Top 1200 Comedy Writing Quotes & Sayings

I have to say that my background in comedy, of performing live, has been such a great foundation for what we do now on camera. I really value having that kind of experience. Because when you're doing comedy shows you're writing your own material and trying it out on people and you know people find funny and don't.

Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it. ... Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character. ... In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it's one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I'm writing it) against her own worst impulses.

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.

Sitcom writing is difficult because it's not just about writing jokes - there's a very fine balance between characters, plot, and comedy, that if you get one thing wrong, the whole castle comes falling down.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

I'm writing a political comedy that takes place in Canada in Quebec. It's funny. Saying political comedy is a little redundant but it's a first. I've never done any comedy per se.

There's sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy. But I do like the idea of being an auteur in the sense of writing and being in your own stuff.

I will do comedy until the day I die: inappropriate comedy, funny comedy, gender-bending, twisting comedy, whatever comedy is out there.

Horror is like comedy. Woody Allen's comedy is going to be very different from Ben Stiller's comedy which is going to be different from Adam Sandler's comedy which is going to be different from Judd Apatow's comedy. They're all comedy, but they're all very different types and you can enjoy all of them. Horror is the same way.

I think comedy is very easy. Its all in the writing. If the writing is good and you have good director it is good.

There is a lot of catarsis that passes itself off as art or comedy and I'm kind of critical of that. I think that just because you bare your soul or underwear or private moments it doesn't , or necessarily make for entertainment, or good writing, or funny writing.

At the end of the day I'm writing comedy. If you get too realistic as a comedy writer with your disasters, it stops being funny.

When I graduated, I was director of my school's sketch comedy group, and I knew that I wanted to be writing and performing my own sketch comedy. It kind of made me want to do my own one-person sketch group.

I find writing is the most fun I have in comedy.

You know, I think British comedy is very smart comedy. You don't get too much dumb comedy over here. Or at least I haven't seen it. If I'm wrong about that, I apologize to all the dumb comedy makers over here.

I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.

When I was in improv workshops or doing stand-up or writing comedy with others, or just doing comedy, I just laughed. Funny was funny; I loved to laugh. I always liked people I found generally funny.

Writing comedy is a superpower.

I’m trying to be the Jay-Z of comedy one day. I don’t know if there’s any comedy moguls out there, but I would love to be the first comedy mogul.

I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.

I think that's part of being a comedy writer. You have to be confident. If you're sitting around worrying about, like, oh my God, what are people going to think, then you're not writing comedy. You have to write what makes you laugh, and then the world hopefully laughs as well.

I would love to do a comedy, but comedy probably in the sense of a dark comedy like 'Californication,' that sort of thing. Yeah, sure, I think I'm funny.

Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.

I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.

I realized that I really enjoy writing comedy, and how important comedy is when you feel like total crap.

My acting has always been in the world of comedy, but in my writing, other than writing sketches, I really am drawn to the balance between comedy and drama. I like things that sort of toe that line of one minute you're in this emotional space and then all of the sudden something happens.

I found out I had a real love for comedy and comedy writing. The logic was, there weren't too many female comedians, so I thought I might as well try a field that had fewer competitors than the field I was in, which was acting, singing and dancing.

Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn't interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don't think in terms of comic dialogue.

Writing a comedy script is a difficult thing. I think if someone is attempting a comedy and then they fail then it's understood.

I knew I just loved comedy, and I think it was my parents who initially brought up the notion of me trying to do stand-up. I think I actually tried writing jokes just at home, just kind of sitting around. But it seemed like a very real way to step into the world of comedy.

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.

I love action movies, and I love comedy, and I love writing comedy, but the genre of action-comedy - or, at least, as it currently usually is - is just not something that I feel that compelled by, generally, because I find the action to be silly, or it's too slapstick, or the stakes feel low because people are joking in the middle of it.

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 think writing in a group, even though it can be a challenge - you have to be on your toes all the time - is the way the best comedy gets written. It's very, very collaborative. A lot of comedy writers are definitely introverted nerds.

What it is is that comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write. Anyone can write, and then you leave it to special effects to make it look good. But comedy, you've got to do some writing.

I'm trying to be the Jay-Z of comedy one day. I don't know if there's any comedy moguls out there, but I would love to be the first comedy mogul.

I feel like L.A. is more of a showcase, and Chicago is a pure comedy scene where you're doing comedy for comedy. You're doing comedy actually for the audience that's there.

At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

It bothers me when people say 'shock comic' or 'gross-out' because that was only one type of comedy I did. There was prank comedy. Man-on-the-street-reaction comedy. Visually surreal comedy. But you do something shocking, and that becomes your label.

I love the satire and skewering of comedy writing.

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.

I love comedy and did a lot of comedy in college. I was in an improv comedy group with my friends.

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.

In the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.

I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose - short pieces for my blog - because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy!

When we graduated [ from Cambridge], we were grabbed right into television. I was grabbed straight into the practice of writing comedy. It was all writing and performing. You wrote something in order for you to perform it.

I love writing comedy.

I've been spending quite a bit of time writing, acting, and making films. Because I'm doing all this extra writing, acting, and creating short comedy skits with my friends in improv shows, I feel like that's really filled out my confidence on the mic.

I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire.

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

I've been a musician and a songwriter for years, since I was a teenager, and made my living doing that on and off for a long time, so when it came to writing comedy material, it was the thing that came easiest to me, the most natural way of writing.

'Something Borrowed' is looking like a romantic comedy, but it's a comedy. It shines as a comedy; it's definitely not just about the romance. It's an honest depiction of the struggle between the characters. The comedy aspect will make it shine.

'Writing' always means 'not writing' to me because I will do anything to put it off. I think this is mainly because writing anything down and then handing it over to a third party - especially in comedy - is such an exposing act that you naturally want to delay the process.

I probably prefer comedy. Why? I'm not sure. I feel like the energy of a comedy is a better fit for me. I try to be a happy guy! It seems that most of my life has the energy more for a comedy than for drama. I'm grateful to do both, but I would have to lean towards the comedy side of acting.

I really love writing comedy. Writing romantic comedy is even nicer because you get to write about how insane we all act when we're falling in love.

When you have a writing partner and you're writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.

Comedy writing is the hardest, and yet there's so much that's relatable in it.

I've been a comedian for a long time so writing and performing is a big part of what I do. If anybody's doing comedy they should also work on writing.

I love good comedy. I don't like bad comedy. Of course, nobody loves bad comedy, but there's a lot of bad comedy out there.