Comedy Intent Quotes

I like some of my stuff not to be particularly funny. It's supposed to be amusing, entertaining or thought-provoking, like a curiosity. If you put it on in front of 500 people in the Odeon they wouldn't laugh. They shouldn't laugh.

If you don't like the people, you're just doing a sketch. Which, in most cases, is comedy minus some emotional backbone.

If you're billed as a comedian, people will accept anything you say as light-hearted and not with intent behind it.

People come to my shows on purpose as opposed to coming to a 'comedy show.' Which was always my goal.

I don't like comedy that I think is bad comedy, where people are trying to be sick for the sake of it, where there's no intellectual point behind it. I like stuff that's got an underlying point of view.

You have to know you are in a comedy. You have to know that you are actually allowing the audience to participate on some level. When you go dark and mean it, then you don't let them in.

The last thing I want to do is use my comedy as a partisan tool or as a method for preaching.

It's never a matter ever, ever - are - we're never trying to gross anybody out, or ever are we trying to shock people. We're just trying to make it funny in a way that makes the audience go, 'You know, that was the first joke they thought of, and they weren't afraid to do it.'

Nobody is here without a reason. I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy - from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated - but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.

After I saw a couple of pictures put out by my fellow comedy-directors, which seemed to have abandoned the fun in favor of the message, I wrote Sullivan's Travels to satisfy an urge to tell them that they were getting a little too deep-dish, to leave the preaching to the preachers.

Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make 'Humpday' a comedy.