Category: Comedy Books

I recently finished a great comedy book, “And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft” by Mike Sacks. I got a ton of useful quotes from it, so this is part three in a rather long series of posts. I recommend buying the whole book, as there is a lot of insight inside. Since the book is interview style based, I’ve put the writer’s name above all of the quotes that are attributed to him.

IRVING BRECHER

“I didn’t even think about it, really. I just thought they were funny. I didn’t know any better.” (109)

“The circus is funny on its own. And when you throw in more funny, it becomes too much. You need a solid framework.” (112)

Q: So the Marx Brothers films were shown to audiences and then tweaked in the editing room?
“No, not the films. The brothers would travel around the country performing the script live.” (113)

“I don’t believe that you can teach anybody to be a top comedy writer. If anything, you have to teach yourself.” (115)

“I would say that if you think you’re funny, then do it. As long as people genuinely respond to what you produce, keep at it. If their laughs seem genuine, keep writing. And don’t stop. Never stop.” (117)

BOB ODENKIRK

“We would ask ourselves about every sketch, “Is it funny? Really, truly funny? Or do we just think it’s funny because we really want it to be funny?” That doesn’t sound very scientific, but I think there’s an important truth there. We took this very seriously. It was very, very important to us. Second: What is this sketch about? That was a little challenging sometimes, because we’d have an idea that seemed funny, but the sketch didn’t really have anything to say.” (122)

“When writers would pitch ideas at meetings, I would talk at length about every idea. Because when you shit on a writer’s idea quickly, they either clam up or they pitch ideas just for the sake of pitching them and just to sort of waste time. They know everything is going to get shit on, and they’re more apt to pitch something that even they don’t believe in. so you get this list of shitty pitches that are being bandied about.” (125)

“My feeling was “Brian, you are a funny guy. You wrote this because you saw something funny here. What is it? What was funny to you? Because if we can all understand why you thought it was funny, then maybe we can make it great, or maybe we can all agree that it is not very good. But you didn’t intentionally just write a piece of shit.” (126)

“Then people get older, and they just don’t want to hear a new idea. They want to sit back and watch the same people do the same thing they did last week. That’s what TV exists for – it exists to be a mild sedative.” (129)

“Robert Smigel used to talk about finding the core joke of your sketch, which was something that struck me as a great lesson and one of the first things that a writer should think about when it comes to sketch comedy.” (132)

TODD HANSON

“How many people can say that something like that happened to them? That they and their friends have this little group in which they did this little fun thing together and then it ended up becoming internationally respected? Most people go through their entire lives without ever having anything like this happen. They get married, they have kids, they grow old, and they die. And nothing like this ever happens to them. But it happened to me. That’s amazing. What are the chances it’s going to happen twice? I’m going to go out on a limb and say probably zero. But don’t get me wrong. I still complain every day.” (137)

“I don’t think there is any point in making a joke that is not an honest joke.” (138)

“Everyone on the staff felt that it was just something to do where we would feel less like we were wasting our lives. Nobody ever had a goal of getting paid, let alone thinking we were going ot become media figures or have our work read all over the world. It was just something you did two nights a week when your shift ended.” (139)

“I don’t care if we are outside of the mainstream – I prefer it that way.” (140)

“People will often ask, “How do I get a job writing comedy?” And I just … it just annoys the fuck out of me. I always answer: “You do it for free for ten years and then, if you are really lucky, you get to write humor as a full-time job.” And they look at me like, “That’s not what I want to do.” (140)

Q: Any advice for those readers who dream of writing for The Onion?
“Start your own paper. Do your own thing. That’s what I would recommend to anybody who wants to do anything, not just write for The Onion. Do it for free and have fun. Whether it’s writing comedy or making music or painting or performing interpretive dance. If you want to do something creative, you should have a better reason for wanting to do it than to make money. If you want to make money, my advice is to sell shoes or go into banking.” (141)

“Comedy is extremely hard. It’s not just like, “this is so great!” It’s a hell of a grind.” (141)

“Mark Twain said, “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.” He also said, “There is no humor in heaven.” (147)

BEN KARLIN

“Three things are needed to be successful in comedy, but I think it applies to almost everything. First, you need natural talent. Second, you need skill development. Third, you need ambition. Everyone’s ratio is different, but the most successful people have all of them.” (147)

MARSHALL BRICKMAN

“TV’s a monster. It just eats up material. It’s impossible to be continuously good. That’s why I’m amazed when I see a TV show that’s good consistently, night after night, week after week.” (151)

“I’ve always thought that television exists for the audience as a kind of parental entity. If it’s on TV, then it’s been certified by someone, somewhere. And if Johnny did a joke about Nixon or the mayor or whomever – then it became oaky to do jokes about that person.” (151)

“It’s easy to write for someone who’s already established a persona.” (152)

“It’s the hardest thing to develop a persona. That’s why movies and plays about fictional comedians are almost never truly convincing. Because it takes years for the audience to help a comedian shape a comedic persona.” (152)

“Developing a comic character requires a collaboration with the audience. It’s the only way you can do it. You have to get out there and do a variety of material. Over time, certain things, statistically, will continue to work, and other things will drop away, and the audience will tell you what seems correct for you – for what you project onstage as a personality.” (153)

“A lot of material was taken out because the audience just doesn’t care how clever the authors are. They only want a good story. And they’re right.” (155)

“After watching it, we thought, “Where’s the relationship?” When people come to me with ideas, sometimes they say, “I want to do a story about a war” or “I want to do a story about a hospital.” And I’ll always say, “Tell me the story in terms of a relationship.” (157)

“It’s a mistake to think that what you’re seeing up on the stage or on the screen is what the author intended. It isn’t. it’s always the result of a hundred compromises and accidents, both good and bad, and if you’re lucky, you get lucky.” (158)

“The great rule I learned from Woody is that when you get in a room with another person, you’re both responsible for the result – assuming that there’s a reasonably equal level of talent.” (159)

“Even though a great line or idea might be uttered by one person, it may have been triggered or stimulated by what the other party said.” (159)

“What I like to do is to turn ninety degrees from something that’s headed towards sentimental and undercut it.” (161)

MITCH HURWITZ

“I put in “call forwards,’ which were new for me. I inserted hints of events that hadn’t happened yet. And, of course, there’s no way you can get laughs out of that.” (170)

“I’m sure there are many great comic voices who really don’t quite understand what they’re doing – who are just true originals. But the rest of us tend to understand what already exists and then try to go further with it.” (173)

“In any creative endeavor, there needs to be progression. If there is no progression – no innovation – you’re finished.” (173)

“One of the key ingredients with humor is surprise.” (176)

“The system behind TV development is designed to fail. If you, as a producer, jump through all the hoops that the network asks you to jump through, the show probably won’t work. If you look at the success of the best shows, almost all are a result of someone breaking the rules.” (177)

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4

I recently finished a great comedy book, “And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft” by Mike Sacks. I got a ton of useful quotes from it, so this is part two in a rather long series of posts. I recommend buying the whole book, as there is a lot of insight inside. Since the book is interview style based, I’ve put the writer’s name above all of the quotes that are attributed to him.

DAN MAZER

“Most of the comedy writers I know are complete disasters socially. You put them in a room together, and it’s just a car crash. It’s horrible.” (56)

“They have the same type of childhood. Not necessarily unhappy childhoods so much as lonely ones.” (56)

“My mum would have been proud if I were a serial killer. She would’ve boasted that I’d murdered thirteen prostitutes and left no forensic evidence.” (57)

“I still don’t go out much. But I do think it’s vital to leave the house and meet people and explore life, to get inspiration for your work. The scourge of comedy is when it eats itself – when comedy writers watch sitcoms and think, Oh, you know, such and such a show is great. Let’s do something a bit similar to that. I think that’s wrong, really. I think the idea is to live life and take inspiration from that experience, as opposed to just getting inspiration from other artists and their work.” (57)

“At the end of my second year, I told my parents, “Look I’m not going to be a lawyer. I’m going to try and make a career in comedy.” I think my parents just ignored it and pretended it wasn’t happening, because it was just too traumatic for them. They already pictured me in a barrister’s wig and had probably already told their friends I was a lawyer.” (59)

“You find little bits here and there, and you toil away, and you do things you think are funny, and you make a nice living, and people might talk about something you wrote. But occasionally you might find a nugget. You just find this thing that is completely different and special, and you have a moment when you just know. At that point, you have to trust that instinct and really go with it.” (61)

“I think we hold a mirror up to people. We don’t edit things to make people look more stupid or ignorant. A lot of people come out of the Ali G interviews looking great.” (61)

“It’s one thing to do something funny, and that’s great, and all you can do as a comedy writer is to write funny things and hope that people find them. But the idea that so many people found this character and he became such a phenomenon is incredible to me.” (63)

“It was a genuine pop-culture phenomenon. And I think if you try to go out and create something like that, it won’t happen; it was just a weird confluence of events.” (63)

“Americans are generally more polite. That is, up until the point when they snap. And then when they snap, they snap instantly and fiercely. There’s just this moment, and then the switch flicks, and that’s it.” (64)

“That’s half the process: finding the right people to interview.” (65)

“I think some performers have one or two of those things. Some have brains. Some are funny. And some are daring. But Sacha has all three. And that’s a unique combination.” (68)

“We probably have a file of scripts and jokes that extends to about three thousand pages. We write so much material for each three-minute segment. And Sacha is brilliant at keeping it all sort of filed together in his head. He’s able to access any joke instantly and brilliantly. There are jokes from years ago that Sacha will be able to call on.” (69)

“Sacha goes to extremes with each character. If he’s playing Borat, he won’t shower the night or two before an interview. It’s an amazing devotion to detail. Even Borat’s underwear is authentic for the character. It has a Russian label on it, so that if Borat strips and somebody catches him, his underwear won’t say “Wal-Mart.” (69)

“There are two things I would say are the key to comedy. One is character. All good comedy comes from character. In my mind, jokes are one thing, but without a convincing protagonist and somebody you care about, your comedy is on a path to nowhere… Number two is to have a voice. Have an opinion. Try and say something. I don’t think it’s enough to just write trifling jokes. You should have a point of view. Have the confidence in what you think. Don’t let the executives or your own self-doubt dilute what you want to say.” (70)

MERRILL MARKOE

“If I know there is something I am supposed to be doing or saying or wearing, I feel compelled to resist – particularly with creative endeavors, like writing. If I see an obvious punch line or plotline driving toward me, I can’t help but make a sharp left turn into the unexpected. I don’t like to replicate what I’ve seen done before – I don’t like to give people what they expect. I think it’s my job to come up with a surprising angle or to add some personal twist.” (74)

“One immediate task – when we were determining how to construct a daily format – was to create segments that could be repeated.” (76)

“I had Dave’s voice all analyzed and figured out, because not only did I live with him, but I was preoccupied with creating a show that would please him. Nowadays we call that sort of thing “co-dependence.” But in those days I simply called it “being head writer.” (82)

“A friend of mine calls TV writing the “golden handcuffs.” You get hooked on the idea of making big money as a reasonable and worthy trade-off for lack of artistic control. So you stop worrying about whether you are meeting your own needs for self-expression and just focus on the size of your bank account.” (83)

“Real human beings don’t behave in big broad strokes. They behave with tiny, exacting, site-specific details. Your stupid McDonald’s employee should be different than mine.” (85)

“You need to find a way to get enough distance from yourself to effectively edit and rewrite your own work. And I do a lot of editing and rewriting. A lot.” (86)

“Don’t be overly attached to every syllable and detail of your work. Your commitment is to making the whole thing work. So you have to allow yourself to throw out sections you may love if they block the flow or seem unnecessary. Tell yourself you can save them and use them elsewhere later. Even if you never do, lie to yourself if it makes it easier.” (86)

“Take a moment to imagine how you will feel when your work is published. Anything that you think will make you uncomfortable or ill at ease… get rid of it.” (86)

“You have to allow your first draft to be really bad. Just throw a lot of things out there and get it on paper. The hardest part of the process is just getting a first full draft. The fun part, if any of it can be considered fun, is when you start to improve the piece through the editing and rewriting. That is definitely where the art is: knowing what to save, what to throw out, what to embellish.” (86)

“In the end, nothing works except sitting down to write. And then, even sadder, actually writing. “ (87)

“Robert Benchley explains, “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” (87)

PAUL FEIG

“Tragedy is when something bad happens to you; comedy is when something bad happens to somebody else.” (89)

“That’s the great thing about humor. You can take those experiences, and if you recount them in a funny way, and if they’re truthful and real, they will always become funnier.” (91)

“Real life experiences are rife with bad decision-making. And bad decision making is, in a lot of ways, the key to comedy.” (91)

“Movies are mostly about spectacle and huge stories… On the other hand, TV is about assembling a group of friends that you visit and hang out with every week.” (94)

“I’ve seen more comics storm off the stage and yell at people, slam their mics down, and do weirder things than you could ever imagine. There’s a real insecurity that comes with being funny. You’re on a razor’s edge. Comedy is an attempt to control things, and it just so happens that you’re trying to control people through laughter. But laughter can go off the rails at any given point.” (94)

“That’s not to say that Hollywood doesn’t care about quality but that they only want the quality when it’s going to bring in money. Nobody in Hollywood wants to do something that they’re proud of but that nobody is going to see.” (97)

“You need the show to be grounded. When it’s grounded – when the characters are living, breathing, real people – then you, as a writer, can do practically anything with them.” (98)

“The cruel side of me likes creating situations where people get buried deeper and deeper.” (100)

“You want characters to respond as they would in real life. They’re saying things quickly without thinking about them. But when you write, you can take months to finish a script. So everything the characters say has been so well thought out that it becomes almost perfect. But that’s just fake.” (100)

“You can get away with a lot by having just a simple expression.” (101)

“That’s what I liked about the show ending so suddenly: loose ends are never tied up in real life.” (101)

“If there’s any magic, it only exists to create a chemistry within a group of talented people – actors, writers, directors, producers – who are willing to work together and allow each of the others to do their best work. I personally don’t think that’s a hard mix to create again. It’s not always going to work, but I think it could work if enough talented people with a vision are willing to make it work.” (102-103)

“At the end of the day, none of us is that different. Freaks, geeks, jocks, whoever. The events we experience as human beings are fairly similar. The circumstances are different, and the surroundings and the social strata are different. But, you know, insecurity is insecurity. And loneliness is loneliness. And the basic human circumstances are all the same. If you’re telling honest stories that are done in a special way, magic can definitely be duplicated.” (103)

CLICK HERE FOR PART 3

I recently finished a great comedy book, “And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft” by Mike Sacks. I got a ton of useful quotes from it, so this will be a rather long series of posts. I recommend buying the whole book, as there is a lot of insight inside. Since the book is interview style based, I’ve put the writer’s name above all of the quotes that are attributed to him.

BUCK HENRY

“I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening.” (6)

“If you ride in limos for too long, you tend to forget what cabs, buses, and subways are like. You lose contact. I think it’s important to stay in contact with the outside world.” (6)

“All the great filmmakers from the past knew something about real life.” (13)

“One of the characters says, “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV.” That’s an American disease. And it’ sonly become truer now than it was when the movie came out.” (13)

“When you’ve been in improvisational theater, you get used to capturing the characteristics of people who are really out there in the world. And if you’re up on stage every night for a year, or two years, or three years, with the audience yelling suggestions at you like “Do Chekhov, but do it with Chinese characters,” you get used to an immediate commitment to lunatic ideas. You gain a confidence. Most of the SNL cast members came from that background.” (16)

“In one of the samurai sketches, John hit me in the forehead with a samurai sword. He put a real gash in it, and I needed a bandage. And by the end of the show, when the cast members were saying good-bye, all of them had bandages on their heads.” (17)

“Timing is when a movie comes out. Timing is what the country’s political disposition is when a movie is released. It’s what people are thinking about – what they want to see. You really can’t control that as a writer. But if you’re talented, it’ll all work out in the end. I mean, not all the talented writers will make it, of course… but for the most part, if you’re talented, I think somebody will find you.” (17)

STEPHEN MERCHANT

“In a documentary, there’s no real narrative. Usually in a documentary, a narrative I just created unofficially.” (20)

“There’s nothing wrong with a huge audience. But in reaching for that huge audience, you could possibly compromise your material or maybe try to second-guess what an audience wants. We genuinely thought that The Office was funny and that it was truthful, and maybe there would be a million and a half like-minded people who thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. And if that happened, then we’d think, oh, well, we had fun and that was good. And that would be that.” (21)

“When we first showed The Office to test audiences in Britain, we received one of the lowest scores ever – the only show that beat ours was one that featured women’s lawn bowling. That’s why you can’t judge these focus groups.” (22)

“The best sitcoms are about creating an environment in which you want to return and poke around for another half-hour.” (22)

“The most important things in life are to find a job you like, to make a difference, and to find someone you love.” (25)

“Initially we started off trying to improvise, and then we typed the dialogue, but that was a very slow way of working. Ultimately, we bought a Dictaphone tape recorder. We would improvise into it and sort of refine the dialogue a little, and then we would edit it down later so that it could be typed up. It just seemed the only way to create that ebb and flow of real dialogue, where people stop and start and they don’t use proper grammar. Speech patterns are very different from what you would get if you were to just write dialogue.” (25)

“I think we kind of liked that the audience was not entirely sure how they should feel.” (29)

“We never sit down and think about what subjects we are going – or are not going – to tackle. We just do what feels right. Audiences see certain topics, and their immediate reaction is anxiety. You can’t talk about this, you can’t joke about that. Our feeling is that the more we accept people who may be different, the more we should be able to joke about our own discomfort. If I have friends who are disabled, I can make jokes about their disability, just like they can make jokes about my height or Ricky being overweight. Of course, if you’re meeting someone in the street for the first time, you don’t start making those cracks, because it’s inappropriate. But to us it’s that fascinating stew of discomfort and ignorance that becomes a great recipe for laughter. We’re not laughing at the disabled; we’re laughing at people’s discomfort with disability.” (30)

“We want our shows to be aimed at a sort of reasoning, smart, intelligent audience that can steer its way through ambiguities.” (31)

“There’s always a danger that we as comedy fans are writing comedy for other comedy fans. Whereas the average viewer – and I don’t mean this in a disparaging way – but the average viewer doesn’t sit around thinking about how jokes work. Its just not something that’s important to them. They just want the joke to be funny. So you can’t be too clever. You can’t assume reference points and sophistication that are not there.” (31)

“Sometimes you can get too up your own ass.” (31)

JUDD APATOW

“Whenever we got stuck, Garry Shandling always said, “What is the truth here? What would someone actually do?” He pushed his writers to go deeper to the core.” (33)

KEN LEVINE

“Before anything else, you have to learn how to write. And you learn writing by teaching yourself.” (34)

“One way to stand out is to write a holiday-themed script.” (35)

“Just make it “Jessica enters.” That’s all you need. Describe the action quickly, and get on with it. But you can sprinkle the scripts with inside jokes, such as: “Character orders a three-pound lobster (therefore breaking the show’s budget.) Small jokes that will reward the reader.” (35)

“When I go on staff, I want the producers and everyone else to think, Man, we cannot do the show without this guy.” (35)

HAROLD RAMIS

“An audience member told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.” I said to myself: Why wouldn’t you want o think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head?” (37)

“The other end of the spectrum isn’t funny: “I get so much respect.” No one will laugh at how great things are for somebody.” (38)

“I was more intrigued by the alternative comedy posture. The characters I enjoyed creating were the dropouts and the rebels. They voluntarily opted out of the mainstream. It wasn’t because they couldn’t join it. It was because it wasn’t worth doing. Or there was some serious hypocrisy going on. Or it wasn’t cool.” (38)

“I worked in a mental institution in St. Louis, which prepared me well for when I went out to Hollywood to work with actors.” (39)

“Michael Shamberg said, “Comedy works in two ways. Either you have a normal person in an extraordinary situation or an extraordinary person in a normal situation.” And A Confederacy of Dunces was about an extraordinary person in a series of extraordinary situations.” (42)

“I’m always more offended by dishonesty and hypocrisy than by an honest portrayal of the real world.” (45)

“Often, Rodney Dangerfield thought he was bombing on the set, because no one was laughing. He just didn’t know from that world. He really knew nothing about the process of filmmaking.” (47)

“It’s the editing room that saves your ass. If you took all the improv from Caddyshack and did it onstage, you’d bomb half the time. One thing I learned to do was shoot enough improv so I could actually shape it in the editing room.” (47)

“If you’re cutting away on a joke, you’re probably doing it because you can’t top that joke. If the scene is still building and is still rich, you keep going.” (47-48)

“In any genre, viewers want to feel something. They want to have an experience. There are more well-made movies than good movies. That’s sort of my new mantra. Plenty of people can shoot beautiful films. There are a lot of great edits, a lot of great designers. But where is the content? Who are the characters? Is it moving? You want the audience to feel something, and if it’s comedy, you want them to laugh hard, even if it’s at the expense of a better shot or a better edit. There are many times when the editor will say to me, “Well, that’s not a real good cut.” And I’ll say, “Yeah, but it’s funny. Let’s just do it.” (48)

“I always tell students to identify the most talented person in the room, and if it isn’t you, go stand next to him.” (48)

“It’s like that great saying, “You ride the horse in the direction it’s going.” Billy goes his own way. But he’ll go my way if he thinks it’s a good way. So my job is not to force the actor to do anything; it’s to convince them. Billy was smart enough to know a good thing when he heard it. If I said, “Try this” or “try that,” and it was really funny, he’d do it.” (49)

Q: Do you have a target audience in mind when you write?
“No, I write for everybody. Or, really, for anyone who can read and is not hopelessly fucked in the head.” (50)

“I just did what I wanted to do and what interested me. As I tell writing students, the only thing you have that is unique is yourself.” (51)

“The other approach is to skip the pitch and just write it. You don’t want to waste a lot of time waiting for an editor to evaluate the pitch. Just write it – either the editor will laugh or not.” (53)

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2

I recently finished  “Comedy At The Edge: How stand-up in the 1970’s changed America” by Richard Zoglin.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it. Here’s some (okay A LOT) of quotes from it:

“New York City alone, as I write this, has nearly a dozen-compared with just three in their ‘70s heyday. But the sense of adventure has been replaced by the programmed predictability of a General Motors assembly plant. The comics all sound pretty much alike these days, with the same patter to loosen up the crowd.” (2)

“Stand-up comedians who reached their artistic maturity in the late’60s and ‘70s saw themselves as rebel artists. Unlike the comedians of an earlier generation.” (2)

“By their very presence onstage – alone in front of a mike, telling it like it is- they were advertisements for honesty and authenticity, a rebuke to the phoniness and self-righteousness of your parents’ generation.” (3)

“The old comics made jokes about real life. The new comics turned real life into the joke.” (5)

“Even at their peak of creativity and popularity, these stand-up innovators were often itchy to move on. They didn’t feel validated (or make enough money) until they proved themselves in other fields – movies, TV sitcoms, directing. Stand-up comedy may be the only major art form whose greatest practitioners, at any given time, want to be doing something else.” (5)

“Many of them had relatively short stand-up careers. Unlike rock stars, they couldn’t go on indefinitely with greatest-hits tours. The old jokes had to be constantly refreshed, and that became harder as they aged – as their material became familiar from TV and the cocoon of fame enveloped them, cutting them off from their real-life sources inspiration.” (5)

“The result was a brain drain that short-circuited the careers of many young comics, who came to regard stand-up not as an end In itself but as a road to sitcom stardom.” (6)

“”I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values,” Bruce once said.” (10)

“Lenny Bruce was incapable of separating the comedy from the comedian.” (13)

“Carlin was disciplined about his work, a compulsive student of his own career who kept a detailed log of every gig he did.” (19)

“Carlin said, “I think I was looking for familiar frames of reference that lend themselves to distortion. Because distortion is one of the most important things in comedy. You look at an ordinary event, an ordinary tableau, and you say, what element can I distort in this? And suddenly you have at least the potential for a joke.”” (25)

“Carlin showed that stand-up comedy could be a noble calling, one that required courage and commitment and that could have an impact outside of its own little world. And you could make a lifetime career of it, without burning out or self-destructing.” (40)

“Richard Pryor: “I wanted to do more black material, but I had people around me telling me to wait until I had really made it and then I could talk to the colored. I knew I had to get away from people who thought like that and the environment that made them think like that.”” (48)

“I was working very hard and wasn’t making great money but I loved it because I was doing the material I wanted to do,” Pryor said. “I learned what freedom is.” (50)

“The power of Pryor’s comedy had its drawbacks as well. Plenty of comedians, white and black, emulated his rough language and in-your-face style but missed the empathy and vulnerability that informed it.” (63)

““In stand-up, being ahead of the country is the same as being behind. All that matters is the right moment,” said David Steinberg.” (71)

“Robert Klein says, “I had an education. I was intelligent. I wanted to say something.” (77)

“If I was going to have a career on The Tonight Show,” Klein realized, “I couldn’t be talking past people.” (79)

““Klein wasn’t afraid of going over the audience’s head,” said Jerry Seinfeld.” (81)

“Like most people in show business, Budd Friedman’s interest in you was in exact proportion to how he could use you at the moment.” (89)

“Budd Friedman had his little principles: ‘You can never blame the audience. It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.’” (90)

“When Larry David went on, all the comics in the bar would rush in to see him,” says Albrecht, “and all the people in the audience would rush to the exits.” (105)

“Most comedians worry about being funny,” says Dennis Klein, a comedy writer who was friends with Albert Brooks for year. “Albert is the only one who doesn’t worry about that. He worries about everything else.” (110)

“What I thought was so amazing was that the audience knew Jack Benny’s persona so well that he didn’t do anything. All he had to do was react. Most comedians have to create the confusion. All he had to do was look at it. And that was such a profound, clear comedy character.” (116)

“As I studied the history of philosophy, the quest for ultimate truth became less important to me, and by the time I got to Wittgenstein, it seemed pointless,” Steve Martin told Time magazine. “Then I realized that in the arts, you don’t have to discover meaning; you create it.” (128)

“Says Martin, “I decided that to deny the audience the punch line was the secret of modern comedy. I sort of analyzed the one-liner, which was the style before I started working – OK, here’s the punch line, how funny do you think it is? And I thought, well, if there were no punch lines, it would create its own tension, and eventually the audience would start laughing and they won’t know why. And that’s a better kind of laugh.” (133)

Steve Martin: “I came up with a plan, which was to observe myself when I laughed, and figure out what it was that made me laugh, and try to put it into material. And the second biggest artistic and commercial decision I made was to drop the politics, to go very solipsistic. I just wanted to break from the depth of that political infestation in comedy. It was very pervasive. It was just making me another one of the group.” (133)

“The lesson for Martin: he needed to stop being an opening act and hold out for headline spots – even if it meant going to smaller clubs. “My opening act was going nowhere,” he says. “There’s a kind of psychological aspect to opening: even if you killed and you’re better than the headliner, they only remember the headliner.” (134)

“I think my material didn’t change so much as its delivery,” says Martin. “And the delivery was just that total confidence.” (134)

“When someone up front would leave to go to the bathroom, Martin would enlist the rest of the crowd in a practical joke: when the poor sap came back, Martin instructed them to laugh at everything he said even before the punch lines. Three thousand people playing a prank on one unsuspecting schlub. It was brilliant lunacy.” (135)

“When the crowd lingered, Martin led them outside, saw an empty swimming pool next door, and on an impulse, told everyone to climb inside, forming a human sea while he “swam” across their bodies.” (135)

“Says Lorne Michaels, “we were burned-out. He was sunshine. We were very much about being taken seriously. And Steve was braver than that. He didn’t care.” (136)

“I knew that while I was hot, I had better switch to something,” Martin says. “I had no intention of turning over my act and getting a new act. I knew it was over when it was over. And I thought, now’s the time. I’m hot enough to make a deal. You’re on a train and it’s going one way and another train passes and it’s going another way, you gotta leap onto that other train when your paths are crossing.” (139)

“Martin demonstrated that experimental comedy was not inconsistent with entertaining huge numbers of people.” (140)

“Once you got that Tonight Show break, you’d better be ready – with enough material to last more than one appearance.” (142)

“Seinfeld put off his Tonight Show debut for months while he gathered enough material to avoid the David Sayh trap.” (143)

“Then they open up that curtain, and at that moment you feel something nudging your Adam’s apple, and it’s your asshole trying to get out.” (143)

“Carson was so secure in himself that he never had a problem laughing his ass off when somebody was funny.” (145)

“What Leno demonstrated to me, by being on stage,” says Letterman, “was the importance of attitude.” (154)

“Leno was a glutton for the road, a comic who never met a crowd he didn’t want to win over. Letterman never liked performing outside of the comfortable cocoon of the Comedy Store.” (156)

“Kaufman, the conceptual comic whose big joke, most of the time, was that he didn’t have an ounce of talent in his body.” (160)

“My style in the beginning, especially in the smaller clubs, was not to be on the mike,” Kaufman recalls. “Because if you were on mike, you invited the standard thing where people could kind of lose track. So if I didn’t go on mike, they were immediately listening.” (162)

“Andy would always watch the audience,” says Zmuda. “The theatrical moment for him was not onstage, but what’s taking place in the crowd.” (174)

“Kaufman always felt inhibited by Taxi, and reduced the number of episodes he did in the later seasons. “He wanted to be on the cutting edge,” says Zmuda. “He felt all of TV was a sellout. We couldn’t tell the difference between Full House and Saturday Night Live.” (176)

“When Kaufman played Harrah’s in Reno, according to Zmuda, he paid a visit to the Mustang Ranch, the famed Nevada brothel, and vowed to sleep with all forty-two girls in the house before the end of his weeklong run. He accomplished the feat just under the wire, Zmuda says.” (177)

“An administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the comedians, as independent contractors, could not be unionized.” (200)

“Oh my God, the parties we had there,” says Rick Overton. “Inexplicable stains everywhere. Waitress who go, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ then when you’re looking for a condom, say, ‘It’s in the third drawer.’”

“Getting a TV sitcom, however, was a Faustian bargain for any stand-up comic who was serious about his art. On the one hand, it could make you famous beyond your wildest dreams. On the other, it neutralized your best talents by putting you at the services of formulaic scripts, ensemble casts, and network restrictions on language and content. You might get an ovation when you walked back into the Improv, but it wasn’t necessarily deserved. The skills of live stand-up needed constant maintenance; it wasn’t easy to pick up again after you stopped doing it regularly.” (213)

“The TV sitcom changed the dynamics of the stand-up profession. IT drew comedians from New York to Los Angeles faster than ever. It encouraged them to develop clean, family friendly routines that would be palatable to a mass TV audience. And it altered their career ambitions.” (215)

“They were the comics who got so good at their jobs that they could leave it behind – for movies or a TV series. In the ‘60s it would have been called selling out. In the ‘80s it simply meant that stand-up was losing much of its urgency and vitality, a sense that it was central to what was happening in the culture and the country.” (216)

“Any art works best when it’s the only pinhole of expression that a human being has,” Seinfeld says. “Everything that they want to express gets forced through that little hole.” (217)

Seinfeld: “Klein was a hipper guy, but he was talking to unhip people, and getting them to laugh. If I could sum up my entire philosophy of comedy in one sentence, it is to be hip without excluding. That’s the key: staying on the front of the curve, without leaving the mainstream audience behind.” (218)

“Seinfeld was known among his friends as the professor of comedy. He studied joks and worked diligently on new material. He made sure he spent at least an hour a day writing, compiling his ideas on a pad of yellow lined paper. “Jerry was the first one I saw who understood the importance of craft,” says Larry Miller. “He would write every day. I only started doing that about three years in.” “His life was always very efficient and clean and uncluttered,” says Resier. “He used to have a wallet that had one credit card and however many crisp bills he needed. And one piece of paper of one word ideas he wrote down that day. He’d try out that stuff. Jerry did new stuff regularly and methodically.” (219)

“I was at the top of the food chain in New York,” Seinfeld says. “I didn’t like everyone looking up to me. I figured that wasn’t good for my growth.” (221)

“Most of the great innovators of ‘70s stand-up, like avant-garde artists of many eras, faced the problem of watching their outsider art become part of the mainstream culture – rubbing them of their originality and their raison d’etre.” (222)

“Stand-up comedy in the ‘70s helped created the world we live in, and the way we look at it. It made us more cynical about our leaders, and more suspicious of authority of all kind. It forced us to take a close, skeptical look at the media world that has overwhelmed us. It made us more open about ourselves, and more willing to tolerate differences in others. It freed up our language and showed that our most embarrassing memories are nothing to be ashamed of, because others share them too. It made us observant and questioning and smart. It taught us not to sit still for anything, but to talk back.” (224)

I recently finished “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. I highly recommend this book, especially if you treat it as a workbook.

The two main activities this book preaches, which aren’t obvious from the quotes below are 1) Writing three pages of stream of consciousness every morning, and 2) Going on an “Artist’s Date” with yourself every week. I’ve been writing every morning since I started reading this book in November, and I’ve definitely noticed a huge surge in creative output. Not from writing the three pages every day per say, but from getting the momentum going of writing every day. That makes it easier to write later on in the day, as the hardest part of it is starting. The Artist’s Date is just taking 2 or 3 hours a week to do some fun, child like activity with yourself, as this will inspire more creativity. Anyway, here are some actual quotes:

“People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or the specifically imagined.” (82)

“Think of yourself as an accident victim walking away from the crash: your old life has crashed and burned; your new life isn’t apparent yet. You may feel yourself to be temporarily without a vehicle Just keep walking.” (83)

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” –Seneca (83)

“Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite – getting something down. The directions are important here.” (117)

“We are the instrument more than the author of our work.” (118)

“I remind my students that their movie already exists in its entirety. Their job is to listen for it, watch it with their mind’s eye, and write it down.” (118)

“Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.” (120)

“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough – that we should try again.”

“We deny that in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly.” (121)

“Very often a risk is worth taking simply for the sake of taking it.” (123)

“Most academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.” (132)

“Because I asked “How?” instead of “Why me?” I now have a modest first feature to my credit.” (136)

“I love movies, love making them, and did not want my losses to take me down. I learned, when hit by loss, to ask the right question: “What next?” instead of “Why me?” (136)

“Whenever I am willing to ask “What is necessary next?” I have moved ahead. Whenever I have taken no for a final answer I have stalled and gotten stuck. I have learned that the key to career resiliency is self-empowerment and choice.” (136)

“Clarke clearly took to hear the idea that it was harder to hit a moving target. Whenever one avenue for her creativity was blocked, she found another.” (137)

“Non illegitimi te carborundum, the graffiti in prisoner-of-war camps is said to have run. The rough translation, very important for artists, is “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” (137)

“Artists who take this to heart survive and often prevail. The key here is action. Pain that is not used profitably quickly solidifies into a leaden heart, which makes any action difficult.” (137)

“Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.” – Linus Pauling (138)

“Question: Do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn how to play the piano?
Answer: The same age you will be if you don’t.” (138)

““I’m too old” is an evasive tactic. It is always used to avoid facing fear.” (138)

“Many blocked creatives tell themselves they are both too old and too young to allow themselves to pursue their dreams.” (138)

“We do not want to look crazy. And trying something like that (whatever it is) at our age (whatever it is) would look nuts.” (139)

“Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.” (139)

“Kids are not self-conscious, and once we are actually in the flow of our creativity, neither are we.” (139)

“Instead of allowing ourselves a creative journey, we focus on the length of the trip. “it’s such a long way,” we tell ourselves. It may be, but each day is just one more day with some motion in it, and that motion toward a goal is very enjoyable.” (139)

“You can’t learn to act because there is always more to learn.” (139)

“Doing the work points the way to new and better work to be done.” (139)

“Focused on process, our creative life retains a sense of adventure. Focused on product, the same creative life can feel foolish or barren.” (139)

“There is always one action you can take for your creativity daily.” (141)

“By setting the jumps too high and making the price tag too great, the recovering artist sets defeat in motion. Who can concentrate on a first drawing class when he is obsessing about having to divorce his wife and leave town?” (141)

“Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time – or at all.” (141)

“Creativity requires activity, and this is not good news to most of us. It makes us responsible, and we tend to hate that. You mean I have to do something in order to feel better?” (142)

“When we allow ourselves to wallow in the big questions, we fail to find the small answers.” (143)

“The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.” (152)

“What other people may view as discipline is actually a play date that we make with our artist child. I’ll meet you at 6:00 A.M. and we’ll goof around with that script, painting, sculpture…” (153)

“A successful creative career is always built on successful creative failures. The trick is to survive them.” (156)

“Note carefully that food, work, and sex are all good in themselves. It is the abuse of them that makes them creativity issues.” (164)

“The truth is, we are very often working to avoid ourselves, our spouses, our real feelings.” (166)

“Fame is not the same as success, and in our true souls we know that. We know – and have felt – success at the end of a good day’s work. But fame? It is addictive, and it always leaves us hungry.” (171)

“The point of the work is the work. Fame interferes with that perception. Instead of acting being about acting, it becomes about being a famous actor. Instead of wring being about writing, it becomes about being recognized, not just published.” (171)

“In the long run, fan letters from ourselves – and our creative self – are what we are really after. Fame is really a shortcut for self-approval. Try approving of yourself just as you are – and spoiling yourself rotten with small kid’s pleasures.” (172)

“As artists, we cannot afford to think about who is getting ahead of us and how they don’t deserve it. The desire to be better than can choke off the simple desire to be.” (173)

“This compare-and-contrast school of thinking may have its place for critics, but not or artists in the act of creation. Let the critics spot the trends. Let reviewers concern themselves with what is in and what is not. Let us concern ourselves first and foremost with what it is within us that is struggling to be born.” (173)

“The footrace mentality is always the ego’s demand to be not just good but also first and best. It is the ego’s demand that our work be totally original – as if such a thing were possible. All work is influenced by other work. All people are influenced by other people. No man is an island and no piece of art is a continent unto itself.” (174)

“Be willing to paint or write badly while your ego yelps resistance. Your bad writing may be the syntactical breakdown necessary for a shift in your style. Your lousy painting may be pointing you in a new direction. Art needs time to incubate, to sprawl a little, to be ungainly and misshapen and finally emerge as itself. The ego hates this fact. The ego wants instant gratification and the addictive hit of an acknowledged win.” (175)

“Being true to the inner artist often results in work that sells – but not always. I have to free myself from determining my value and the value of my work by my work’s market value.” (178)

“If I have a poem to write, I need to write that poem – whether it will sell or not.” (180)

“Sometimes I will write badly, draw badly, paint badly, perform badly. I have a right do that to get to the other side. Creativity is its own reward.” (180)

“As an artist, I write whether I think it’s any good or not. I shoot movies other people may hate. I sketch bad sketches to say, “I was in this room. I was happy. It was May and I was meeting somebody I wanted to meet.” (180)

“As an artist, my self-respect comes from doing the work. One performance at a time, one gig at a time, one painting at a time. Two and half years to make one 90-minute piece of film. Five drafts of one play. Two years working on a musical. Through it all, daily, I show up…” (181)

“As an artist, I do not need to be rich but I do need to be richly supported. I cannot allow my emotional and intellectual life to stagnate or the work will show it. My life will show it. My temperament will show it. If I don’t create, I get crabby.” (181)

“To be an artist is to recognize the particular. To appreciate the peculiar. To allow a sense of play in your relationship to accepted standards. To ask the question “Why?” To be an artist is to risk admitting that much of what is money, property, and prestige strikes you ask just a little silly.” (181)

“If you are happier writing than not writing, painting than not painting, singing than not singing, acting than not acting, directing than not direction, for God’s sake let yourself do it.” (182)

“To kill your dreams because they are irresponsible is to be irresponsible to yourself.” (182)

“Creativity is a spiritual practice. It is not something that can be perfected, finished, and set aside.” (182)

“Just when we get there, there disappears.” (182)

“The ruthless truth is that if we don’t keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die.” (182)

“The stringent requirement of a sustained creative life is the humility to start again, to begin anew.” (182)

“it is this willingness to once more be a beginner that distinguishes a creative career.” (182)

“Those who attempt to work too long with formula, even their own formula, eventually leach themselves of their creative truths.” (183)

“Creativity requires faith. Faith requires that we relinquish control. This is frightening, and we resist it.” (193)

“Joseph Campbell wrote, “Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.” (194)

“Bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.” (194)

“We speak often about ideas as brainchildren. What we do not realize is that brainchildren, like all babies, should not be dragged from the creative womb prematurely. Ideas, like stalactites and stalagmites, form in the dark inner cave of consciousness. They form in drips and drops, not by squared-off building blocks. We must learn to wait for an idea to hatch. Or, to use a gardening image, we must learn to not pull our ideas up by the roots to see if they are growing.” (194-195)

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” (195)

“Hatching an idea is a lot like baking bread. An idea need to rise. If you poke at it too much at the beginning, if you keep checking on it, it will never rise.” (195)

“It is a paradox of creativity that we must get serious about taking ourselves lightly. We must work at learning to play. Creativity must be freed from the narrow parameters of capital A art and recognized as having much broader play.” (196)

“As gray, as controlled, as dreamless as we may strive to be, the fire of our dreams will not stay buried. The embers are always there, stirring in our frozen souls like winter leaves. They won’t go away. They are sneaky. We make a crazy doodle in a boring meeting. We post a silly card on our office board. We nickname the boss something wicked. Plant twice as many flowers as we need.” (197)

“A little flattery can go a long way toward deterring our escape velocity. So can a little cash.” (199)

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” –Andre Gide (199)

“The first rule of magic is self-containment. You must hold your intention within yourself, stoking it with power. Only then will you be able to manifest what you desire.” (199)

“In order to achieve escape velocity, we must learn to keep our own counsel, to move silently among doubters, to voice our plans only among our allies, and to name our allies accurately.” (199)

“Make a list: those friends who will support me. Make another list: those friends who won’t.” (199)

“I think the single most important factor in an artist’s sustained productivity… is what I call “a believing mirror.” Put simply, a believing mirror is a friend to your creativity – someone who believes in your and your creativity.” (219)

“Artists like other artists. We are not supposed to know this. We are encouraged to believe “there is only so much room at the top.” Hooey. Water seeks its own level and water rises collectively.” (220)

“Success occurs in clusters.” (220)

“As creative people, we are meant to encourage one another. That was my goal in writing The Artist’s Way and it is my goal in teaching it. Your goal. It is my hope, is to encourage each other’s dreams as well as your own.” (221)

If you liked these quotes, please buy the book here.