Quotes & Sayings About Sitcoms

Americans continue to suffer from a notoriously short attention span. They get mad as hell with reasonable frequency, but quickly return to their families and sitcoms. Meanwhile, the corporate lobbies stay right where they are, outlasting all the populist hysteria. — Eric Alterman

I didn't like what was on TV in terms of sitcoms-it had nothing to do with the color of them-I just didn't like any of them. I saw little kids, let's say 6 or 7 years old, white kids, black kids. And the way they were addressing the father or the mother, the writers had turned things around, so the little children were smarter than the parent or the caregiver. They were just not funny to me. I felt that it was manipulative and the audience was looking at something that had no responsibility to the family. — Bill Cosby

'Scary Movie' was a different type of comedy than I'm used to. I've mostly done sitcoms, so working with David Zucker, who wrote the film and who directed the last two 'Scary Movie's and 'Airplane' and 'Naked Gun,' was a lot of help. — Ashley Tisdale

There are so many sitcoms. So, when you get to be a part of something that feels exciting to you, you just want to be a part of it. — Oliver Jackson-Cohen

If actors could actually make a living doing theater, that would be my first choice. Sitcoms are the closest thing to being onstage in front of an audience. If I had to choose, it would be theater and doing the occasional movie once in a while, and spending time doing nothing. — Enrico Colantoni

When I first started, they were trying to get me into sitcoms - I think because I had that kind of Wonder Bread look and my hair always went into place. I kept saying, 'I'm not good at sitcoms. I don't know how to do that.' — Brad Pitt

I loved doing sitcoms. — Will Estes

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms. — Megyn Price

I really hate sitcoms on television with canned laughter and stuff. What really makes me laugh is the real-life stuff. I've got a dry sense of humor. — Katie Price

Sitcoms are making a comeback, but you've got to have a little quirkiness in there now. — Jackee Harry

I just love doing sitcoms. I'd be in them till I was gray if they'd have me. — Jason Bateman

When I was a little girl, the only real form of entertainment I was exposed to was theater, being raised in St. Louis, and I still love theater, and I think sitcoms are similar to that, in there's a live audience, and you know, I definitely like the comedy of it, too. I like to make people laugh, and I definitely think laughter is healing. — Kelly Stables

The projects I have done on television, they're sitcoms, situational comedies. The problem is, maybe because they go on every day, Monday through Friday, one-hour format, maybe that's why they're labeled as a telenovela. But technically speaking, they're sitcoms because they're situational comedies. — Jaime Camil

I think satire is a luxury of literate middle-class people. People who are well fed and relatively secure in their beds can laugh at their troubles. They can enjoy sitcoms. For those who aren't quite so lucky, well, the irony might be lost on them. — Harold Ramis

Sitcoms, I always figured that would be an easy gig, but man, it is not. — Blake Shelton

I grew up on network sitcoms. If those are gone when I'm 65 years old, I would never forgive myself for not stepping up to that plate, as often as possible. I'm already bummed out that DVDs are dying off because, in my 20s, those were a huge thing. — Dan Harmon

There was a time when I couldn't watch sitcoms for a while because it was just cacophony, it was just noise. — Phylicia Rashad

I don't want to get pretentious, but there's an art to doing sitcoms; you have to make it work in that format. — Sean Maguire

I don't have an interest in being a director-for-hire on sitcoms - but if it's a really cool show that I thought I could bring something to, I would love to do that. — Jake M. Johnson

I sleep five or six hours a night, then crash at the weekend. I'm learning to eat properly and exercise. I relax by watching silly sitcoms like 'Scrubs' and 'How I Met Your Mother.' — Elise Andrew

I think I get way too much credit for making what people consider to be smart choices, but it's only because I made a decision to stop worrying about making money. I had done network sitcoms. I had a nest egg. — Lizzy Caplan

Sitcoms always made the most sense to me. I grew up watching them every day with my dad. Every Monday, Tuesday night, we would be sitting in front of the television watching any kind of sitcom. I connect with that more, but I love to do whatever kind of role. — Hayley Orrantia

Sitcoms are like summer stock. You put it up in three days, and then you do it in front of an audience, so it's a really great transition from theatre into camera work. — Susan Egan

O put it in the modern parlance, this is a re-run. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - something to do with that experience of moving West to East or East to West or island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. — Zadie Smith

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't. — Alexei Sayle

Televisa is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world, and the steps we have taken, which extend the tenure of our exclusive access to Televisa's premium Spanish-language telenovelas, sports, sitcoms, reality series, news programs and feature films, put Univision in a stronger competitive position. — Randy Falco

I started on television, and on sitcoms, and loved them, but then they sort of seemed to be going through sort of an ice age, and they started dying off one by one, and I recognized that, and my representatives recognized that, and we said 'Well, let's look at dramas and other things like that.' — David Alan Basche

Yeah, sometimes it gets a little sappy for me, but I'm tired of hearing about dysfunctional families in sitcoms. That's been done to death, and that's probably what everybody expected from me. But that's not what I wanted to do. — Mike Judge

'Leave It to Beaver,' which ran from 1957 until 1963, was one of the strangest, sweetest, most distinctive domestic sitcoms of television's celebrated Golden Age. — Tom Shales

I mean, sitcoms shouldn't be doing 'Saturday Night Live.' You can't just do bit after bit after bit. You have to string it together with tight writing and performances. Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to do this. — Joyce DeWitt

I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That's my tasty junk food. — Felicia Day

A lot of stand-up comedy is embarrassing: too many idiots doing it in orange neckties against brick walls. I find most sitcoms embarrassing, too, because they seem so forced. — Tracey Ullman

Cable is a great medium. It's something I respond to. I'm not doing sitcoms. People don't find me funny. That's just the way it is. — Diego Klattenhoff

Writing is a solitary occupation, except for Presidential speeches and sitcoms. — Ron Brackin

I'll get to make a lot of money and do some bad sitcoms. — Darrell Hammond

Many, many things are dangerous in our world, commercials and TV are dangerous, and so is the world of sitcoms. But nobody does anything about them because they're turning in alot of money. — Wes Craven

People still want to escape, but today's escape is different. People now want to know that there are people out there who have more problems and are a train-wreck! This is why I think it's difficult for sitcoms these days, because people are not going to believe, joke, beat, beat, joke, because there ain't nothing to laugh about. — Darius McCrary

There are only about three really, really good sitcoms on the air. — Sharon Gless

TV family sitcoms have always been about fathers who know best and mothers who are so enchanted with everything they do. I wanted to be the first mom to be a mom on TV. I wanted to sent out a message about how us women really feel. — Roseanne Barr

popular TV sitcoms sprang up, each a variation on a single theme: something alien is close and secretly among us, and one person is burdened with protecting all others from the unspeakable truth of their presence and power: My Favorite Martian, My Mother the Car, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, Mister Ed, Bewitched - they all pointed to the growing anxiety of middle-class whites that nothing was as it appeared, — David Henry

I'm more inclined to linger in the science pages of 'The Week' magazine. But my principle obsessions are still watching sitcoms and football. — Alan Davies

Xiang wei is the character a good dish has when it's robust, flavorful, and balanced but still maintains a certain light quality. That flavor comes, lingers on your tongue, stays long enough to make you crave it, but just when you think you have it figured out, it's gone. Timing is everything. Soup dumplings, sitcoms, one-night stands - good ones leave you wanting more. — Eddie Huang

The striking thing about 'New Girl' is that under all the comedy, there's something about the emotions and reactions that feels very real - much more real than other sitcoms. Like - maybe everybody is sort of laid bare in different ways. — Elizabeth Meriwether

Sitcoms are what got me excited about show business. — Jen Kirkman

So much of the humor on new sitcoms plays to the lowest common denominator. Wit isn't nearly given as much attention as slipping on a banana peel. So much of the writing is so coarse, so obvious that it doesn't provide a shock, never mind a laugh. What makes something funny is alluding to it without laying it out explicitly. You let the audiences fill in the gaps and that's where the laughs come. — Betty White

It's very hard to find a good child actor. There are a lot of child actors out there, especially in America, and they're cute kids, but most child actors appear on sitcoms where their main role is to be cute and make funny little remarks. — George R R Martin

Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers. — Steve Erickson

Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly - the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I don't think anybody in my graduating class would have figured that I would be doing full-on single-camera comedies or sitcoms, or anything like that, but it certainly has been a part of my career. — Brooke Nevin

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms. — Ben Lerner

People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love. — Helen Fisher

He convinced me - Fred Freeman - to go to Hollywood and we went to Hollywood to write sitcoms. Joey Bishop actually paid my way to Hollywood. — Garry Marshall

Tina Fey is part of a generation of women who have changed the face of comedy at 'Second City,' 'SNL,' in sitcoms and in film. — Janeane Garofalo

Emotionally, shows like 'Cheers' and 'Taxi' were classic sitcoms when I was growing up. — Dan Harmon

I love film and I love sitcoms, and I was one of those kids that would just go to the movies on the weekend and spend my whole weekend watching all of the movies. — Terrence J

Where do babies come from? Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called "making love". Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said "sex is good". All available evidence, however, points to the contrary. — Matt Groening

'The Simpsons' basically - and 'Futurama' - are really smart shows. They're kind of disguised as these goofy animated sitcoms, but the references within the shows, if you're paying attention, are pretty smart and pretty sophisticated. — Matt Groening

It seems like all the sitcoms on now, the families are kind of dysfunctional. — Kevin Nealon

We're bombarded with liberal propaganda 24/7, from the early morning shows, Hollywood movies, documentaries and sitcoms, all major newspapers, fashion magazines, the sports pages, public schools, college professors and administrators, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Unless liberals specifically seek out Ann Coulter books and columns, which I highly recommend, or tune into Fox News or conservative talk radio, they have no idea what conservatives are thinking. — Ann Coulter

Americans get mad as hell with reasonable frequency but quickly return to their families and sitcoms. — Eric Alterman

What they do in America in all those sitcoms is hire glamorous girls and they're never that funny ... that's because they've never had to develop a personality because they're hot. — Rebel Wilson

Sitcoms are incredibly limiting. When you do a sitcom and it becomes a signature part for you, it's harder to do something else; but if you do a drama, you can get lost in it and have a role to do other things. — Aunjanue Ellis

Religion is rarely mentioned in current prime-time dramas or sitcoms that supposedly reflect the way we live now. — Dan Wakefield

I used to enjoy bad television, like really bad quiz programmes or sitcoms. — Kate Bush

As far as sitcoms go, I thought Jenna Elfman in 'Dharma and Greg' was a wonderful physical comedienne who had great timing. — Carol Burnett

I don't think of marriage as the drudge work that a lot of sitcoms and movies might have shown it to be, I think it's more deadly murderous rage, unadulterated passion, soul-crushing purgatorial dread ... It's more interesting. — Rob Delaney

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There's bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying. But — Andrew Klavan

The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms. — Dylan Moran

Occasionally, some sitcoms still stereotype women - the old dragon or the dolly bird - but on the whole we've moved away from that. — Jo Brand

Definitely for myself, I find myself gravitating towards dramatic work. In terms of sitcoms, you know, I always tell my agent I don't want to be seen. — Reggie Lee

When I first got out to Hollywood, they were pushing me for sitcoms, and I didn't really have an interest in them. I wanted to do films and slowly worked that way. And then it became, I guess, this curse of the leading man. — Brad Pitt

Most sitcoms and cartoons, especially, you can rely on, because they go back to square one at the beginning of every episode. — Scott Adsit

A lot of people are like, "You're doing commercials?" And I honestly feel like those Sierra Mist commercials are better than a lot of sitcoms I get offered. It's hard work, and I'm paid a lot of money, and I do it because I love the soda. — Jim Gaffigan

I'm an actor first and foremost, who happens to do improv. I've also done sitcoms, I've done stage. — Wayne Brady

I grew up doing sitcoms and theater and even playing with the Beach Boys, where you're programmed to perform, your body gets into a rhythm and you know it has to perform. — John Stamos

The Simpsons was pretty experimental at the time, but it attracted a lot of sitcom writers that felt confined by the limitations of live-action sitcoms in the '80s. — Eric Andre

I'm surprised how many commercials and sitcoms and movies have a need for, 'We just need something to come by the camera that's really weird.' They call Doug Jones. — Doug Jones

Definitely not a sitcom, that's my first condition. No sitcoms. — Hector Elizondo

I never had any interest in sitcoms or motion pictures or anything like that. — Norm MacDonald

I'm going old school. Adult comedy but you can have your kids in the room. Kind of Andy Griffith meets Bill Cosby meets Bob Newhart. Also my character isn't an idiot as all the rest of the sitcoms recently have the dad character like Homer Simpson. — Henry Cho

Sitcoms are designed for normal people who just want to turn on their TV and get a laugh. It's not high-brow, you don't have to work so hard, and it's meant to be a relatable genre. That's why I love it so much - my fans are from 8 years old to 80 years old, because everybody can relate to what's funny. — Megyn Price

I've always been terrible on regular sitcoms with lots of jokes. I don't know how to tell jokes. — Rainn Wilson

We kinda hated sitcoms when we sat down and talked about this. We wanted to do something that was in the sitcom vain but totally different. — Christopher Titus

With classic sitcoms like MASH, the characters all drove each other crazy, and that's what you loved to see. — David Alan Basche

I decided sitcoms weren't for me. — David Alan Grier

I do miss the rhythms of comedy. And I've never been able to perform very well without an audience. The sitcoms I've done had them. It was like doing a little play. — Dick Van Dyke

People are too lazy and too stupid to think for themselves that we've got sitcoms with canned laughter that let's you know when to laugh if you're to stupid to know when the joke is. — Marilyn Manson

Yes, 1960's North American sitcoms have led me to study the United States 1920's and 1930's crime bosses - QET Jenkins — Kim Welsman

More teenagers go to movies or rent a tape of a movie than sit down and watch sitcoms on television. — Mindy Cohn

I could have stayed in L.A. and done sitcoms for awhile and will probably go back and do one I hope. — Andrea Martin

Brendan Harris loved everyone now because he loved Katie and Katie loved him. Brendan loved traffic and smog and the sound of jackhammers. He loved his worthless old man who hadn't sent him a single birthday or Christmas card since he'd walked out on Brendan and his mother when Brendan was six. He loved Monday mornings, sitcoms that couldn't make a retard laugh, and standing in line at the RMV. He even loved his job, though he wouldn't be going in ever again. — Dennis Lehane

I was raised on the purest comedy there is: 'I Love Lucy.' I was raised watching 'Three's Company' and sitcoms of the '70s and '80s. — Mayim Bialik

I don't think American family sitcoms are mean. I guess I really love 'Arrested Development.' I guess they are quite mean in that, but that is also a very silly, surreal, absurd show as well, and it has got a heart as well. — Simon Bird

I watch sitcoms like Seinfeld, and here's a newsflash, but what a great show. — Scott Wolf

I can't even look at daily comic strips. And I hate sitcoms because they don't seem like real people to me: they're props that often say horrible things to each other, which I don't find funny. I have to feel like they're real people. — Roz Chast

I have been approached now and again about sitcoms, but, with very few exceptions, one simply needs to move to L.A. for at least a year or two these days if one wants to develop a series - which is what writing a pilot means. I've also been approached about writing episodes for sitcoms, but in order to do that one actually has to watch sitcoms ... Life's too short for television, and I don't what it on my actual gravestone, HE STARED AT A BOX FOR 10,000 HOURS. — David Ives

The only thing that I'm not willing to do is really stupid, horribly written sitcoms. It can be tempting during pilot season time, but I realized this a while ago when I almost signed my life away to a stupid pilot. — Ari Graynor

Outside of the mindless sitcoms that the networks thrive on, people able to think generally consider most entertainment is escape in one form or another. — Gary Gygax

In the old-fashioned sitcoms, to be gay was, in itself, funny, and you laughed at the characters rather than with them. — Ian McKellen

Sitcoms are usually given short shrift by the acting profession, but it's quite an amazing job. — Lea Thompson