Sophisticated Comedy Quotes

On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.

I don't want to go back to sitcoms - I'm a middle-aged, white guy - the high school principal who's a buffoon. It's hard enough raising kids now a days, and I don't want to be a part of a show that I'll be embarrassed watching shows like that with my kids and my mother. A lot of shows feel they need to get that for humor. You've have to have had a life experience; otherwise, it's toilet humor. If you've had a job before or experienced something, you get it. Some of these people haven't and they look for the cheap laugh.

Delicate humor is the crowning virtue of the saints.

I'm naturally inclined to want to be funny and make people laugh, and that's what I want to do with my life. I also want to do it on an intelligent level. I want to kill the clown but I also want to preserve the comedian.

'Backwash' is an old-school, slapstick-y romp between three eccentric loser friends who inadvertently rob a bank, armed solely with a salami and a sweat sock, and then find themselves on the run pursued by singing cops. It's kind of a classic piece, a sophisticated piece, if you will.

If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.

The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They're superficial and I like articulate comedy. I don't know how to do the other, so I won't consider television until the audience's taste changes.

I feel that a lot of British comedy is often too bombastic, too obvious, dressing up and shouting and pulling funny faces.

Even when low-brow comedy ruled, I ensured my lines were not vulgar.

The desire to work with Burrows-Charles was really to change NBC's identity, to say, "We want to be in the sophisticated-adult-comedy business."