Quotes About Humor

I'm a storyteller. I'm not like any other comic. I tell detailed stories - not made-up stuff, but true stories.

Rowling is a luminous storyteller. I love her sense of humor and the intricate wizarding world she built around Hogwarts. I think all writers aspire to be like her, to capture readers like she does. But I didn't think about 'Harry Potter' when I wrote 'The Bone Season.'

My dad is a storyteller. I've heard his funny stories 500 times, but I would never stop him because he tells them so brilliantly and still knows where to put the funny bit.

I love storytellers. When I was growing up, my inspirations were watching Eddie Murphy, Dennis Wolfberg, and Louie Anderson. These guys were great at telling stories, and I made that my own style, talking about things that happened to me and trying to make them funny.

We wanted to capture Danvers' humor and flaws. For us as storytellers, those are all aspects that we really appreciate in characters.

The more a character wants and the less a character has the ability to get what they want, the more you have an endless fuel for storytelling in comedy.

The dynamics of storytelling are very important. To just be serious and morose all the time would be not very enjoyable.

Folks, I've been straight for seventeen days... Not all in a row.

Our characters were antiseptic but we weren't. And if you remember what we did on BATMAN, as the scripts were written very funny, we played them very straight.

All you have in comedy, in general, is just going with your instincts. You can only hope that other people think that what you think is funny is funny. I don't have an answer but I just try to plough straight ahead.

My worst hair experience was when I was trying to relax my hair and my grandmother did it. It went all straight and I looked like a black Bee Gee.

How many straight men maintain inappropriately intimate relationships with their mothers? How many shop with them? I want a gay son. People laugh, but they assume I'm kidding. I'm not.

I'm pretty much a straight guy on 'The Office.' We can't all be crazies. You need some balance.

When I'm playing comedy, I never do 'jokes.' Sometimes I'll deliver a line in a way I think is more likely to get a laugh, but all the best comedy is played straight. What's funny is the way it hits the world around it or the way it hits the other characters.

If you watch 'SNL,' any time there's this thing with everyone singing, I'm, like, the one person who just has a straight line of dialogue because I can't sing to save my life.

If you have a character that doesn't have anything wrong with him, there's nothing funny about it. The idea of the straight man is very important. But I'd rather it be somebody else, because it's not as fun.

The straight man has the best part. He gets to be in the show and see it, too.

My definitions of comedy, drama, and straight man are all blurry for me. I don't think of it in those terms.

To a straight man, the notion of walking around as a coiffed, waxed, nail-polish-wearing, lispy dude is uproariously absurd. As people, we find absurdities funny. That's our first step in making sense of them.

I've committed myself to perfecting the art of the straight man. I try really hard not to crack up.

The brilliance of Adam Scott is that he is so damn funny in a straight man role.

I was an only child and I had a mother and father who were just - there wasn't a straight man in the house, and I mean that in a very nice way. They were fun, and we would laugh a lot.

One of my favorite comedy performances of all time is Charles Grodin in 'Midnight Run,' and in a lot of things he's done. I think he's hilarious as the straight man, playing it real.

People say: 'Why do you want to play the straight man?' Well, it's because he gets to be in every scene.