A Quote by Peter Billingsley

I think good comedy is a commitment to the absurd in that the situation for the actors should be virtually played like a drama. — © Peter Billingsley
I think good comedy is a commitment to the absurd in that the situation for the actors should be virtually played like a drama.
I think if you turn down the volume on the good comedy, you should not even know if it's a comedy or not. It should look like a drama.
Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.
Most of the time, my favorite drama has comedy in it as well. I think most good dramas have comedy in there. And all of the dramatic actors I look up to are also very funny.
When you do a good comedy show, you have to understand that if you don't have drama or sad moments, then the comedy turns into a clowning kind of situation.
Comedy is more difficult than drama. I think it's really difficult to make someone laugh because people have very different comedic sensibilities. In drama, you can get away with being a great actor and surrounded by great actors and having good writing. But in comedy you have to listen and you have to perform with a certain rhythm, because if you don't, it's like playing a wrong note in the orchestra and you can hear the off key and it will fall flat and you won't get that instant response.
There are two types of actors. There's the actors who can acknowledge that they could never do standup comedy. Then there's the pretentious ones, who believe that acting is harder than standup comedy. I definitely don't think it is. I also think making a comedy is substantially harder than making a drama.
A really good comedy, I think, is played as if it was real, and it's the circumstances that make it amusing. And I think that the - the inverse or the reverse is true for drama.
I love doing comedy. You don't get many good comedy scripts. They're rare. But, I do love playing comedy. Even in drama, I like to try to find the humor because I think it's very human.
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.
I like comedy, but I like comedy as a device in drama. It's more interesting for me to use comedy to seduce people into thinking about something serious. If you want to hit a beat in a drama, you can distract people with a little comedy, and you can punch them in the gut with some emotion.
Because I was familiar with Taika's Watiti work and there's a very subversive, funny streak amongst all of them. I don't think he turned [Hunt for the Wilderpeople] into a sort of drama, there's too much dark material underneath it for it to be a comedy; it wasn't designed to be a comedy. I think it's a comedy... I think it's a drama that's funny; which is different.
I'd like to do more dramatic roles but I would never give up comedy to do it. I've seen a lot of actors that do a complete 180 degrees and say: "I'm done with comedy, I want to be taken seriously." I take my comedy very seriously and I want to be taken seriously because of my comedy. I think it's more fun for me. I enjoy laughing and attempting to make people laugh. So I'd like to do more drama but I'd never do the 180 thing.
People seem to want to give 'Flowers' a comedy or a comedy-drama label. I suppose it's closer to comedy-drama, but it feels like it requires a whole new definition all of its own.
Drama is played at the pace of chess... or billiards... or poker. Engrossing? Sure. But comedy is played at the jubilant, high-octane speed of sports like basketball or hockey.
When you are dealing with something that's crazy, you still want actors to play characters and find the reality of the situation, no matter how absurd the situation is.
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