A Quote by James Buckley
I'd done comedy for years, it was almost like breathing so doing something new is dead exciting.
Related Quotes
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.
I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it's been something that I've always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.
Originality is not doing something no one else has ever done, but doing what has been done countless times with new life, new breath.
For years that may mean imitation. Then, one day, it is like a door opening, and a new thought comes in. Why not try this instead. Suddenly he is doing something original, almost in spite of himself.
I like doing comedy, I like doing drama. Naturally I like to do, I like doing dramas, I like conflict, and when I do a comedy, you know, I've found that, like, romantic comedy is the trickiest one, because often it's neither: it's not romantic and it's not funny. So, like, I like a comedy that's biting. It's biting humor or really quirky humor.
I think that's so particularly exciting about this moment in time is all the new platforms that are now existing, the Netflixes and the Hulus and Amazons and so and so forth; I mean they are really doing what pay TV was doing twenty years ago. So a show like Dancing On The Edge gets to have a digital life after it's playing on Starz. I think what's exciting is how these new platforms are providing more opportunities both for first-run programming on the one hand but also for second plays for shows that have appeared first either on traditional broadcast or on cable.
When they first start doing comedy, new comics or even people that have only been doing it three or four years, they're doing an impersonation of a stand-up. This is what I think a stand-up should sound like.
I feel like L.A. is more of a showcase, and Chicago is a pure comedy scene where you're doing comedy for comedy. You're doing comedy actually for the audience that's there.
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.
Doing [a relationship comedy] with Sam [L. Jackson] was exciting. I've done a lot of comedies with a lot of comedy people. My peers. I've never worked with anybody of the kind of dramatic caliber of movie actor that Sam is. It was a little bit intimidating for the first day. Or two... Or the first week. Other than that, it was a joy.
If there's one regret I have of my time in comedy it's that I really I was so obsessed with improv for so many years and I exclusively did improv for the first 6 years or 7 years. I was doing comedy and then I started doing solo work and stand up, a bit of writing, making videos, and really going into it on that end.
Making comedy is a privilege, so you should be doing something no one else can do. That's when it feels like art; it's a personal expression and it's being done in a unique way.
I remember all the stages in my career where I almost didn't have enough confidence to try for something, almost didn't have the guts to follow something I was excited about doing, because I didn't know anyone else who'd done it, or other people made me question it.
Leaving high school. It's sad and you're going to miss all your friends. You're going to miss your life and you've been doing that for the past four years, and it's comfortable. But now, there's something possibly bigger on the horizon, just new and fresh and exciting. I think we all kind of felt like that.
Am I a star? That's a different thing. I mean no, I'm not in People magazine. But I must be doing something right, because I've done it for 50 years! And I like doing what I do.
If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means NOT doing what's been done before, and that's a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. They're the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas.
