A Quote by Nicole Byer
The way I toe the line with comedy is I run jokes past people.
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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.
People have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.
What I love about the Coen brothers - what everyone loves - is that they sort of toe the line of a truly dark comedy.
My acting has always been in the world of comedy, but in my writing, other than writing sketches, I really am drawn to the balance between comedy and drama. I like things that sort of toe that line of one minute you're in this emotional space and then all of the sudden something happens.
Comedy, at least the way I write comedy, is just drama with jokes.
I hope I never have to stop acting. I love it. But, I think the coolest thing about acting is working with these amazing people all the time, and writing represented a new way to meet those people and to tell stories, at the same time, which I've always wanted to do, and to tell jokes. I love comedy, so writing was a way of getting these jokes that I had down on the page.
Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I've learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could've on my own.
The people that become the biggest jokes are people who do not change. They stay the way they were in the past.
I didn't want to do comedy again. It is way harder when you are doing comedy. You can't just concentrate on the character and the plot. In comedy, the writers, instead of obsessing about character and plot, obsess about the jokes.
We used to get 27, 28 minutes to do a story in, and now they're lucky if they get 18 or 20 minutes. So I don't think they can really do a beginning, a middle, and an end anymore. There's an awful lot of one-line jokes; almost every line is a punchline. It's not the same, but there's still good comedy around.
The people that become the biggest jokes are people who do not change. They stay the way they were in the past. Look at Michael Jackson, he never evolved.
I took movement classes that I wore my double-breasted suits to. I worked on my elocution because people spoke differently then. I was really trying to toe the line. I think that if I had spoken exactly the way that people spoke back then, it probably would have alienated people.
There are a lot of things you do in a supernatural universe that can toe the line and cross the line.
I have a basic theorem as to how I do my jokes. Growing up, I knew when to cross the line and when not to cross the line. It's the same with my comedy. I know what my audience will take and how much they won't take. I can't give you a formula for it. It's my own personal formula inside my head. Somebody else's might be different.
There's a theory with comedy that you shouldn't do anything that's too topical in your specials because people won't be able to watch them in five years. But I look at Trump in the same way I look at Mr. T. I can watch comedy jokes about Mr. T in the '80s and still understand what they're talking about.
Standing toe to toe with another fighter, I could probably do well, but a smart fighter is not going to stand toe to toe with me, and they're going to move to a weakness.
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