Comedy Critique Quotes

Comedy historians take note: this Gottfried character doesn't have the best eye for detail - and, for a Jew, he doesn't have the best eye for retail, either.

Yet there are some people - Steve Allen would dissect comedy forever; he's a really funny guy, but he would love talking about comedy. I'm doing it right now and you all seem bored.

I don't worship comedy; at the end of the day, I don't fall to the altar of comedy unquestioningly.

I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real laughter.

I don't like comedy. I like funny things. I don't like comedy. Like, comedy movies are just, 'Oh Jesus.'

Comedians second-guessing themselves is scary. Poor taste is not a crime and we can't forget that.

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

Can we all admit that 'Parks and Recreation' is horrible? Is this something we would all know, but don't say? Maybe everything should not be improv'd.

It's very hard to watch comedy for me, when I'm doing a comedy show, because I either watch a show and I love it, and I'm jealous, or I watch a show and I see all the problems with it, and I'm angry that I watched it.

One hopeful sign that the filmmakers can learn and grow is that the sequel does not contain a single pie, if you know what I mean.

Looking back at that now I shudder at my naivety: while 'Men Behaving Badly' remains a brilliant sitcom, how did I ever aspire to Gary and Tony's eternal adolescence?

That's kind of my job in the writer's room. I'm always the guy going, like, 'People wouldn't say that there. They wouldn't say that.' Like, I hate when I watch sitcoms and something crazy happens, and people just kind of go, 'Huh?' and then they just go on.

Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don't know who that's attributed to. I think it's Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.

All I mean is, I'm not the kind of audience comedy directors want at a test screening because I seldom laugh, and if I do, it's not very loud. That doesn't mean I don't like the movie.

There is nothing worse than annotated humour.

There is a strong ethical dimension to the best comedy. Not only does it avoid reinforcing prejudices, it actively challenges them.

I don't like 'comedy,' I like 'life,' which has everything in it.

Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.

I got, like, Diane Keaton's manager, and she was very connected; she had power. And she was like, "Your star is in tears on this comedy. Do you even notice that at all?"

I think cheese smells funny, but I feel bananas 'are' funny. I'm assuming Swamp told the whole story of the executives seriously asking us to replace the banana with cheese because they thought it was funnier.

There's a lot of ordinariness, and people tend to play to the same regressive tropes - sexism, patriarchy, unkindness to the oppressed. Comedy shouldn't fall into these traps - by its very nature comedy is supposed to be edgy and anti-establishment.

To me, comedies are usually the least funny movies. Movies that are actually a comedy are usually not all that funny. To me Goodfellas and Raging Bull are two of the funniest movies I ever saw.

Some comedy has turned into, 'Donald Trump's bad, isn't he?' That's a true statement. But where is your joke?

As a director, you can't stop a guy if he thinks something's hysterical, because if you do, then he'll get depressed because he thinks he didn't come up with a good joke. So if a guy's going on some run and it's killing him, and he thinks it's hilarious, you gotta do enough so that he thinks you can use it in the movie.

So much of male heterosexual comedy can be steeped in a gay panic. A lot of juvenile comedy is predicated on that.