A Quote by Tom Hiddleston
If you play it straight it's funny - the best comedy is always played straight down the middle. The adjustment is understanding from the screenplay that a moment is hilarious.
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The best comedy is always played straight down the middle.
A silly comedy needs a straight guy, and that guy needs to be as straight as possible. The moment you start playing straight you're not straight anymore, you're bent straight, so it really requires the usual serious, straight-forward analysis and research, looking into it and finding the dramatic function, all of what you do until you feel you've collected enough points to safely and securely play the part.
I'd love to do comedy. I'd probably have to get my laughing fits in check, because generally if I've done comedy, I'm usually the straight character that plays against the very obviously funny character, so that's really hard when the person is really hilarious.
When I'm playing comedy, I never do 'jokes.' Sometimes I'll deliver a line in a way I think is more likely to get a laugh, but all the best comedy is played straight. What's funny is the way it hits the world around it or the way it hits the other characters.
Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.
When someone who is known for being comedic does something straight, it's always "a big breakthrough" or a "radical departure." Why is is no one ever says that if a straight actor does comedy? Are they presuming comedy is easier?
The truth is, good actors are always looking to do something different. They are dying to play slightly odder characters or work on movies that aren't straight down the middle.
All jokes aside, it's a very difficult job playing the straight man. Jason is potentially the most brilliant straight man that ever was because he's also really funny while doing it, which is even harder. I've always seen myself playing characters who are flawed. We use comedy in our lives to obscure the drama.
I think the best advice I'd say to any actor when you do comedy is play it straight.
Your hair looks funny," Lief said, as soon as the Ugloids left. "It stands straight up!" No," said Nick, intensely irritated, "It's hanging straight down." Lief just gave him an upside-down shrug. "Up is down in China and you're part-Chinese.
I'm not at all funny. I can do dark comedy pretty well, but straight-up comedy, I don't know. I'm much darker. I've been like that since I was 3 years old.
I'm not at all funny. I can do dark comedy pretty well, but straight-up comedy, I don't know. I'm much darker. I've been like that since I was 3 years old
I've never been turned down for a role because I'm gay. I'm a character actor, and that's probably why. I don't find Hollywood, in my own experience, to be homophobic. ... But I do think the straight folks will continue to play the straight roles.
One of my favorite comedy performances of all time is Charles Grodin in 'Midnight Run,' and in a lot of things he's done. I think he's hilarious as the straight man, playing it real.
Gay people, certainly gay people of my generation, at least of a certain echelon - middle-class Americans - have binocular vision. We all are raised by straight people and grow up with straight people and in straight families, but we all have this totally other way of looking at things. Increasingly as I get deeper into middle age, that is why I resist plunking for any one camp. Because I have this delicious sort of experience of being able to see things in two ways.
When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.
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