Comedy Expertise Quotes

When you've been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don't know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be.

I'm not a big comedy show-watcher, but I love Ricky Gervais' stuff and Sacha Baron Cohen's things. But I'm not an expert on them. I've seen them once.

I think people who can do comedy well don't get enough credit. It can be harder than drama.

It takes a while to realize that just because you're a stand-up comedian and you do comedy, you're not going to be good at all comedy.

In some sense, Comedy Central has made their audience into comedy connoisseurs.

It's so interesting to watch Ben Stiller work because he just knows what's funny.

Judd Apatow and Paul Reubens are two people who I'd be more than happy to learn from because I think they're geniuses at what they do.

Jay Leno told me once, 'Don't do jokes about things you don't know about.'

Writing and producing the show is an intellectual process. Performing the show is far more athletic and intuitive, because you don't get to do it twice. It helps if you've done whatever the old saw is, 10,000 hours of it. Because I've done 10,000 hours of comedy, I have this database in my mind of what works and what doesn't work.

I'm saying nothing new that Dave Pasquesi is really good at what he does.

The Daily Show writers are incredibly smart and very well plugged-in but occasionally they would need me for certain specific things, and I'd be like, 'Yeah, I completely know how to do that; I can solve that problem,and then I'd be like, 'Mom?

I think of Paul Feig as the Scorsese of comedy. He's the best at what he does. I think people just trust everything that he's got to say.