A Quote by Jenny Slate

I think sometimes in comedy the characters are often sacrificed for the joke, and it's more important for it to be funny than for there to be love.

Jenny Slate

Quote Topics

Characters Comedy Funny Important Joke Love More Often Sacrificed Sometimes Than Think

Quote Author

Jenny Slate
American - Actress
Born: March 25, 1982

Humor is not funny. Humor is something else. Funny is a joke, sometimes silly. Comedy is deep and connected to tragedy; comedy could be deeper than tragedy, in my view.

Gerald Stern

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

Most of the jokes that I wrote were funny and there always seems to be an aspect of comedy in my long-form work. I think that's how life is. I think even the more dramatic moments of one's life are often punctuated by very funny comments or situations. I like to say, "Keep your comedy serious and your drama funny, and you'll be pretty true to life."

Victor Levin

I think sometimes people become quite emotional about the characters as well, and that's pretty cool that you can get that emotion out of people. And I think that's more my motivation than like, "Hey I want to be the funny guy, I want to be that famous funny guy." That doesn't sit as well with me as the idea of taking people on this ride and taking them into the illusion of the characters. That's much more exciting for me.

Chris Lilley

I think it's more fun to grow to love characters who are flawed than it is to present perfect characters. Perfect characters aren't very funny. Certainly my friends are a strange, intense bunch of people, and people's families drive them crazy, but challenging relationships are always more rewarding.

Christopher McCulloch

I think Amy Poehler and Tina Fey have done so much for women in comedy in the sense that they've normalized it. You don't think, 'I'm going to watch that comedy starring a woman,' you think, 'I'm going to watch that funny show.' They refuse to play the foils for men, or be reduced to the butt of every joke, and I love that about both of them.

Tatiana Maslany

I love bad comedy more than I love good comedy, so I love open mics. Or I used to. But the thing that delights me more than anything else in an open-mic performer is when the comic has one joke that requires some kind of prop. But only one. The prop is always produced very awkwardly, and it never, ever pays off. The resulting embarrassment is savory and delicious.

Paul F. Tompkins

I have become a giant fan of the testing process, especially with a comedy. I mean, they tell you what's funny. It's almost tailor-made for people who shoot the way we shoot, trying a million different options and versions of things. Because the audience doesn't laugh at a joke, we put in another joke. If they don't laugh at the next joke, we put in another joke. You just keep doing them and you can get the movie to the point where every joke is funny, if you have enough options in the can.

Seth Rogen

I like ones that pertain to the music they make. Talking Heads does that somehow. More often than not band names are just a quirky joke that doesn't really stay funny for very long. It's like Homer Simpson's barbershop quartet, the Be Sharps. At first you're like, 'That's funny!' Then you're like, 'It's not that funny.'

Samuel Ervin Beam

I've noticed, as a comedy fan, that I really like Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino because when they're funny, they're actually funny. It's not like when other dramatic writers have comedy, and I'm just like, 'Well, that's not funny. Why are you even trying to make a joke here?'

Paul Rust

More of my songs are intended to be funny than almost anyone else. Sometimes maybe it cheers me up a bit. I've got a distance from it. Sometimes what I'm writing is more important to me than the rest of my life. It's more important to me that I'm writing well than anything else.

Randy Newman

A joke is either funny or it's not funny. If I hear a funny joke, you know what I do? I laugh, that's what I do. I don't start a focus group to see who got hurt by the joke.

Alonzo Bodden

Comedy has always been important in my family. If you got in a good joke at the dinner table, it meant more than almost anything else.

Isla Fisher

Any joke can be funny, but not any joke is funny. Any joke has the potential to be hilarious to you, but more importantly, the joke has the potential to not be funny to you but to someone else.

Phoebe Robinson

I would love to do a comedy, but comedy probably in the sense of a dark comedy like 'Californication,' that sort of thing. Yeah, sure, I think I'm funny.