I think that for the most part, when I started doing comedy, it had become very commercialized.
Larry David

It's that I wasn't suited to do the kind of comedy that these people were coming to hear - mainstream comedy.
Larry David

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.
Tina Fey

The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
Miguel de Cervantes

A woman doing comedy doesn't offend me, but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.
Jerry Lewis

Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.
Rowan Atkinson

I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography.
Kathy Griffin

Friends applaud, the comedy is over.
Ludwig van Beethoven

When you make a drama, you spend all day beating a guy to death with a hammer, or what have you. Or, you have to take a bite out of somebody's face. On the other hand, with a comedy, you yell at Billy Crystal for an hour, and you go home.
Robert De Niro

The best comedy I ever did was when people didn't know who I was.
Chevy Chase

My mom and dad are both in stand-up comedy, so that's where I started, that's where I got everything. My roots are holding the mic.
Pauly Shore

I had always fancied a go at the comedy and when it started to go reasonably well and the opportunity arose for me to move into it full time, I just couldn't turn it down. I just took the risk, and I just wanted to see if it would work and thankfully it did.
Jo Brand

Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable.
Paul Lynde

Comedy is tragedy plus time.
Carol Burnett

Comedy is much more difficult than tragedy-and a much better training, I think. It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh.
Vivien Leigh

I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
John Cleese

When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.
John Cleese

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.
John Cleese

The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
James Thurber

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
James Thurber