Top 1200 Improv Comedy Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I absolutely loved improv! I felt very much at home being onstage. It freed me to be all sorts of people other than myself. It was an escape from myself, if you will. I still love that creative freedom of improv and making people laugh.

Improv requires your audience to be informed about what improv is. With stand-up, anybody can sit down and watch stand-up and laugh at jokes.

I think the improv also helps with the imagination of dealing this person across from me who's not physically there. When you do an improv scene, you're usually working on a blank stage and creating the props and creating the environment.

I miss improv. I hate it in a way - watching it, doing it - but only because it's so challenging and nerve wracking. Improv is the only belief system I've ever experienced that directly works on how to be. Just how to be.

I did, like, one or two plays in high school, but I don't think I realized I wanted to do comedy until I got to college, and I started doing improv and saw the Upright Citizens Brigade perform and did workshops with them.

I was not one of those people who wanted to be a comedian when I was growing up. I liked comedy, but didn't know it was something you could do for a living. I actually wanted to be an attorney. I did do things on the side like improv and sketch comedy, but law was my focus. I was a very bookish, academic kid. When I got out of college, I was really unhappy. I had a great job that I should have loved, yet I was miserable. I slowly realized that was because I wasn't performing. So I just tried stand-up and fell in love with it after one performance.

The hardest part about improv is getting the audience to relax and enjoy themselves, because most improv is not very good, and the audience is nervous for the performers the whole time. Not that they don't even like the show, but they feel bad for the performers.

I know now for a fact that improv can't hold a candle to doing standup. It's not the same buzz, it just isn't. It feels infantile to me at times. When you see guys who do it really well, great. But improv needs a rewrite.

I went to a French immersion school, and French-Canadian improv is a big thing, and we had an improv team at school, and 12 of us would get up and make things up against other elementary schools. I'd always wanted to perform, and that was just another extension 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 love improv-ing, you know, from very early on when I started acting the school that I went to and everything was very big on ad-libbing and improv-ing and messing things up, so I feel very comfortable doing stuff like that.

When I moved from Boston to L.A., I floundered. I definitely did time at the Improv and the Comedy Store, making 20 bucks a night. I learned how to be a starving comic. I was an in-debt comic: I ate well on loan.

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’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.

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.

We kind of lost a lot of that and puppeteers were sticking to the script and we thought everything needed to get a lot funnier, so we thought we would go to a good improv comedy instructor.

Comedy chose me. I always had this urge to be silly that I couldn't control. I remember my father having me read 'The Three Little Pigs' to him, and I would improv all around the story, like when one pig's house got blown over, he put on his gym shoes and took off.

When I moved to New York at 22, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I took an improv class, and the first scene I did, I felt like 'I want to do this for the rest of my life.' It was the first time I ever felt like that about anything. I tried to make a living off improv.

In comedy, you have to do all of the same stuff you do in drama and then put the comedy on top of it. You, the actor, are aware of the comedy but the character is oblivious. And you have to have a sense of humor.

Improv seemed to replace stand-up, which was very big before that. Stand-up comedy was real hot in the late '80s and through the '90s.

It's great when improv is encouraged. It's a really fun thing. It depends on who's in the movie and how their process works, as well. It takes a director who is open to that because you have a script, but then something funny could happen on set. So, to have people around you who encourage improv is really exciting.

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.

Many improv groups give off the same positive annoying vibe that I associate with Christian Young Life groups with shows that more resemble children playing than a comedy performance.

If improv gets reckless, you can feel it. A lot of shows try to do that, I find. When improv is done sloppily. It betrays the story. It can slow down the energy of the story you're telling.

I love physical comedy. I love Oscar Wilde, I love Shakespeare comedies, I love improv.

I will say I miss teaching improv way more than I miss performing improv.

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 joined an improv comedy group. Ours was named 'Quick Fire!' with an exclamation point. It was when I auditioned for that team and got on it and felt like... I'll just say I felt like I was good at it.

I think in the inception and creation of the characters, improv was the most important part for me, because I wanted to feel at home in those characters. I wanted to feel like I could commit to them. And so much of improv is saying yes and committing, so I think that's where the improv came in. Even if I'm saying yes to the X across the room from me, or the tennis ball on a stick, I have to stay alive.

'Breaking In' is a very different office comedy and a caper comedy. Aside from 'Chuck,' there is no half-hour comedy that does stuff like that.

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'm not a huge fan of improv theater or improv sports or whatever, because it still just looks like a tool. It looks like a technique to me.

I love creating characters that are ridiculous and flawed. To me, the most important thing about comedy is the joy it can bring to the performers and the audience alike. I love making people laugh and not over-thinking things. Some of my favorite moments are when I am doing an improv scene with friends, and I can't stop laughing during it.

When I was coming up the DC Improv was considered the best Improv out there. It's always been high quality stuff coming out of there.

My rule of thumb is to always do what's on the page first. Then you can talk to your director about playing with it. Improv frees me up in a character, but I would be mortified if the writers who agonized over their words assumed I thought my improv was more valuable.

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.

That's what's so great, I get to play any character in the world. And I think that's one of the things that makes doing 'Comedy Bang Bang' or other improv podcasts so fun, as well as my own, is that you can really explore a character deeply for a long period of time that is nothing like yourself.

The thing that's frustrating about improv is that even if you have the best show in the world, it's over when it's over. You get to build stand-up - I really like that aspect of it. I like writing jokes, and you don't get to do that in improv.

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 like doing live things and plays. You can perfect the laugh or extend the laugh, you can get them on a roll. Versus improv, which I hate. Put it all together. They're more vignettes. Improv makes me slightly anxious because I feel for them.

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 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.

There's different kinds of improv. There's Second City improv where you try to slowly build a nice sketch. There's stuff you do in college coffee houses where you just go joke, joke, joke. Bring another funny character with a funny hat on his head. Christopher Guest is more the line of trying to get a story out.

One thing my old improv teacher taught me is when you're not in the improv scene and you're standing back watching your partners, you ask, 'What does the scene need?'

I know how to have a conversation, but I've never done improv. I've never taken improv classes.

I did improv for about 10 years professionally, and before that, I had done it in high school as part of an improv team. It was definitely a big part of my upbringing.

Improv is more than just spitting out a bunch of funny stuff that's unrelated to the material. You have to stay in character, you have to react and respond as the character you're trying to play. You have to service the story, and I think improv training has helped with my listening, responding, and my audition technique. It's sounds so silly, but it's true. Because not only do you improvise during the audition, but once you get the part, they'll say, "Throw away everything. Just improv this scene. Do whatever you want." Someone could panic if they're not used to doing something like that.

I don't think that many people today, understand the nature of what an improv does for an actor in a specific setting. What an improv does for an actor is help him find the life; it's the life that an actor's after.

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.

Well, actually, the Second City thing came about because I was taking a few improv classes there. I thought that the improv classes would help with my wrestling career, which it has.

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.

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.

'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.

Improv is like writing. It's actually a different discipline to acting. It helps acting greatly, but it's completely different. It's the same side of your brain when you write as when you improv.

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.

When I finished my residency in New Orleans, I went to L.A. where I would work as a doctor during the day, and then at night I would actually go to The Improv and do standup, all the while kind of cultivating my comedy resume.

In 2002, I was taking an improv class because, as a white male with glasses who was born between 1978 and 1994, it's legally required that I take at least one improv class in my life.

I was invited to do an all-female improv festival in Portland called All Jane, No Dick. The person running it asked me if I had a female improv team, and I just said yes and then figured out who I would want to bring with me. We had such a fun show together that we decided that we should keep doing it.

I worked with the Groundlings, doing sketch comedy and improv at a theater here in L.A. It was my hobby, but I took classes and stayed passionate about it because it's what I wanted to do. It just fit. It takes a while before you can actually make money at it. I worked for years.

Improv changed my life in the best way. I gained so much confidence and really learned how to use my sense of humor to do something other than make sarcastic comments to the TV, though that remains one of my best skills. I stayed in Chicago for college mainly to continue doing improv, which was an awesome decision for me.