I mean Ally McBeal was sort of the closest thing I can think of to kind of being a comedy-drama but that had its own kind of style that meant it got kind of big sometimes. But it was a great show.
I think 'Paper Moon' is a comedy-drama. 'What's Up, Doc?' was the most severe comedy, but my favorite film of my own is 'They All Laughed,' which is a kind of bittersweet comedy.
The character of 'Mama' is so ambitious in a way that everything I did was always on the verge of being almost funny. So you have to be very careful with that. It's that sort of face that you don't usually see in horror.
Comedy scares me a lot. I feel like it's way harder than drama. I think my safety net is definitely drama, and I would love to kind of be able to be able to push into the comedy world and do something kind of like a Christopher Guest kind of style show. That, to me, is my kind of comedy. Like, Ricky Gervais comedy. That's my kind of thing.
Comedy scares me a lot. I feel like it's way harder than drama. I think my safety net is definitely drama and I would love to kind of be able to be able to push into the comedy world and do something kind of like a Christopher Guest kind of style show. That, to me, is my kind of comedy. Like, Ricky Gervais comedy. That's my kind of thing.
All good writers across the board, if they're dealing with real tragedy, they will give you comedy in it. And if they're dealing with real comedy, there will be tragic moments in it.
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.
Bittersweet is kind of my own favourite style because I want to be able to cry to the same song that I also can laugh to.
So I always respected the guys who were trying to do it on their own without taking a handout from a big organization. They were trying to create their own thing, the DIY style, which is sort of always been my style, kind of a makeshift survival mode and really just kind of forging your own path.
I think I'm one of those guys who was sort of always in comedy. I thought of myself - and other people seemed to think of me - as funny from a very young age. I was a very young comedy nerd and I even did sketch comedy in high school and college. I wrote and shot sketches on video and acted in them.
Comedy comes from tragedy, and being Iranian in America from 1979 on had been quite tragic. In stand-up comedy, I was able to take the reality and exaggerate it.
We always wanted to make a comedy that was a little bit more than that, which had tragic elements to it... that people engaged with - an intelligent comedy essentially.
I think the only real referent for anybody writing drama is probably Hamlet. You have the most extreme tragic drama, this sort of blood-boltered thing, but it's also very funny, which is simply a matter of the playwright being alive and observant and entertaining, and understanding not only the world but what will play.
The scariest thing about screening a comedy ... if you screen a drama, you know, there's no real way to tell in real time if people are enjoying it or not. But in a comedy, it's like, if people aren't laughing, it's sort of scary.
The scariest thing about screening a comedy... if you screen a drama, you know, there's no real way to tell in real time if people are enjoying it or not. But in a comedy, it's like, if people aren't laughing, it's sort of scary.
Basically, I was always very interested in comedy, but I was much more sort of academic. And then, after college, loaded with my art history degree, I decided to go work at Comedy Central as a temp.