Comedy Development Quotes

I moved to New York and went to a performing arts college, but it wasn't until UCB that I started performing on the regular, figuring out how I'm funny, why I'm funny, and how to play with an audience.

The comedy seeds were planted before the Marine seeds. The thought of comedy never happening was scary. When you have a plan, you never know what will happen.

How to do half-hour comedy innovatively is something I do pride myself on. We invented it with 'I Love Lucy.'

For comedians, we're all kind of tweeting our thoughts instead of spending time developing them. You can gauge how good a joke might be by how many times it gets retweeted, but it takes discipline to go back through the tweets and then develop jokes from them.

I just always loved comedy and I really wanted to be good at it. And it was heartbreaking, 'cause I started and I wasn't good at it. I was only 17-years-old, so I had a lot to learn about life in general. But I just kept on trying. I was young enough and stupid enough and I had no other choice. I had nothing else I was good at.

Anybody with a sharp brain and a mic can become a comedian, but there's a need to move beyond it. The audience wants to witness the marriage of theatre, comedy and something more.

I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.

NBC gives comedies a chance to find their legs.

Especially in the world of comedy, it feels like you have to be proactive, in terms of pitching and trying to sell and being a part of the creation of the stuff that you do.

A responsive crowd is great - they help you see new things in your comedy.

I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing.

Comedy has changed with the times, thank God - slowly, oh my lord, slowly - but it has.

I'd been writing jokes since I was 16, not very good ones though, but I was always trying to make my mates laugh.

There were guys in 'The State' who would take one script and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and fight for it for a whole season, and after a couple of seasons, you realized that doesn't work. You have to just be willing to throw something away, no matter how good it is, and write a better joke.

I've been trying to get into comedy for years. I had a meeting with one of the networks a couple years ago, a general meeting, and when they asked what I was looking for and I told them I'd prefer to do comedy, it was as if I had two heads.

One percent of all comics ever reach the level of a Chris Rock or a Jerry Seinfeld. When audiences come to the underground rooms, they have a chance to watch the process that happens along the way - and see the comedians grow.

When I began doing stand-up, it took me a long time to get an hour's worth of material together.

Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept.

If you're trying to make something funny, and it doesn't feel like you're always getting something, it doesn't have quite a lot of joy.

If I'm not in the theatre, I'm in an open mic night or doing a guest set at the Comedy Club, or whatever, just trying to develop stuff.

I've been writing the show with Nigel Coan, the director of 'Luxury Comedy', and Tom Meeten. Three's good. With two, you can lock horns a bit. On your own, you're not sure whether what you've made is any good. I don't know how people write novels. I would go mad.

I did all this standup comedy in college, and from that point on, I tried to develop myself and get my name back out there.

They shouldn't call anything a boot camp unless you're going off to war. Standup boot camp has been a fantastic thing, for the people putting it on. They keep you out in the woods and won't let you come back until you're funny. Lenny Bruce came up with his Religions Inc. bit on a day hike.

To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.

Comedy is like music; it builds on itself. Once someone comes up with a theory or a different way of doing things, people start to mimic it on some level. That's why you go back to the guys you loved in the 80s... and it just seems tired now, because it was all foundation.