A Quote by Eddie Izzard
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.
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It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.
The problem with a lot of comedy clubs is not that they are a comedy club; it's just the cheesy way they're presenting themselves. That's why a lot of people have a problem with them. If you're a relatively unknown comedian, you can play at a comedy club, you might play to hundreds of people every night. But if you try to make a concert event out of it, and try to play a rock club or something, where you might play to 10 people or no people. And the flipside of that is, that's also a great thing, to play to people who are your fans. Some people are too hard on the comedy clubs.
It bothers me when people say 'shock comic' or 'gross-out' because that was only one type of comedy I did. There was prank comedy. Man-on-the-street-reaction comedy. Visually surreal comedy. But you do something shocking, and that becomes your label.
For me, my preference for comedy is grounding it in the psychology of the character, and not just kind of making faces. Even when it's a crazy character, grounded comedy resonates more with people because it doesn't look like you're watching someone do vaudeville. No offense to vaudeville.
I am not doing comedy because the genre is successful. If that was the case, I would have done a run-of-the-mill comedy film. I set my own trends. I like to give something new and different to my audiences. I want to do the kind of comedy that has been missing till now.
A rap is a tweaked version of comedy, because comedy came first. People weren't spitting before they were doing comedy. Comedy has been relevant for years. It's the same art form, pretty much. Discovering that and applying it, I think that has made my stand-up better.
There are some professions that culturally and sociologically take a long time to change, and because of that, there's still sexism in comedy audiences. We shouldn't blame them: I do it too. A woman comes on, and I feel slightly anxious. I'm a woman in comedy, and I do that; I think everyone does.
Postmodern comedy doesn't work well with very old audiences, because it's making fun of the comedy they enjoy.
Comedy is the result of what's happening, not what people are doing. Because if people are doing comedy. It's embarrassing. The individual elements have to be straight-faced, serious, realistic with a firm basis. What makes it comedy is a somewhat shifted way to put it together.
I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.
'Smart Funny & Black' came about because I felt that black comedians were being considered as only capable of a certain type of comedy - sort of physical, kind of silly - and I felt like we are not a monolith, and our comedy isn't, either.
I wrote a play at drama school, which was a dark comedy - people laughed and cried. And then my script of one of the shows was picked up by a comedy sketch company... so then I had to write comedy.
'Something Borrowed' is looking like a romantic comedy, but it's a comedy. It shines as a comedy; it's definitely not just about the romance. It's an honest depiction of the struggle between the characters. The comedy aspect will make it shine.
There's a very interesting article or symposium to be written on just the real difference between comedy filmmaking and non-comedy. Because, you know, when you work in comedy, you depend on audience screenings to tell you about your movie.
Because comedy is cheap to put on: if you've got a play or an opera, there's a whole load of people and a set, but comedy is just one man or woman. And because TV has learned to love comics - there's so many more around now than when I started out.
I like comedy, but I like comedy as a device in drama. It's more interesting for me to use comedy to seduce people into thinking about something serious. If you want to hit a beat in a drama, you can distract people with a little comedy, and you can punch them in the gut with some emotion.
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