Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.

I enjoy comedy and I hope that people enjoy watching me do it.

Drama can feel like therapy whereas comedy feels like there's been a pressure and a weight lifted off of you. You come to work and you laugh all day you go home and you feel light and there's a certain feeling when you're sitting with the audience and they leave after 90 minutes and it's just pure escapism and they're happy.

The appreciative smile the chuckle the soundless mirth so important to the success of comedy cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.

Vegas means comedy tragedy happiness and sadness all at the same time.

You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life comedy.

Sometimes I make very selfish choices like I did 'Once Upon A Time' for my inner 8-year-old and my hypothetical future child. I've done some movies because I would regret them if I didn't but other projects I've done because they've scared me or if I felt I needed to do a big romantic comedy to help me professionally.

Comedy was the key to everything. I grew up fast and controlled my future by bringing it on faster than it naturally unfolded. I cheated myself out of a childhood but then got a running headstart into adulthood that no one else could keep up with.

People are funny and in the most tragic situations when comedy erupts from nowhere it can turn on its head within the space of a second or a minute. You're laughing one minute and you're crying the next and that's just life for me and that is what people are like.

The prospects for a coherent hilarious and consistent American comedy seem to lessen every year as the poor waterlogged gassy corpse called 'Evan Almighty' proved when it floated ashore recently. So there's a temptation to think too highly of Robin Williams's uneven but occasionally funny 'License to Wed.'

You know if I started worrying about what the critics think I'd never make another comedy. You couldn't pick a less funny group than critics - you couldn't find a more bitter group of people!

Comedy is so subjective. You could be in a room with 400 people laughing at a joke and you could just not think it's funny. You're just sitting there like 'Am I in the twilight zone? Why is everyone laughing?' It's such a personal thing. People have such a personal visceral response to comedy.

In my experience it's not just that serious books get a hearing on comedy shows. But serious books get a serious hearing as well as a funny one on comedy shows.

And regardless of the fact that in this country certainly in the arts we treat comedy as a second-class citizen I've never thought of it that way. I've always thought it to be important. The last time I looked the Greeks were holding up two masks. I've always thought of it not only as having equal value but as the craft of it being funny.

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.

I always approach comedy roles pretending they aren't funny.

I think it's actually a misperception that I am a comedic actress. I do more drama than comedy but very little of it has been seen. When you are in big funny movies and they do well and your little part in it kind of explodes people perceive you as a comedian.

Comedy clubs can be brutal. Those people are for real and if you aren't funny they aren't laughing. They don't care who you are.

I think if actors don't think of themselves as funny in real life they think they can't do comedy.

Mmmm... the comedy that matters is the comedy you pull out of thin air. It's a bit like when something funny has happened and you try to explain it to someone else and end up saying 'You had to be there.'

But sooner or later I'd love to do a comedy. I mean I think that you know people don't think that that's in my wheelhouse because I've sort of played a lot of dramatic stuff and that's certainly a side of myself that I want at some point in the right context in the right stuff that I find really funny.

I do find comedy difficult. I don't know why. Maybe I think about it too much. There's a tremendous amount of pressure to be funny.

Comedy is surprises so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh that's funny.