Quotes About Comedy

Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.

With While You Were Sleeping, it was so much fun and such a Cinderella story, that I didn't want to do another romantic comedy. I wanted to do the opposite.

Truthfully, I almost avoided 'While You Were Sleeping ' because I find those romantic comedies kind of precious, and they're full of lines that leave you feeling a little bewildered when you say them.

You want me to say something about Bill? Bill who? Bill Schroeder? Never heard of him… I'm kidding, of course.

Kyle Baker's work is really funny, but it's also got a very clear vision.

CINDRELLA   Q. why did Cinderella get kicked off the soccer team? A. Because she kept running from the ball. BELT     Q. What do you call a belt made out of watches? A. Waist of time! ELEVATORS   Q. Why do ghosts love elevators? A. Because they lift their spirits! GRAVEYARD   Q. Why are there fences around a graveyard? A. Because people are dying to get in!

The mistake that people make in stand-up is thinking they're profound or they're deep when there are so many people who have more worthwhile ways of phrasing things.

If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this.

I'm a satirist, so I've got boxing gloves on if the person is worthy of satire. But I'm not an assassin. If that ever happens, it's only because something happened during the interview that got me going, and then I had to translate my feelings to the mouth of the character.

Doug Stanhope is great - I saw his 'Burning the Bridge to Nowhere' show and it was inspiring. He's like an anti-shaman, taking the sting out of a bunch of things we've chosen to give a symbolic power to. I've made it sound noble and worthy there, it's not, it's really funny.

Since I got an audience before I even had a comic voice, my material that really wasn't worthy of an audience somehow got it, slightly unfairly.

I would trade 20 white babies for an Asian baby. If I'm ever rich, I want a closet full of Asian babies. And I'll just pull them out whenever I'm feeling down, you know? All kinds. Korean ones. Chinese ones. Vietnamese - not so much. My dad was in the war, and I hold a grudge.

Phil Hartman was brilliant, and Dave Foley is a really funny guy. Phil Hartman was actually even funnier offstage than he was onstage because he would say nasty things. Dave Foley's very funny, very witty guy, very quick.

The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.

Sometimes, things need to be so understated on film that I don't even see them as funny, which isn't my favorite style, comedically. When I watch film comedy, I like people that are a little bit more alive on the screen and wound up. I like volatility and unpredictability and other long words like those.

Joe Carroll had a certain black comedy to him. But I think it's lovely playing a man who, in his heart and soul, is a gentle man. And he's wounded and complicated.

Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories.

The fact that 'A Dirty Job' has comedy and supernatural horror in it, that both are woven in and out of it with a whimsical tone, despite the fact that it's about death, makes it hard to characterize with standard genre labels - but I have no problem with that. I'd call it a funny story about death, and leave it at that.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, 'Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.'

I started out in 1989 doing open mic nights. The first 10 years, I was literally all about I'm going to be a star. I want leather pants, I want a kangaroo, I want to be on 'MTV Cribs,' I want to go to the mall with a pet monkey and I want everyone to go, 'Wow, that guy's huge, he's successful.'

I've always liked and appreciated storytellers like Garry Shandling and Bill Cosby - more long-form comedy. So starting in San Francisco, watching all these great comics - Patton Oswalt, Dave Chappelle - you get to see them a bunch, and you go, 'Wow, this is where I need to be.'

In Canadian comedy, you'll almost never see guns. If you bring a gun into a scene, it's like, 'Whoa! Wow, how are we going to deal with that!' Guns in an American comedy are a given. Violence in America is used in a much more cavalier way.

I just write and do what I think is funny. Sometimes, you do have it in your head about certain bits. There are certain jokes where I know if I did them in certain situations, it would irk people. There are times where I look at the news and see a story going on, and I'm like, 'Wow, if I tweeted this, I would get press if I wanted to.'