A Quote by Joseph Gordon-Levitt

As soon as you are trying to be funny or dramatic, that's when things start feeling fake and boring. — © Joseph Gordon-Levitt
As soon as you are trying to be funny or dramatic, that's when things start feeling fake and boring.
Fake feeling good.... You're going to have to learn to fake cheerfulness. Believe it or not, eventually that effort will pay off: you'll actually start feeling happier.
The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.
Funny stories on set - there are thousands of them, but they are only funny to the people who were on the movies. You start to have inside jokes and gallows humor. You have all kinds of things you laugh at, but as soon as you tell somebody, the joke falls flat because they don't know the context of it.
People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring.
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?'
If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children — oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either.
I'm known as a kind of dramatic, serious, almost humorless actor and the fact is, I'm a funny guy, and I spend most of my life trying to find a lighter side of things, and on stage was given plenty of opportunity to do that.
It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do.
I don't get offered many dramatic roles. As soon as my face pops up in a movie, everyone knows I'm the funny guy.
As soon as you start to talk about your own mannerisms, you are screwed. Because if you are aware of your own mannerisms, or beyond that even what makes any one thing funny to people, I really ascribe to that that if you start deconstructing it too much, it is immediately not funny.
As a bowler it's a strange feeling when you start running through a team. You get that one wicket under your belt and suddenly you start running in feeling loose, feeling relaxed and thinking about what you want to bowl rather than focusing on trying to force that wicket.
So much of what I am doing in my fiction is just trying to get into interesting places in terms of language or form, places that don't bore me. And this happens via hundreds of quick micro-decisions that are done "to taste," so to speak. So the experience is one of groping toward that interesting place - trying to leap away from anything that seems boring, or about which I don't have strong opinions. Essentially trying to avoid that moment where, devoid of any strong feeling, I start conceptualizing.
When you start talking about sacrifices, pretty soon people start feeling like chumps.
I actually don't subscribe to the notion that comedy is easier than drama. When you're trying to be funny and you're not funny, that's really terrible. It's a horrible feeling.
When you're caring with your head, there are the things that we talked about that seems boring in baseball. But when you care about your heart, exactly the boring things - a pitcher looking over to first, a batter stepping out and adjusting his gloves - those are just tiresome to the person who's interested. But to the person who's invested, it just makes everything all the more dramatic.
You can't fake comedy. You can't make it look beautiful or put an interesting bit of music on in the background: funny can only be funny if you're funny.
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