Comedy Approach Quotes

When people write comedy from neutrality, it just gets kind of silly.

I do love situational comedy, clowning, and slapstick; I approach that with a lot of respect. The goofier you are, it doesn't mean you're going to be funnier.

I don't think my film style has changed. I'm doing the same kind of jokes I did when I was younger.

My stand-up is more like how I am in real life. I don't really do a character thing in stand-up. It's just a bunch of sentences that are supposed to be funny.

I'm very observational in my comedy and what I create with the characters that I'm blessed to play. I don't believe comedy needs to be offensive, and I don't believe it needs to be a mockery of anything.

I guess I've kind of recognized what my worth is and what my specific brand of humor is. And that's not necessarily being the guy who's super witty and saying a joke every second. I'm the guy who you throw in a bizarre scenario, and I'll play it as real as possible.

They don't make you pay for the humor. It's up and down, but they're trying to give you as many laughs as possible in 2 minutes. They are the most honest comedians ever.

I love doing great entertainment, but I like the joke to be on me. I don't want to take advantage of some poor person and dog 'em out and let the chips fall.

Most comedy is based on getting a laugh at somebody else's expense. And I find that that's just a form of bullying in a major way. So I want to be an example that you can be funny and be kind, and make people laugh without hurting somebody else's feelings.

Everyone was doing alternative comedy. I thought I'd distinguish myself by just telling jokes, with differing degrees of success.

I didn't think that anything is beyond humor - not profane humor, but a good, honest approach to humor.

I have the version of me where I'm interviewing someone, where I definitely am the straight man, and I like to show a lot of respect to my guest and let them take the reins. I don't like to compete with my guests. I don't like to be funnier than my guests or get into a 'Who's wackier?' sort of thing.

I am always a great fan of keeping things on an eye level for comedy because it plays better.

The way Apatow works, you do it scripted a couple times, and then he just kind of lets you go and improvise.

I never like to do parodies. I never do. It's just not my style of comedy.

My brand of humor is trying to play the situation as real as possible because I'm not the type of guy who is a joke a minute.

I have a really dry sense of humor. I don't think it's funny when people wink at the camera. That's more of an actor thing, just committing to whatever the thing is.

I'm a huge fan of French comedy. The French play comedy in a slightly different way than we do: they play it with a sort of realism that we don't necessarily often do ourselves.

The mistake British comedians often make is trying to beat the Americans at their own game - getting visiting American singers on their shows, talking about 'sidewalk' instead of 'pavement,' sitting on high stools in a white dinner jacket doing ballads. That way, you simply end up with a mid-Atlantic mishmash.

I don't necessarily have a traditional stand-up set.

When I'm playing comedy, I never do 'jokes.' Sometimes I'll deliver a line in a way I think is more likely to get a laugh, but all the best comedy is played straight. What's funny is the way it hits the world around it or the way it hits the other characters.

I think comedians get too much credit or too much criticism for the style of comedy they do, and they generally do the style of comedy that works for them. [...] There's no kind of shrewd calculation going into the type of standup we all do. It's like David Cross is supposed to be doing the David Cross' type of standup.

A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny.

Anders Thomas Jensen and I had talked about making a movie which addressed the cancer issue, and we didn't want to make it heavy-handed. We wanted to do something which had a lot of hope in it. And then for some reason we came up with a romantic comedy.

That's what I think works the best, and what I think makes the best comedy - something that's completely committed and more approached as an acting exercise, as opposed to being worried about whether to be funny or not. The comedy comes from the context.