Quotes About Comedy

I have laughter dates with myself, where I find comics on YouTube and watch them. Louis C.K. was my first laughter date a couple years ago. I'll also watch those videos of people doing idiotic things. That cracks me up.

I make funny videos. I hate saying I'm a comedian because then people stick their finger in your face and demand you tell a joke. But the other thing people call me is 'a YouTube sensation,' which is even worse.

I grew up watching Jim Carrey, and I was like, 'I want to be like him. I want to do what exactly what he does.' YouTube was just a platform, kind of like a trampoline to, like, bounce into it at a faster rate.

YouTube is the vlogs and my life, then Instagram is comedy skits and pictures that I take. Twitter's text, and Instagram Stories is even more behind-the-scenes vlog stuff. I'm always posting.

One of the first jokes I wrote was this nail salon bit that ended up blowing up on YouTube. That's kind of what propelled me into standup.

If anything, being a female has afforded me opportunities on YouTube that I necessarily didn't have in doing traditional comedy and auditioning in TV and film and that whole world.

With YouTube streaming and Twitch and all that, you can just hop on on any given night and play videogames and have people come watch you. And even if you've only got 400 people watching your stream, that's more people than would see my comedy if I went to UCB.

My influences are a wide variety: from Dave Chappelle stand-up comedy specials on YouTube, to watching chick-flick comedy movies, to scrolling through stuff people say on the Internet.

I go on YouTube just for fun when I have nothing to do. I love watching Lilly Singh.

Certainly, when I left New Zealand, there was no career there as a comedian. I was doing more live gigs than anyone, and I was maybe doing three a week. Even then, it would often be the same people in the audience, going, 'I saw you on Tuesday, mate!'

Comedy is difficult, especially slapstick. The trick is to have fun while you are performing it.

I'm super happy to say that it's not that hard to write bad stand-up. I guess the trick is to write bad stand-up that sounds like you're trying to be good.

OK, so we all know that 'Borat' is humiliatingly, career-endingly unfunny (one trick too many for one-trick pony Sacha Double-Barelled) - but can anyone explain why the 'character' isn't roundly condemned for being as unacceptably racist as the one-dimensional stereotypes from 70s sitcoms such as 'Mind Your Language?'

I used to run into lampposts. That was my party trick.

Because 'Gob' was a terrible magician, he was always, in great comedic moments, messing up his magic act. We used to have magicians come in to work on these tricks to actually get them wrong. But they still had to work. We had to bring magicians on to make magic not work.

I very rarely laugh. I remember I used to have a joy at comedy. I remember going to see Sean Lock for the first time live, just in some comedy club when I was 18, and again, just guttural, pure laughter. I didn't know what he was doing; I couldn't see the tricks.

Watch 'Dog with a Blog' to get a good laugh, to see me, of course, and to see an awesome, awesome talking dog who is the cleverest, most awesome dude in the world. He's really, really adorable and cute, and it's really cool seeing what kind of tricks he has up his sleeve.

Comedy has to be so much cleaner than drama. You can't layer it in the way you can a dramatic performance. Which is why it's more difficult than drama - you don't have so many tricks.

We've all seen comedians look like they're reaching just a little bit too much for the laugh. This is counterproductive. The conceit of standup is that it is effortless, which makes the prospect of generating new comedy a tricky one: you are trying to be funny without looking like you are trying to be funny.

With the Tonys it's a little tricky because a lot of the funnier jokes are more insider, so people watching at home may not get a Julie Taymor reference the way that New Yorkers would. So you have to figure out what comedy plays to a large audience and still respect the individuals who are there.

London audiences are tricky, too. They don't laugh as much as the Northern audiences because, and I hate to say this, they are a bit cleverer normally, and they are picking up on all the little details and listening more carefully.

I do notice a lot of people who want to shock to get laughs. It's such a tricky thing; you don't want to make rules about it. There's nobody more hilarious than Dave Attell, and he'd break every rule you set up. But he's funny.

I never meant to be in romantic comedies; it's just what ended up happening. But they are tricky, in a post-1960s sexual revolution way. It was easier when you couldn't have sex scenes: everything crackled very nicely. They're not easy.

Adding comedy into what I do is just my natural approach. It's how I approach anything that I find tricky or daunting, because it's like putting syrup in your medicine, and it just makes it easier to go down.