Comedy Instinct Quotes

I think comedy's something you can't learn. It's an instinct, which makes it rather elusive.

Thomas, my 15-year-old, is effectively my editor, I've always trusted his voice, more than anybody, on the strip for years. He has one of those ears that's just tuned to the rhythm of humor, so if he says something's not funny, my stomach just hurts because I know he's right, and it's already been drawn.

Amy Sherman-Palladino is very funny. She's got just natural timing and comedic instinct. And she writes in a comedic rhythm.

I can never tell when something is funny. I just have to do it onstage and find out.

When I tell a joke, I immediately know whether it's funny or not.

All you have in comedy, in general, is just going with your instincts. You can only hope that other people think that what you think is funny is funny. I don't have an answer but I just try to plough straight ahead.

The major caveat in all of comedy is that it's all instinctive. There's no true criteria. There is no right or wrong. Ultimately, often I'm surprised at what an audience will or will not laugh at. I have to stay very, very open to an audiences first exposure to that material and how they react to it.

By the time I got to the point where I was 'starring' in movies, and I had executives telling me what lines to say, that wasn't for me. I'm really not an actor. I'm a guy who comes out of comedy, and my impetus was always to rewrite the line to make it funnier, not to try to make somebody's precious words work.

I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it's been something that I've always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.

The principles of comedy are the principles of comedy. I can hear funny.

I don't think comedy is something you learn. I think it's something that's either there or it's not.

The big challenge for me is that my nature is more towards comedy, so I understand when a comedy thing is working; I know when I'm not bored in a comedy.

I like to make people laugh. I like that kind of silly stuff. For me, it's a natural thing to want to do something like this.

I don't think comedy is something you learn. I think it's something that's either there or it's not. When I read a script, I have to see the funny, and if I can see it's funny, it helps me to be able to transmit that.

I've been a performer for a long time and I know when people are laughing from their guts, from the inside, and when their tuxedos are laughing.