A Quote by Tina Fey

You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at. — © Tina Fey
You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.
If I had a daughter, I would tell her certain things. I would tell her that it’s great to be smart, really smart - that being smart makes you strong. I would tell her that emotions are powerful, so don’t be afraid to show them. I would tell her that some people may judge you on how you look or what you wear - that’s just how it is - but you should keep your focus on what you say and do. I would tell her that she may see the world differently from boys, and that difference is essential and good.
I think it's because it's so different and it takes risks. Plus, it's really smart humor. It gives the audience credit in terms of not needing to tell them when to laugh. I love that about the show. There's no laugh track.
People wince when something is in bad taste. They laugh when it's funny. If it's too dirty or wrong, they won't laugh. But if it's a big, dirty, smart, funny laugh, they love it.
I always wondered, like, you know how you go to the family barbecue, and your uncle is that funny guy that you laugh at because he's family? That's how I felt with 'Fighter and the Kid.' People would laugh at my stuff, but it was always tough for me to tell. I just needed to see if there was something going on.
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
Laugh. Laugh as much as you can. Laugh until you cry. Cry until you laugh. Keep doing it even if people are passing you on the street saying, "I can't tell if that person is laughing or crying, but either way they seem crazy, let's walk faster." Emote. It's okay. It shows you are thinking and feeling.
I use a lot of humor, and I follow the saying that if you want to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh first, otherwise, they will shoot you. So I can tell you a joke and maybe you will laugh at the beginning. But it's not about telling jokes.
Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.
Nothing makes me happier than to have a smart person tell me why the show is smart, especially if I didn't intend that. I tend to be a very instinctual writer, and I don't plot shows out like, "This is my thesis and this is how I'm going to subtly sneak my thesis into this episode." I just approach it from, "We know these characters well, here are the situations that they're in, now how would they behave? What would the consequences be?" And it's always fun to see how people interpret that and dissect it afterward, and make me and the other writers seem probably smarter than we really are.
I don't do it often, but I do cry. I also laugh a lot; people tell me I'm funny and I do like to laugh.
I just may laugh at different things than most people. I laugh at mistakes. I laugh at how you recover from mistakes. I see when people go off their material and it's actually happening in front of you and that kind of stuff excites me.
You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart. He was really competitive; he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent.
I have a very high respect for professional comedians. What they do astonishes me. You have to be really smart and absorb everything, repackage it, bring it back to the person, and make them laugh at themselves. I can make people laugh during my talks because they didn't come to have me make them laugh. It's added value. So my job is way easier than that of a professional comic.
They think that, if we were just smart enough, we'd be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell 'em, and I do tell 'em, Oh, we're plenty smart, oh yeah - we know what's goin' on. And we don't like what's goin' on. And we're not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.
With me being in so many pain from when you have a betrayal from your best friend - who was my husband - and the girl got pregnant, I couldn't even get out of bed. The only thing that saved me was my stand-up. I would get on stage and just talk about stuff, and I made people laugh. A lot of women e-mail me and say, 'How do you smile? How do you laugh at something like this?' That's how I do it. I laugh because that's how I get through pain.
Stand up is really fun because if I think of a joke or a funny idea, then I can just go and tell some people and if they laugh, they laugh right away.
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