A Quote by John Cleese

When you've been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don't know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be.
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
A rap is a tweaked version of comedy, because comedy came first. People weren't spitting before they were doing comedy. Comedy has been relevant for years. It's the same art form, pretty much. Discovering that and applying it, I think that has made my stand-up better.
I still don't really know what my style is. I like a lot of different kinds of comedy, I like watching it and I like being inventive and original. That's the problem with doing a longer set - you can't do every joke that you have because some stuff contradicts other stuff. Even when you know that the audience knows that you're joking and it's not true, you still can't do a joke about your family dying and then later talk about your Mom. I mean you want to keep some kind of cohesive order going.
We just, you know, we're just sort of doing it like Bewitched, because we just think that the character of Kenny is so specific and so outrageous and so fun. And by far the hardest character to cast out of everybody to find someone who was capable of, you know, doing, you know, the comedy and just with the broadness and to be also just a really brilliant actor, you know, to do naturalism.
I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.
In comedy, I often see so many weird race jokes, and it's like, there is no racial diversity in your show to even make those race jokes. The problem is that there is no one in the back to say, 'Hey, that race joke is not really appropriate.'
I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.
I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that - you don't even know if you're failing in drama, but you do know when you're failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don't hear anybody laughing, you know that you've failed.
Well, the coffeehouse audiences never know what they're going to get, and all the comics are different, as opposed to when you go to a club, and they're pretty much all telling jokes with set-ups and punchlines. Coffeehouse audiences are the most forgiving: They really listen, which is the best part.
I've been doing comedy longer than I haven't been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on 'The Tonight Show.' There's truly nothing like it; it's intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.
On 'Late Night,' it's like we're all in on the joke. That's what I wanted it to be. I'm not doing something sneaky. Inside jokes, I don't like those. We can all ride together, and everyone's on the same thing going, 'Aha, I know where you're going here.'
And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.
A comedy can actually get funnier and funnier. Even though you know the joke, you enjoy it so much, it's the facial expression, you laugh. The laugh doesn't wear off. It could be with you for thirty years.
When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.
If there's one regret I have of my time in comedy it's that I really I was so obsessed with improv for so many years and I exclusively did improv for the first 6 years or 7 years. I was doing comedy and then I started doing solo work and stand up, a bit of writing, making videos, and really going into it on that end.
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