Comedy Quotes

My comedy does not come from a place of deep cynicism, and I tend to play characters who are naive in some way.

An actor who is good at comedy can also be very good at drama, but not necessarily vice versa.

And if you can offer an explanation as to why it doesn't work then you've got to the whole root of comedy.

I felt audiences are happier to take comedy people who play darker people because there's a link between the psychosis of comedy and the psychosis of being a twisted character.

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.

To be perfectly honest, drama is a lot simpler than comedy.

Mmmm... the comedy that matters is the comedy you pull out of thin air. It's a bit like when something funny has happened and you try to explain it to someone else and end up saying, 'You had to be there.'

The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.

If you want good sketches, go pick up Sid Caesar. The best of Your Show of Shows. That's the greatest sketch comedy you'll ever see on television.

You're at the top of your game if you do comedy.

My day jobs... I knew I was bad at those, so I didn't really have the confidence to think that I could do comedy. But I knew I hated the day jobs.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.

In studio films, everything has to be boxed in, everybody needs to know beforehand - this is comedy, this is sci-fi, this is drama - and what's the point of independent film if you don't get to experiment?

I love the absurd - kind of absurdist comedy, absurd things in life.

Together with script writers Syd green and Dick Hills, we worked on the comedy ideas for this series.

There's a lot of comedy in Intermission but it's got this depth. It's not comedy for comedy's sake - it's informed by something else. I like stuff like that.

As the purpose of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I see no reason why anyone should be exempt.

We actually did quite a lot of comedy on 'Xena'. The whole show was very tongue-in-cheek.

There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

I was always a silent comedy nerd. I would stay up late and sneak downstairs to watch 'Saturday Night Live' and 'Kids in the Hall,' and things like that. Very early on, my parents realized that I was not going to be an engineer or a doctor. I just don't have those inclinations, at all.

Every time I've done comedy in, like, traditional comedy clubs, there's always these comedians that do really well with audiences but that the other comedians hate because they're just, you know, doing kind of cheap stuff like dancing around or doing, like, very kind of base sex humor a lot, and stuff like that.

In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.

Well, I loved variety in television, I loved sketch comedy. At 'Saturday Night Live,' I stayed almost seven years.

My real name is Scott Thompson. I could have gone by that name, but when I started doing comedy I thought I needed to go by something that has a little more of a hook.

Women and minorities have excelled beautifully in comedy, but very few women are the lead in a drama.

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

If I could sew comedy and philosophy together, then I've done a good job. The primary goal is always going to be laughs and the secondary goal is always going to be saying something without it being a lecture. I think it's important to have substance for what you're saying.

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.

I never like to do parodies. I never do. It's just not my style of comedy.