Quote

Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.

Mel Brooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mel Brooks
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: June 28
Actor
Composer
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Journalist
Librettist
Lyricist
Screenwriter
Soldier
Songwriter
Stage Actor
Brooklyn
New York
Melvin Brooks
Melvin Kaminsky
Writing
Serious
Trying
Comedy
Never
Situation
Deadly
Help
Joke
Actors
Absurd
Funny
Performing
Helping
Jokes
Must
Amount

More quotes by Mel Brooks

Image
Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It's all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it's diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They're supposed to help you, but too often they help you into your grave.
Mel Brooks
Image
Basically, I'm a writer. I'm the proprietor of the vision. I alone know what I eventually want to happen on the screen. So if you have a valuable idea, the only way to protect it is to direct it.
Mel Brooks
Image
These men both publicly and privately have done so much for me. Without Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick I would be living in a little motel just around the corner here, trying to make ends meet.
Mel Brooks
Image
All short women have a delayed fuse. Marry a taller woman: My wife was an inch or two taller than me it's a sign of security.
Mel Brooks
Image
American sex is generally straight. It happens at 11 o'clock Saturday night. In the rural areas, it happens at nine and it happens pretty fast. Got to get up the next morning, especially if there're kids. Can't make noise, either, wake the kids.
Mel Brooks
Image
I don't think in terms of results at all. I think: what next insanity can I shock the world with?
Mel Brooks
Image
I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
Mel Brooks
Image
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
Image
Humor keeps the elderly rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, its an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you dont laugh, youll die.
Mel Brooks
Image
I usually start with the words. The rhythm of the words gives me the rhythm of the song, and then I look for the musical highlights in it to carry it.
Mel Brooks
Image
I was adored [as a kid]. I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again. Until I was six, my feet didn't touch the ground. Look at those eyes! That nose! Those lips! That tooth! Get that child away from me, quick! I'll eat him! Giving that up was very difficult later on in life.
Mel Brooks
Image
Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Nazi Party!
Mel Brooks
Image
I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.
Mel Brooks
Image
I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.
Mel Brooks
Image
My favorite expression is: When you go up to the bell, ring it ? or don't go up to the bell.
Mel Brooks
Image
Do you have a dollar on you? I hate to answer questions for nothing.
Mel Brooks
Image
When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.
Mel Brooks
Image
You're always a little disappointing in person because you can't be the edited essence of yourself.
Mel Brooks
Image
If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.
Mel Brooks
Image
We want to get people laughing we don't want to offend anybody.
Mel Brooks