Dark comedy is very difficult. You have to bring the audience in and push them away at the same time.
The word 'funny' is a bit like the word 'love' - we don't have enough words to describe the many varieties.
I never approach comedy thinking 'I know it all.' Comedy is tough. To make people laugh is not easy.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
All I know about humor is that I don't know anything about it.
I like to think my sense of humor is sort of smart and dumb at the same time. I like to work on multiple levels - smart and dumb, funny and sad, profound and mundane, cynical and hopeful.
The best of my songs are more than just a joke. There's something else going on - a character, or it's not just a plain joke.
Being funny is very complex.
There can be a blurry line between laughing at the expense of a character and laughing at the recognition of something painful and true. But blurry as it may be, it is nevertheless unmistakable, and sometimes the laughter I hear makes me wince.
The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?
Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.
I like smart jokes, I like dumb jokes, and I like dumb jokes done smartly.
Humor is the hardest thing to do. Action is so much easier, because you're just trying to establish the mood, and a pacing, and a rhythm, and an energy. Where, in humor, comedy is so subjective.
I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it's impossible and always was impossible to define.
I certainly tried to talk about less complex things, but I've had to accept that it's just not what I do. That isn't to say that my shows are depressing - they aren't. At least, I hope they aren't! The problem I have with stories about happy things is that they don't require any skill from a comic - they just repeat the details verbatim.
The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry.
I don't think every joke has to be so dadgum cerebral. I mix it up really good, because that's the kind of humor I like. I like the goofy one-liner type stuff.
We tend to associate humor with lightheartedness, but really, it's a rhetorical mode than can be applied to any subject. It was through researching Chechnya that I came to understand this.
