A Quote by Rob Walton

Comedy, at least the way I write comedy, is just drama with jokes. — © Rob Walton
Comedy, at least the way I write comedy, is just drama with jokes.
Having written both comedy and drama, comedy's harder because the fear of failure's so much stronger. When you write a scene and you see it cut together, and it doesn't make you laugh, it hurts in a way that failed drama doesn't. Failed drama, it's all, 'That's not that compelling,' but failed comedy just lays there.
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
Comedy doesn't come easy for me. I've only done 2 movies that are really comedy-style films and I have to work at them. And they're just as scary in a way. I hate labeling all these things; comedy, love stories, dark drama, whatever.
I've always tended to write comedy, but I'd hate to just write some kind of sitcom or a lighthearted series of jokes and slapstick. I wanted to talk about some deeper things within the comedy.
My experience - and it might be just the kind of comedy that I do, which is usually sketch comedy - is that there's a lot more texture and subplot in drama than in comedy.
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.
People have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.
I wrote a play at drama school, which was a dark comedy - people laughed and cried. And then my script of one of the shows was picked up by a comedy sketch company... so then I had to write comedy.
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.
As a writer, I haven't delved into dramatic writing. As an actor, I could always, even more so than comedy, do drama. When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest.
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.
I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression. I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama. There's a lot of bullshit drama that leaves you totally cold. And there's a lot of wasted comedy time too. But when you get something honest, it doesn't matter what label you give it.
I didn't want to do comedy again. It is way harder when you are doing comedy. You can't just concentrate on the character and the plot. In comedy, the writers, instead of obsessing about character and plot, obsess about the jokes.
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.
To be honest, I'm probably more of a comedy person, actually. I really enjoy the comedy stuff, and I've got some things I'll be working on that I think are just different ways of combining genres in comedy and drama and action.
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