Deadpan Delivery Quotes

English humor resembles the Loch Ness Monster in that both are famous but there is a strong suspicion that neither exists.

Americans just don't understand dry wit.

I've always enjoyed watching characters that aren't aware that they're doing anything funny. And I think that inherently makes them funnier.

The understatement is the English contribution to comedy.

I loved Peter Sellers. I thought he was the perfect mix of physical comedy with out-of-the-box humor. I loved his tone; I loved his physicality; I loved everything about what he was doing as a comedic actor.

I like a very dry wit, not the big kind of humor like Robin Williams. I don't think I'm capable of that.

I was pretty much a child of 'Monty Python.' I grew up loving that type of humor and even structured a lot of humor in the same fashion.

You just can't take yourself too seriously, especially in comedy. You shouldn't try to be funny, but you should try to be as honest as possible. The extreme end of honesty is usually what's funny. That's your job [as an actor]. You just have to let people see it.

I try to play the stiff, as much as I can, and play it dry, which is sometimes hard for me. My problem with comedy is to want to clown it up, but she's the funny one. Those are her jokes, not mine. For me, it's a lot of not doing anything. I just don't want to muck it up.

I have a really dry sense of humor. I don't think it's funny when people wink at the camera. That's more of an actor thing, just committing to whatever the thing is.

I think Michael O'Donoghue felt he'd said what he wanted to say. In fact, nobody thought we could spin it out long enough to make a book.

The English take everything with an exquisite sense of humour. They are only offended if you tell them that they have no sense of humour.

I'm a silly guy, I love wit and cynicism and sarcasm.

One of my favorite comedy performances of all time is Charles Grodin in 'Midnight Run,' and in a lot of things he's done. I think he's hilarious as the straight man, playing it real.

I don't know, maybe Australian humour isn't supposed to be funny. It's as dry as the Sahara, and I think people miss that.

I'm a huge fan of Zach's [Galifianakis] and I auditioned Zach a million years ago on a movie called Duplex which I was fired from. But Zach came in - It was like 2000, maybe - as a buddy stand-up that people were starting to notice and there was something about him I loved. He wasn't quite right for the part in [Keeping Up with the Joneses] and I got fired anyway, so who cares? But I always wanted to work with Zach.

Comedy is the result of what's happening, not what people are doing. Because if people are doing comedy. It's embarrassing. The individual elements have to be straight-faced, serious, realistic with a firm basis. What makes it comedy is a somewhat shifted way to put it together.

What you see on stage is pretty much the way I am... a dry sense of humor.

My dad is and was very funny and had a really dry sense of humor, which, as a kid, seemed un-fun. But in retrospect, it's kind of hilarious.

When people come in to act on the show, we say, "Just be extremely dry and not funny. Let the idea be the joke." That holds true through a lot of our stuff.

English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the 'Boston Phoenix,' and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that's where I first saw 'deadpan.'

Donald Westlake's lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.

To me, real comedy comes out of behavior. It's the choices you make as an actor. It's never about, "I want to do a comedy script." I can't think of it that way. And besides, some of those movies, those comedy movies, I can't even watch them.

The brilliance of Adam Scott is that he is so damn funny in a straight man role.