I always told everybody the perfect joke would be where the setup and punch line were identical.
I tried to make the punchline as close to the setup as I could. And I thought that was the perfect thing. If I could make the setup and the punchline identical to each other, I would create a different kind of joke.
Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.
A lot of times when I sit down with the other comics and try to talk theory, they say I'm being too serious.
There is no Algorithm for Humor
As soon as you explain a joke, it immediately becomes unfunny.
The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
My favorite kind of humor is basically, if it was happening to you, it wouldn't be funny, but to observe it, it's hilarious.
A good joke provides tension, and then, release of that tension. You build the tension by saying things that are controversial. The release is the laugh. The bigger the surprise or insight in your joke, the bigger the laugh.
I think when you dissect a joke too much, you have ruined whatever there is in comedy.
Bourgeois humor is always bankrupt; it is mortgaged to Red radicalism.
Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog: Nobody really enjoys it, and the frog generally dies as a result.
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.
In Physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humors.
Comedy is surprises, so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny.
A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
It's always amazed me how little attention philosophers, psychologists, or anyone else actually has paid to humor.
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.
There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.
All I know about humor is that I don't know anything about it.
I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of percieving humor.
All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
There are two things you can't argue in film: comedy and eroticism. If something doesn't make you laugh, no one can tell you why it's funny, and it's difficult to reason someone out of an erection.
