A Quote by Lucy Davis
Sometimes if you do a multi-camera comedy, often there's rules, like, 'We've got to have three main laughs per page.'
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It would be great to do another television show that was a multi-camera because the hours are so wonderful and you can be a good mom at the same time. The problem is, there aren't a lot of multi-camera shows that I personally like. My aesthetic is more geared toward single-camera shows.
My mom was like, 'You talk so much. You have too much energy. Why don't you just join the play or something?' It was a comedy, and I got laughs in rehearsal, but onstage, in front of a whole audience, I got a lot of laughs.
I was open to anything. That doesn't mean I would do anything, it just means I was open to anything. I've met for dramas, single camera comedy, multi-camera comedy. I take each script as an individual project.
I always have to come back to shows to take out the improvements actors have put in. Laughs are addictive, and sometimes they're good laughs, and sometimes they're bad laughs.
The one thing that I'm really obsessed with is multi-camera comedy. It is a form that is unique to network television.
[on making the transition from the comedy "Mary Tyler Moore" (1970) to its dramatic spin-off series "Lou Grant" (1977)] We were really worried about changing over from a three-camera, half-hour comedy to a one-camera, full-hour drama. The audience wasn't ready for the switch - even CBS billed us in their promos as a comedy. In fact, the whole thing was impossible. But we didn't know that.
Comedy has no rules, per se.
My favorite work is The Full Monty because I got an Oscar for it. But it was really hard work at the time. Sometimes comedy is not a bundle of laughs to actually do.
My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.
It's a hard job to get the camera to see it like you see it. Sometimes you have it just the way you want it, and then you look in the camera and you don't have the balance. The main thing is to get the camera to see it the way you see it.
My first time on stage was the class "graduation" at the Comedy Store. It was awesome. Everything got huge laughs and I just thought I knew how to do comedy.
Sometimes when I do a joke and it doesn't get a lot of laughs, it kind of feels like I'm doing jazz. That's kinda cool because jazz is cool, but sometimes jazz sucks ... Maybe I'm the Kenny G of comedy.
When you watch an audience watching my movies, you realize that nobody laughs at the same time. Some people enjoy a beat, and then another group of people are laughing at a sight gag, and then someone laughs where nobody laughs before. They're not timed like a comedy. You're not supposed to laugh at every joke. You decide.
The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called 'Poetics.' It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules.
When you do comedy, the audience is not your boss. They are your collaborators and when you collaborate with someone you don't have to listen to everything they think or say. Sometimes you're not getting the laughs you want or at the place you want but that doesn't mean it's not funny. It means you haven't explored it enough. I'll get laughs in the places I don't want them and that makes me realize the direction I want to go in.
Multi-camera's fun because you have the immediacy of the audience and just being able to tell the story more or less straight through. The thing I like about single-camera is that you have the luxury of shooting a lot of different options.
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