Quotes About Comedy

I do actually use a boxing trainer when I train for stand-up.

Comedy is much more difficult than tragedy-and a much better training, I think. It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh.

Steve Martin said that philosophy is good for comedy because it screws up your thinking just enough, and I agree with that. Being forced to see life's metadata is good training for looking for interesting angles on a topic.

Theatre sports is the best improv training period.

I don't care about how I look; I'm dedicated to the laughs. You know, I used to be a clown, so - my name was Smoothie the Clown. All the training I had, all my training is geared toward making people laugh, and I didn't care about being cool.

I really loved when I started doing '70s Show,' though I had never acted before, so it was a great training ground being on a sitcom.

I learned a great lesson early on, even before I was really an actor, from that movie 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles' that John Hughes made: that you could make a movie that's really, really, really, really funny, and sometimes you can still achieve... making the audience feel very deep emotions as well.

I really liked John Candy in 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles.' He was so good in that movie.

Apparently, my father was funny. I didn't really know him, but people have theories that the gag-smith gene trickles down through the blood amongst other terrible traits like a big nose and a temper.

All these movies are observational comedies. I see somebody, maybe a dry cleaner, and notice how they are. Maybe I'll decide to turn a person with those traits into a studio chief.

In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.

Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it's soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.

Every performer I talk to will, with different words, talk about the sanctity of a good standup show, how it can really feel spiritual. When everybody is laughing, fixed on the same thing, you feel like you transcend yourself.

I'm a huge Groucho fan. There were some great comic minds that would transfer into any generation, and Groucho is certainly one of them.

Comedy comes from a place of hurt. Charlie Chaplin was starving and broke in London, and that's where he got his character 'the tramp' from. It's a bad situation that he transformed into comedic one.

It must be hard being Jim Carrey. His precipitous fall from comedic grace has climaxed in a sad thud as the once brilliant rubber-faced comic has transformed into an unfunny, thick human hemorrhoid.

It's a weird one: nobody notices when a brilliant comedian is fat or has sweat marks under their arms. Peter Kay isn't in the best shape and neither is Ricky Gervais, and it doesn't matter. Still, I like to feel like I'm transforming into something quite cool when I go on stage.

You have to have your own internal barometer of what is too far. I try and consider feelings of people in the audience. What you have to try and do is that when there is something that could be seen as a transgression, you actually have a reason to justify the joke.

I tell fans who ask me why I'm not doing comedy anymore that I'm a different person. I've grown and I've matured. I've made a transition to where I really want to be.

People are going to see both of us and think it's an Abbott and Costello kind of thing. It's not an easy switch. It's not an easy transition from TV to film.

I'm not sure anybody's ready to see me in a drama. And loving movies so much, I've seen a lot of comics try to make that transition too fast, and it can be detrimental. And I don't think I've had as much success as I need in the comedy genre to open up those opportunities.

When you step out and do a song in a musical, the easier thing to do is make it funny. But when those transitions become necessary, when they aren't camp, that, to me, is magic. I've done musical comedies and enjoyed them, but subject matter that's deeper and more realistic is always what's appealed to me most.

Stand-up comedy is a lot about amplifying emotions and situations; movie acting has a lot to do with mellowing things down and making them subtle. The transition was almost terrifying because of the magnitude of change.

Commercial directing felt like a very natural transition from my comedy, sketch, music video directing experience.