And you look at it, go, 'I don't see a dinosaur. I don't see a dinosaur. I don't see a dinosaur. Oh! Oh I see it.' That's what jokes are like. You look at life. You look at it the same way everybody else does. But for a comedian, every once in a while you see a dinosaur. You see a joke. You go: 'Hey, there's a joke there.'
Related posts tagged 'Coming up with ideas'
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Related posts tagged 'Coming up with ideas'
I don’t go, “I’m gonna write a joke.” I just go through the world and see stuff. It’s like I exercised the part of my mind of noticing things, to the point where I’m now noticing things without even trying to notice them.
Intuition mostly. I trust the writers I work with and my own instincts. If we all feel like something is hilarious or fresh, I have to assume it is. And those are the things that tend to be well received.
Ideas exist outside of man. And drift into one's consciousness if one allows it. None of these ideas are mine, I only take them from the ether and put them back out in a more solid form.
Often both... some ideas pop in out of nowhere and come easily and almost HAVE to exist... some ideas need love and care and work and attention.
If you ask yourself, `Is there anything I can do to get a laugh?’ you can find a lot of things.
And usually they’re things that other people have found. But if you take something that’s never going to work and you go, `Wow, I wonder if there’s any way I can get somebody to laugh at this?’ it’s a great challenge.
Larry David and I discovered that we were both obsessed with superman and admired him and also found him very funny at the same time, so that is why he came up a lot. Are you related to the hot dog Kobayashi in Coney Island?
Question: You come from a very affluent family – are you a reformed “rich dick” or are those characters informed by people you went to school with? Or both? Or neither?
Answer: All of my characters are informed by who I am and people that I've come into contact with, as well as everyone else involved in making the show - like in the case of Rich Dicks, John Daly and people that he knew.
That would be me, Robert, when I was EPing Dana Carvey's prime time variety show in 1996. We wanted to to do cartoons on the show, and pretty much anything that make it feel different than SNL. The great writer and deviant Dino Stamatopoulos pitched me something entirely different - what if characters like Wallace and Gromit were clearly having a sexual relationship? I didn't know much about what would be acceptable to the ABC audience watching after Home Improvement but I correctly identified that as unacceptable. Anyway, for some reason, the AGD idea just came to me at the end of that conversation. What if we did two superheroes and everyone suspects they're gay? It was always more about t...
Nick and I came up with Too Much Tuna in five seconds with Jessi Klein about ten years ago at a restaurant on 6th avenue called French Roast. We got a plate with too much tuna and we said "this is too much tuna."
Hannibal and I have very different approaches. I write stuff beforehand; he drifts in and out of consciousness.
Initially they came in and I was just doing the scripted lines and I asked "Do you mind if I try something?" and then 18 hours of recording later, they had the genie. I just started playing, and they said "just go with it, go with it, go with it." So I improvised the character. I think that in the end, there were something like 40 different voices that I did for that role.
I don't know exactly. I think it was Chris Kattan and myself just acting stupid in my apartment when we wrote that sketch for the Groundlings show that we were in at the time. It's also what happens when the beat of any Haddaway song hits your ear.
I think everyone gets tired of who they are, or their own brains sometimes. I think the important thing is to keep pushing through into unexplored territories - new ways to express ideas or new jokes. that's when I feel really good- hitting on something new.
A lot of times it's like a crazy person running up to a whiteboard in the writers room and drawing a turd monster with breasts for testicles. And that crazy person's name is Justin Roiland, or, as I call him, Li'l Goldmine!
plotting can be tough because you're never quite sure you're doing it right - it's usually kind of like an exploration. You try something, and figure out what it needs. For instance, one episode we were plotting last night, I felt like it was all things happening, and no emotional connection from our charaters. So we figured out what my own personal connection to the plot would be, and that actually helped us figure out the things that would happen more easily. It's also helpful if your characters can have opposite points of view about what's occuring.
To motivate, I would try to outline as much as you can before you ever start writing a line of dialogue. If you're having trouble plotting, ...
I wish I could. i have a lot of journals with one page half written in.
I sometimes will write myself a quick email on my bb when I think of something.
One of the great things about the internet - beyond the amazing reddit AMA experience - is that you can research any voice you want, just by going to YouTube. Which was very helpful in figuring out the Canadian accent, the Pennsylvanian accent, C-Czar (I watched a lot of Riff Raff to get that accent down).
i usually just think of one funny grain of the character's identity and let it build from there. with hoho, for instance, i just wanted to be an elf who delivers toys to naughty kids.
There is no line that I know in terms of what's "too far," whether that means too sentimental or too ...I don't know, controversial or confessional....a "boundary" is an artificial construct, we have to create boundaries when they involve other people, precisely because it makes empirical something that would otherwise be frustratingly subjective (like that neighbor that just kind of 'feels like' their yard extends into yours, in which case you have to go to city hall and pull out a map with lines on it). In matters of creativity - when you're sitting and writing dialogue by yourself, there's no lines needed because you're not having to function in cooperation, your job in creation, I think,...
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