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Especially when you deal with comedy, you have got to be really honest because it's the honesty and the spontaneity that causes people to chuckle, that catches people.

There is a universality to comedy.

Improvisation is almost like the retarded cousin in the comedy world. We've been trying forever to get improvisation on TV. It's just like stand-up. It's best when it's just left alone. It doesn't translate always on TV. It's best live.

I can do comedy, so people want me to do that, but the other side of comedy is depression. Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don't realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.

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.

The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power).

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

With While You Were Sleeping, it was so much fun and such a Cinderella story, that I didn't want to do another romantic comedy. I wanted to do the opposite.

I wear so many disguises on the show that only a real comedy fan might spot me.

Comedy is very controlling - you are making people laugh.

The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.

You just make sure you don't screw it up. It's going to work as long as you don't mess it up. Hopefully you have plenty of those moments in a big comedy.

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.

Then my first film was something called Cannibal Girls, which sounds like a horror movie but was actually kind of a goofy comedy with horror elements. Like a horror spoof.

Everybody says how hard comedy is, but, when it comes time to honor things, whether it's on a weekly critical basis or whether it's award time, at that time of the year, comedy is the poor, dumb child of dramatic work.

I never like to do parodies. I never do. It's just not my style of comedy.

In a comedy it helps enhance things that were already there.

Between us and the writers, it was comedy hour the whole time. We could hardly get through it.

I've played comedy before but not that much. I mostly do get drawn to darker material.

Sometimes I would like the opportunity to do character-driven comedy and that's really what I was trying to do in Meet The Parents. I think in a way this is a more old fashioned type of comedy.