell was that.' As long as it somehow ties back into the story, somehow.

I'm very attracted to comedy I don't see coming.

When a dramatic actor does a funny film, people are like, 'Wonderful! I didn't know he was funny!' But when it flips, people can get really thrown by it.

The English have a special sense of humour. This I immediately experienced in the dressing room. As I walked with two plates while eating, suddenly a team-mate asked me, 'Basti, what time is it?' hoping I would automatically turn my hand to look at my watch. That's quite entertaining.

Sometimes it takes you two or three seconds to get your head round a joke and laugh at it. With a snot-bubble laugh, it comes instinctively - almost in spite of yourself. It's caused by something silly - like when a little kid says something unexpectedly bizarre.

My wife is very stealth-funny. She'll come out with something when I'm not expecting it, and it'll just kill me.