Comedy Decline Quotes

It's too bad that there aren't as many light comedies around in the movies as there were when I was making pictures like 'The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.' The boys are just not writing them. Many writers are more serious now than they used to be, and that's showing up in all phases of entertainment.

Whatever happened to a good pie-in-the-face joke?

In terms of comedy, there was a Seinfeldian era of comedy that I love but got played out. Seinfeld was great, but then after him it was people acting like Seinfeld and making observations that we felt like we'd kind of heard before, and then you're seeing Seinfeldian comedy in commercials. Suddenly everything is observational funniness.

Most modern comedy is crap.

You know how old I am? I'm so old, I remember when Letterman used to be funny and it was presidents who were serious. That's how old I am.

Then Saturday Night Live spawns... well, everything right down to American Pie 9, where all humor has to be irrelevant, which can get a little tiring.

I started on television, and on sitcoms, and loved them, but then they sort of seemed to be going through sort of an ice age, and they started dying off one by one, and I recognized that, and my representatives recognized that, and we said 'Well, let's look at dramas and other things like that.'

Comedy now is all about body shaming and delivering vulgar dialogues. There can't be another Manorama.

People that do "bits" and "jokes" or "one-liners" are going by the wayside.

The entire New York comedy scene has moved to L.A. - it's bled the New York comedy scene dry.

The prospects for a coherent, hilarious and consistent American comedy seem to lessen every year, as the poor waterlogged, gassy corpse called 'Evan Almighty' proved when it floated ashore recently. So there's a temptation to think too highly of Robin Williams's uneven but occasionally funny 'License to Wed.'

Show me one guy or woman as funny as Rodney Dangerfield or as good as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Joan Rivers. There are a lot of good comics out there, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics.

In my opinion, where comedy sequels tend to go bad is that they get sillier and lighter.

Especially while television I think is going through some growing pains or is in need of - I think current comedy is a bit, uh, not happening, you know?

Possibly I've become less funny as I've been happier.

'SNL' ain't been relevant since Jim Belushi. It's on every week; it's not funny. They need to find some black women to put on there to make it funny.

Since she got a cause and stopped being funny. I think she's real funny, but lately it's all been hearts and flowers and tears and saving teenagers and creating a role model. And that ain't funny. No giggles there.

I mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians.

We seem to have lost our British sense of humour. It's a great shame. We have to be so careful nowadays; we have lost a lot of humour because people are too frightened of getting too near touchy subjects.

Like leggings, comedies created by women came into vogue in the late 1980s, exploded in the early '90s, went mainstream in the mid-'90s, and were shoved into the back of the closet around 1997.

Hollywood's just not funny.

A lot of series tend to go on for one series too many, especially with comedies, and I think people say 'ooh, it's gone off, that.'

A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.

Lampoon ran out of steam in the early '80s, and wasn't able to reinvent itself because it ran out of talent. People who wanted to do this kind of stuff could suddenly make $100,000 in Hollywood right out of college.