Comedic understanding Quotes

I find something funny when it lives on many levels - a level of self-deprecation, of knowledge and heightened reality.

As soon as you explain a joke, it immediately becomes unfunny.

Confident people, who understand comedy, improvise so much better than people who are scared. You can't be scared to improvise. You have to know your character, and then you have to let go.

It's easier to find the joke in something when you think, 'This - this is ridiculous.'

And if you can offer an explanation as to why it doesn't work then you've got to the whole root of comedy.

For the most part, comedians are pretty friendly with each other. They always say they badmouth each other, but most of the time, they're friends. We're the only ones that can really stand our type of humor.

I remember being fascinated by the very nature of comedy from the age of 10; why is this funny, and that isn't?

There's a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.

You can't be a casual observer of something humorous - you have to engage, you have to find it funny for the relationship between actor and audience to work.

If you get too heavy with the nods and winks, people get a sense that they're excluded from something. If they're in screenings and everyone's laughing, and they don't know what the hell it's about, somehow you feel excluded from the party, or like you're not in the inner circle. As a performer, that's the worst thing you can do to an audience. It's fun, but you have to be very careful with it.