Humor Crafting Quotes

I never really write the jokes. I just sit down over a week or two and try to figure out what I want to talk about. Once I narrow that down, then I start working on the material, like "How do I make this stuff funny?"

Having to stand in front of an audience and have it be your job to make them laugh, you can't really look to anyone but yourself. It's what you wrote, what you said and how you said it, so it's kind of terrifying, but I liked it. When it goes well, it's the best feeling in the world. When it doesn't go well, it's the worst feeling, but once you get into the rhythm of it, I think it's really fun.

If you think it's easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you've probably never tried.

I used to like writing for comedians - I enjoyed the challenge of making other people funny.

I think most people that do comedy write for themselves. I don't think there is any other way you can do it, really. Otherwise it would be quite cynical.

I'll come up with an idea for a character, and I'll write some jokes and make sure that that character is going to have some legs to it - that it's really going to work. If I can come up with jokes and material that I think will work, then I make a cheap version of the doll. Achmed started out just being this little plastic toy from the store.

I don't write my standup on paper or anything; but I just organically do it on stage, have an idea, chat it up a little bit. I'm keeping notes. I'm trying to keep up with this world and try to bring out a special every year.

I need to keep my ad-libbing skills honed and make sure I'm able to banter with people and treat topics a bit more light-heartedly. But as a stand-up, first and foremost, my job is to make sure that I can write the routine that hopefully people will talk about when something big happens.

Sarah [Silverman] writes her own jokes. She doesn't just go through her life and talk about everything. She sits down and crafts jokes. Sometimes her inspiration comes from areas of her life that are risqué. But she is an A-plus professional joke-writer in addition to being very attractive and a great performer.

I learned a few things on my own since, and modified some of the things he taught me, but everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from Danny Simon.

I am excited about getting back to what I do best and what my audience likes best, I am writing new jokes every day and soon Ill be telling them every night. Just me, one Jew talking and that's it.

I also try to think of ways to articulate the joke more economically.

It's depressing sitting at a comedy club all night, waiting to get on to do your five or ten minutes of material.

To me, the script is a living, breathing organism. Comedy is something that is ever-changing and ever-flowing with the vibe and the mood of the movie.

I don't want to get pretentious, but there's an art to doing sitcoms; you have to make it work in that format.

Everyone talks about the gags, but the most difficult thing is coming up with the stories. You have to learn to do that for sitcoms.

Doing comedy is as easy as doing anything else. You're dependent totally on the material.

I think that, for me, my favorite thing to do is perform standup onstage. Everything else I do is for the exposure to do more stand-up onstage, and for the money, and for the health insurance.

A lot of people think that comedic acting is a lot harder than dramatic acting, but for me it just feels natural. It's extremely calculated, you have to be aware of every beat, but I love it. I hope to have a long lasting career in comedy.

I'm not good at narrative; I'm really a gag writer, and that comes from being in the newspaper comic strip world for a while in college. What I do is I just write tons of jokes, then I sort them out in terms of quality and then pick the best of the jokes and then try to form them into a plot. If I get a good theme going, I feel lucky.

If you give a little credit to the concept of the artist, I think you ought to indulge excesses a bit, because that reflects the personality of the writer. Now if a joke is in bad taste or it's not funny, okay, that's awhole different thing, but how you craft a joke is really what the writer's job is, and I don't think that technique should be subject to any editorial constraints.

There's no real formula for doing it, it's either just living life and writing down a joke you think of in the middle of the day and then pieces those together later.

Stand-up isn't something I just sit down and start writing - it's ideas you come up with in the shower, while you're driving, waiting in line.

People need to write articles and they need to have angles in them and I'm grateful when people are doing articles, but I always say there's not a great mystery to stand-up comedy.

As you can tell from watching the show, I'm not a strong joke writer per se.