Comedy Context Quotes

For the writers I have worked with and for me, the relationship between the personal comedy of daily life and the economic context in which that life happens has always been very significant.

Be funny on a golf course? Do I kid my best friend's mother about her heart condition?

Molly Shannon and I used to always talk about that we really felt strongly that we were comedic actors, that we weren't comedians. You just played things real and the comedy came out of the context.

I like to joke about being gay because it's something teenagers would never joke about.

The reality is, to watch Jon Stewart, you already have to have watched the news. In other words, it's not funny if he does a joke about John McCain and they don't know who John McCain is.

Being comedic is a skill, because there is a fine line where the context is important. And being dramatic is just being honest and real in that moment.

I was like, "This is a new thing that the gay people have decided? That's the gayest thing I've ever heard in my life." You can't do that. You can't decide that a word is forbidden now collectively amongst your group of human beings, that the word is a slanderous evil nasty word about homosexuals. It's not, the word doesn't mean that. And sometimes it's a good word to use in comedy. That's what your friend has to realize when he's at a bar just yelling out the word.

I thought they may have presumed too much knowledge of certain things for people who are not comedians. Like Montreal. A comic understands what it is and its importance, but someone else may not know about it.

I always try to keep in mind that while the characters in a farce may find themselves in outrageous dilemmas, and may behave in a way that the audience finds amusing, the characters themselves don't have the consolation of knowing they're in a comedy.

The routines of any ethnic comic - Eddie Murphy or George Lopez, for example - would not work if they were performed by anybody outside the group. The same routines would become arrogant and racist.

That's one of the things about comedy - I think it works best when it's contextualized, as opposed to kind of an island of cleverness.

Compared to what comics say today, I'm a monk, but in those days, it was unheard of to make fun of people like I did. Of course, they exaggerated how outrageous I really was.

What I do is not regional comedy, and it is not based in the southern area.

When I started out, it was around the whole 9/11 - Islamophobia was just sort of hitting a second wind. Obviously that informed a lot of my humor, and it influenced a lot of what I was talking about on stage because it was extremely relevant at the time.

I see my role in the Bonzos as being the straight man, in many ways.

I am myself sometimes, and I do state my opinions, but not in a comedy routine and not in my character. There always has to be some sort of layer to it.

In my experience, it's not just that serious books get a hearing on comedy shows. But serious books get a serious hearing, as well as a funny one, on comedy shows.

If the bear were to make a racial comment, it would be more likely to get a laugh than if a person on stage were to make a racial comment.

There's a difference between an actual insult and a friendly jab. So I don't think I'm offensive onstage.