I like the purity of stand-up because it is all about whether people laugh at your jokes. Either they laugh or they don't.
If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?
Knowing what jokes will work is second nature; you just feel it.
Only one in four jokes ever works, and I still can't predict what people will laugh at.
If there's an intelligence behind the joke - - it's a good joke.
Even if you know a character really well, there's no formula for what jokes will work and what won't.
Humor has the tendency to be funny once. If I tell you a joke, we're going to have a big laugh. But the second time I tell the joke, it's going to be a bit strange, and the third time you're going to ask if there's something wrong with me. So I am very cautious with jokes, but there is a lightness in my work.
Laughter is binary: It either happens or it doesn't. As each joke arrives in the course of a film, the cavernous space of the theater is either filled with joy and laughter or with the quiet of cringing embarrassment. Every time you step to the plate to make a joke, you're going to experience one or the other.
Jokes that make me laugh out loud when I write them almost always bomb. I have no idea why.
I found, especially with stand-up, that if a premise works, you can make the joke work. If a premise doesn't work, you can't force it to.
I always say, if I tell you a joke right now and it's funny, you laugh. Now, we set the lights, and I tell you the joke again, it's hard to find it funny the second time.
You can't just explain a joke. Either it isn't funny, or the person just totally missed the punchline.
Woody Allen - nobody has been a better joke teller than him - and even in his great films, it's always coming out of the character. If you don't have that, jokes are just empty and I think that people rely too much on jokes.
No comedy should be longer than 90 minutes. There's no such thing as a good long joke.
For me, a great joke is an idea expressed in extremely concentrated form.
In movies, you don't get reactions: Live, when you do a joke, you know in a second whether it's good or bad. But in a movie, since no one is allowed to laugh or do anything, when you're done with a scene, you're left asking, 'Was that funny?'
After you do a joke a few times, you have material that you know works. Although sometimes I have a joke that has worked a bunch of times, and then one night it'll flop.
I always hate telling my jokes in print 'cause I always feel like it reads so not funny and people read it and they think, 'Oh, so that's what that guy does in his stand-up? That's terrible.'
I think you make better jokes when you don't break logic for the joke, unless you make a movie just about jokes.
I know what I want to talk about, but I don't really know what's funny about a joke until I perform it in front of an audience.
The funny thing is, when I've gone through the relentless editing process, my editor and I are amazed the Mercy Watson books still make us laugh. The same jokes that made us laugh the first time around still make us laugh in the 16th rendition.
I try not to rely on pop culture references as a crutch for jokes, because then, I think, that's when the timelessness quality is lost.
