Because I've done so many hour dramas, people tend to think of you as more of a dramatic actor and don't see you as doing comedy.
I don't watch a lot of comedy. For relaxation and escape, I watch shows about how people survive bear attacks. Or old episodes of 'Law and Order,' the Benjamin Bratt/Jerry Orbach era.
Right now, I'd like to just continue on a series where I am doing good work with a balance of comedy and drama. That and do occasional features and movies.
I want to educate people and deliver news that isn't just surrounded by Charlie Sheen. I'd like to be able to do the serious stuff in conjunction with the comedy.
There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
You can't get all of your news from Jon Stewart, especially since it's a comedy show.
I love good comedy. I don't like bad comedy.
Our first gig was a battle of the bands. We did 45 minutes of comedy and never played a note - and we won!
About 25 years ago, I was in an apartment, and next door, they put on the radio, so I struck the wall with my fist, but they did not put the radio down. I took a tool and banged until I made a hole through the wall. It was like a comedy movie.
I'd like to do a romantic comedy.
Sometimes, comedy feels like the kid brother of drama, trying to get attention by being the class jokester. But it's actually really hard to tell a story while also making people laugh. It's like trying to do two jobs at once.
I'm really not feeling one way or the other with comedy or drama, I'm just sort of doing projects that I've been finding really fun to be a part of.
The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.
Even the shows or movies that we know are not going to change the world, I love this. I love 'em. I'm a movie fan. I'm a nerd of any kind. I love a big studio comedy as much as I love the teeniest tiniest of indie. I'm not a snob in that way. I really do like a big, big studio comedy.
I also want to return to doing stand-up. I've become frightened of live audiences. This is a really telling sign that I need to go back on the comedy circuit again.
I went to school with Steven Wright, who was the shyest guy I knew, and one day someone suddenly told me that he was in a club doing standup comedy. I went down to his club and he was great. Another friend of mine, who was pretty much a thief by trade, was hosting the show. So I thought, 'If these guys can do it, then so can I.'
Comedy is harder, because if there's no laughs, it's pretty bad. But drama, if there's no reaction, you can say, 'Well, it's not their cup of tea. Maybe it's too heavy for the audience.'
Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
'The Simpsons' is like Charlie Parker or Marlon Brando or Richard Pryor: Comedy couldn't go back to the way it was after 'The Simpsons' came out.
I like doing comedy, I like doing drama. Naturally I like to do, I like doing dramas, I like conflict, and when I do a comedy, you know, I've found that, like, romantic comedy is the trickiest one, because often it's neither: it's not romantic and it's not funny. So, like, I like a comedy that's biting. It's biting humor or really quirky humor.
I've an idea for doing a Situation Comedy myself but its always difficult to get people to listen to you because they like to put their own ideas forward.
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.
I was doing a college show for the first time, and there was this 20-year-old gay male who's been diabetic his entire life. He said, 'I really wanna get into stand-up.' I was like, 'Oh, my God, do you realize how interesting and inherently funny you are? Go do all the comedy that you wanna do.' I care about that.
The comedy in 'Star Trek' is always very subtle, if it's there at all.
My favorite genre of movies growing up was the romantic comedy.
The most fun I ever had on a movie was working with Albert Brooks. He's the caviar of comedy. I mean, nobody's funnier; nobody is smarter than Albert Brooks.
It's a director's job to tell a story and he's very well versed in telling stories with a bit of comedy in them and keeping the pace of the movie right and that's exactly what he did. He was observant of a world he didn't understand but he told a wonderful story.
Eddie Murphy did '48 Hrs.' because that was the only movie offered to him. And he killed it. Bill Cosby did 'I Spy' because that was the TV show he was offered. But now, there are networks dedicated to comedy, and the Internet... it's so easy for comedians to not do things that aren't true to them.
I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.
But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.
We actually did quite a lot of comedy on 'Xena'. The whole show was very tongue-in-cheek.
Now, where does my comedy come from, like, as a human being? Yeah, when I was a kid I was dyslexic and had to go to special-ed every day and felt stupid about that and got very witty to defend myself.
Honestly we never lied to people about who we were. Usually the wackier interviews came to pass because the interview subjects, aware that we were Comedy Central, just wanted to get their stories out.
Writing comedy is an exposing thing because you're putting yourself on the line with every joke you write, and although you can't second-guess an audience, if you want to be successful, you have to write stuff people like.
We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.
Sometimes my mum is very disapproving of my comedy.