A Quote by Charlie Murphy

Comedy has bits, has jokes, has stories, and it has characters.

Charlie Murphy

Quote Topics

Bits Characters Comedy Jokes Stories

Quote Author

Charlie Murphy
American - Actor
June 12, 1959 - April 12, 2017

You have comedians who just do jokes, and they're called comics, not comedians. You have comedians that do bits - a person that has a lot of jokes that have a beginning, a middle and an end, but it's not a real story. And you have someone that does great stories, the one that blends those things together - that person is doing comedy.

Charlie Murphy

Richard Pryor - he had stories, he had characters, he had short jokes, and he had bits. He had all those things. Eddie Murphy has all those things, and he can sing. A comedian is a bunch of stuff; it's not just one area.

Charlie Murphy

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.

Megan Amram

All of comedy at some level is trial-and-error, whether it's a stand-up trying out jokes or a comedy show trying stories.

Michael Schur

All my main characters have got bits of me, bits of my family, bits of my friends.

Lisa Jewell

It seems that two of the most basic forms of comedy are jokes and stories. And, of course, they are not mutually exclusive.

Demetri Martin

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.

Bruce McGill

Sometimes I use my jokes as building blocks for larger bits. I like to draw and play music, so sometimes I do those things along with the jokes.

Demetri Martin

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.

Carl Reiner

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

Neil Gaiman

Whatever I do - whether it's directing, producing - I just come at things from characters, from stories, from jokes and scene rhythms. I'll always have that at the epicenter, I think.

Nahnatchka Khan

All of my stuff is based on personal stories to back up my arguments. It's not a lecture, it's still comedy. I think a lot of comics forget that you can have a theme but that it shouldn't replace the jokes.

Sarah Millican

Whatever job I had, I was always writing like crazy. All I ever liked about offices was being able to type up stories on the computer when no one was looking. I was never paying much attention in meetings because I was usually scribbling bits of my latest stories in the margins of the pad or thinking up names for my characters. This is a problem when you're supposed to be taking minutes of the meeting.

J. K. Rowling

Comedy always works better when you're tracking the story and you care about the characters. That's why there's a lot of movies where there's not a ton of jokes, but you get huge laughs because there's a moment of relief.

Andy Samberg

And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.