Comedy Theory Quotes

A lot of times when I sit down with the other comics and try to talk theory, they say I'm being too serious.

In general, the straight line of a joke sets up a premise, an expectation. Then the funny ending - the punch line - in a sense contradicts the original assumption by refusing to follow what had seemed a reasonable train of thought. Many jokes involve that simple matter of leaping outside what had appeared to be the rules of the game at the moment.

Yet there are some people - Steve Allen would dissect comedy forever; he's a really funny guy, but he would love talking about comedy. I'm doing it right now and you all seem bored.

Here's my take on Andy Kaufman... For Kaufman, comedy was a skill that was open for examination. He didn't just do comedy, he deconstructed it like it was a transistor set. He pulled out all the wires and switched them around, often in front of our very eyes.

People confuse the subject of the joke with the target of the joke, and they're very rarely the same.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.

I never analyze stuff with comedy because it's boring. It makes you stop being funny. Just be who you are and do what you do, and you're either funny or you're not.

Surprise is not humor. I think that there can be a fine line there.

To be honest, I don't know how comedy works.

I'd say I've gone to grad school for comedy being on 'Community.'

People have many theories about comedy, but being just plain funny is the one most important thing.

I'm sure I've all but lost friends by maintaining that, despite their love for it, I always saw Stanley Kramer's 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' as more of an exercise in anti-comedy than humor.

You can analyse a joke and say it's funny because this guy thought this was going to happen, and that happened, and it's surprising. But not all surprising things are funny.

Jokes are a lot about meaning. I think if we understand what jokes mean and why they work, we'd understand everything else. Genuinely I do.

I think comedy as an art involves the audience as a participant as much as is involves the artist.

When you really boil it down, what comedy does is you expect one thing, and you get a totally different thing that's humorous, and we all laugh. That's generally how, just mechanically - super-distilled - comedy works.

Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star.

Comedy is tragedy plus timing.

I'm not a believer in the pratfall. I don't think it's funny just to have someone fall down.

I just talk about the funny things in my life, and the idea is that my observations reflect the lives of my audience - so people are really laughing at themselves. This is the theory, anyway, and I am aware that in print, that it doesn't appear to be very funny. But it is, and I am definitely funny.

I always feel so pretentious talking about comedy and deconstructing it. It always feels somehow self-centred to talk about any sort of process.

My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate, which had a commentary track that wasn't even the filmmakers, it was a professor, some film criticism guy who just happen to be this amazing commentator who went off into the whole theory of comedy.

I'm UCB trained - I came up learning about game, which is a really big part of the Upright Citizens Brigade theater. They teach you about game, and game in a scene is what makes the scene funny. And oftentimes, it's the character - this is really improv dorky stuff.

The key is just to ignore the pain, because physical comedy only works if you see someone get hurt and they aren't actually hurt. If someone gets hit in the face with a bat, falls down, and gets back up, it's funny. If they stay down and their jaw is wired shut in the next scene, it's really tragic and weird. You have to pretend it doesn't hurt.