A Quote by Julia Davis
I think, in comedy, you only hit about one or two great characters in your career. Sometimes my character will be just a sketch... what is the funniest situation to put this person in?
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I'm a huge sketch comedy fan, and I think my love of sketch is reflected in my stand-up in that I do a lot of vignettes and voices and characters.
My experience is at The Groundlings Theater, where we created different characters and did sketch comedy. And sometimes the characters were outrageous, but they always came from a real place. So even working there, we had to create characters from the people that we knew.
I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.
When I graduated, I was director of my school's sketch comedy group, and I knew that I wanted to be writing and performing my own sketch comedy. It kind of made me want to do my own one-person sketch group.
There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.
'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.
God is much more concerned about your character than your career, because you will take your character into eternity, but not your career.
The embarrassment of a situation can, once you are over it, be the funniest time in your life. And I suppose a lot of my comedy comes from painful moments or experiences in life, and you just flip them on their head.
One of the great things about the longer you do a character, the more the writers start to understand your kind of character ticks and things that you like to do. The most exciting thing I think for a writer is when the characters just start speaking for themselves. You sit down at your keyboard and just stuff starts jumping out of their mouths. They just sort of wrote the scripts for themselves.
A sketch should be about two to three minutes, which is basically what most songs are. They're usually done by groups. Good examples of each build and have different parts and twists in them. I guess sketch would be the comedy version of music.
If you think of the people who are funny in your life, you'll note it's not because they tell jokes, it's because of their character. If you develop characters, then you'll know them, and you'll know how they'll speak. The comedy will come out of the character.
I think that if you just kind of try to throw together a sketch show, but you don't have any real vision for what you want to do with the sketch, I don't think your chances are very good. You know, "Let's just have a sketch show!" You have to do something different with it; you have to reinvent that form every so often.
I very easily decide in certain situations that I'm an outsider. That's just my own craziness. I think that I have sympathy for those characters who are like that, but I love it when the humor comes from a character who is serious about his situation - only the way he's thinking about it is all wrong, or the ways he's solving his problems are never going to work.
There are a lot of great jokes you can sit down and write, but that's just a written joke, versus the comedy of the situation. Ideally, you're pulling as much comedy out of the situation as you can.
There was a male sketch group in my college. I was like why isn't there a female sketch group? So then I started doing sketch comedy and all that stuff. It just happened.
I think bringing depth to characters means really needing to find out who this girl is, what is she passionate about, what makes her tick, what gets her going in life. So I did a lot of backstory for who she was and sometimes it comes across screen and sometimes it doesn't. You never know, because you're not the director, but you can only do your work and hope that it somehow subtly is infiltrated in that. But I think the characters I've played for the most part have depth, just not in the way that you think they do.
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