Gag Writing Quotes

Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.

Sight gags had to be planned; they required timing and mechanics. Occasionally, spontaneity would arise in the shooting of the scenes.

My dream in life is to write the one gag that makes everyone in the world laugh.

A page a day means I need to focus on a gag a day, and that's great for laughs but bad for plot, and I'm primarily a plot guy.

Being a talented artist is good, it's nice, but it's not the most important thing. I think being a good storyteller, having a good idea, a good gag, is probably more important than being a great artist.

If you start to disrespect the character you're playing, or play it too much for laughs, that can work for a sketch, it will sell some gags, but it's all technique. It's like watching a juggler - you can be impressed by it, but it's not going to touch you in any way.

Everyone told me that British sitcom was dead. Then I looked at 'Seinfeld' and 'Frasier' and thought, 'No it's not, it just needs more gags.'

I really can't pinpoint the one moment when I said I want to be a comic.

Writing humour certainly involves pain. A sitcom is 6 months of writing pain!

I was always silly in high school. I used to always get in trouble because I was laughing. I've always thought I was funny but never thought I could use it to make money. In 1996, I decided I was going to use my humor to get on TV to make money.

Religion theme aside, most of the time I'm in some sort of comedy and I'm a straight man and it's really just, let's wind this guy up and see him explode.

I'm not going to give up the shock part of my comedy.

If the gag is complicated, you spend more time thinking about the way you're drawing it.

I'm an author whose strength is in gag-writing.

I really love standup, and I really love writing standup.

I don't write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

We did have a script, but it didn't consist of the routines and gags. It outlined the basic story idea and just a plan for us to follow. But when it came to each scene, we and the gagmen would work out ideas.