Writing Jokes Quotes & Sayings

If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller. — Val Kilmer

I always remember writing a page of jokes for a comedian and handing it to him backstage at a club and he read it and then took his cigarette lighter and lit the page on. — Garry Marshall

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979) — Jack McClelland

Women are often pushed into the idea that they write softer, more character-driven jokes. — Allison Silverman

I'm a Macintosh nut. I got my PowerBook, so if I'm not writing jokes, I'm working on that. — Jeff Dunham

Operating by trial and error mostly, we've evolved a tacitly agreed upon list of the elements that make for a good fantasy. The first decision the aspiring fantasist must make is theological. King Arthur and Charlemagne were Christians. Siegfried and Sigurd the Volsung were pagans. My personal view is that pagans write better stories. When a writer is having fun, it shows, and pagans have more fun than Christians. Let's scrape Horace's Dulche et utile off the plate before we even start the banquet. We're writing for fun, not to provide moral instruction. I had much more fun with the Belgariad/Malloreon than you did, because I know where all the jokes are.
All right, then, for item number one, I chose paganism. (Note that Papa Tolkien, a devout Anglo-Catholic, took the same route.) — David Eddings

I knew I just loved comedy, and I think it was my parents who initially brought up the notion of me trying to do stand-up. I think I actually tried writing jokes just at home, just kind of sitting around. But it seemed like a very real way to step into the world of comedy. I felt I could do it, so why not? — Seth Rogen

People keep referring to me as a standup, and that just doesn't sit well with me because a lot of my friends are standups and they're brilliant at writing jokes, and I'm not. — Nick Offerman

I've been writing jokes since I'm fifteen. Not out of happiness, but to go to a different place, because reality wasn't good to me. — Rodney Dangerfield

I don't really write jokes. I wait for stuff to happen in life, and then I tell it on stage. — Kathleen Madigan

I don't write jokes first. I write down topics. I think of what I want to talk about, and then I write the jokes - they don't write me ... And even if you don't think it's funny, you won't think it's boring. You might disagree, but you'll listen. And maybe even laugh as you disagree. — Chris Rock

There have always been jokes all over our songs; I originally started writing lyrics to make my friends crack a smile, which is difficult. — Alex Turner

It's fun when the writers start writing jokes to you, but also it's fun when the writers will come to you and say 'Hey, listen, we're working on this story and we need to know if you speak any foreign languages.' And I said 'No, I don't. I speak a little Spanish, but I can learn a foreign language.' And they go 'Okay, do you think you can learn Portuguese?' And I go 'Yeah, whatever it takes. If it's funny, I'll do it.' So of course I start looking online and learning Portuguese, and as it turns out, I get the script and it's now Serbian. — David Alan Basche

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job. — Jamaica Kincaid

A sign read "Free drinks for billiards competitors only." Hand-lettered below read "All others will pay." It was written in blood. I could tell because a red fairy with what looked like black insect wings was writing it at the time, with his own dismembered finger. — Red Tash

Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I've learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could've on my own. — Megan Amram

And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now. — Nicholas Stoller

Later, the talk turned to all the other guys/girls who were currently hot for the two of them. 'There's this total dweeb named Robert who's always calling me, and I feel bad because he's really nice, but I'm totally not interested,' Phoebe told Pablo.

'Believe me, I know what that's like,' Pablo told Phoebe. 'There's this girl at Hunter who's, like, obsessed with me. She's, like, this big fat girl. Ass like a truck. She's always writing me these love letters. Maybe I should fuck her. You know, just to be nice.' (Smile, smile.)

'You're so bad.' (Phoebe shaking her head; Pablo loving it; Phoebe loving it, too. What was more ego-enhancing than making dumb jokes at the expense of ugly women? Phoebe could never decide whom she hated more--other people or herself.) — Lucinda Rosenfeld

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld advised aspiring comedian Brad Isaac that, because daily writing was the key to writing better jokes, Isaac should buy a calendar with a box for every day of the year, and every day, after writing, cross off the day with a big red X. "After a few days you'll have a chain," Seinfeld explained. "You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain. — Gretchen Rubin

Jokes that are gratuitously offensive are synonymous with bad writing to me. I'm offended as a writer first and as a person second. — Rachel Bloom

I used to go to the library all the time when I was kid. As a teenager, I got a book on how to write jokes at the library, and that, in turn, launched my comedy career. — Drew Carey

But it was Aldo's pen that became his most forceful tool. He started a newsletter for rangers called the Carson Pine Cone. Aldo used it to "scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm." Most of the Pine Cone's articles, poems, jokes, editorials, and drawings were Aldo's own. His readers soon realized that the forest animals were as important to him as the trees. His goal was to bring back the "flavor of the wilds. — Marybeth Lorbiecki

I do three drafts handwritten and then it's typed up ... They are different from each other, they are hopefully improvements in the sense you're going back over something. The first time you write it, it's the first thing that you can think. The second time you're trying to shape the dialogue, helping the characters. The third time you're doing it because you want the words to sound nice, hopefully making the prose better, making it more fun to read, making the jokes funnier and the scary bits scarier. — Clive Barker

I don't have to write jokes. I don't have to write insults. If you ask the man of the hour in the hot seat, my mere existence is clearly insult enough. — Rachael Ray

Whatever the joke is has to be funny, and not coming from a mean-spirited place. I think some things are totally off limits. If someone's spouse died, or one of their children, I would never joke about that. I don't have any aspirations towards writing any cancer jokes, and there's some stuff that I think is definitely taboo. — Amy Schumer

You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal. — Terry Pratchett

Pointing out the emotion in a scene is like laughing at your own jokes. — Diana Gabaldon

Writing is for stories to be read, books to be published, poems to be recited, plays to be acted, songs to be sung, newspapers to be shared, letters to be mailed, jokes to be told, notes to be passed, recipes to be cooked, messages to be exchanged, memos to be circulated, announcements to be posted, bills to be collected, posters to be displayed and diaries to be concealed. Writing is for ideas, action, reflection, and experience. It is not for having your ignorance exposed, your sensitivity destroyed, or your ability assessed. — Frank Smith

I have this natural thing in my head that when I sit down to write something serious, I tend to make jokes. I can't help it. I can't help but desire for the narrative to be as complicated and as truthful as possible. That's just the way my head works. — Justin Simien

I'm not good at anything except writing jokes. I wasn't good at sports, I wasn't good at anything artsy, ever. I think there was a real worry for a while about what I would be good at. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd. — Mindy Kaling

I actually write some pretty tough jokes. I don't want to push the "soft" angle too much. — Allison Silverman

I remember writing standup jokes without having done sets. But as soon as I did my first set, it didn't matter. Everything I thought would work didn't work. And everything I was iffy on was funny. — John Mulaney

Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you've gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them. — Mel Brooks

When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes. — Dave Barry

In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise. — James Dashner

You have to understand that people feel threatened by a writer. It's very curious. He knows something they don't know. He knows how to write, and that's a subtle, disturbing quality he has. Some directors without even knowing it, resent the writer in the same way Bob Hope might resent the fact he ain't funny without twelve guys writing the jokes. The director knows the script he is carrying around on the set every day was written by someone, and that's just not something that all directors easily digest. — Ernest Lehman

I'm on Twitter a lot of the day because I really like Twitter. It's great for jokes. But when I'm writing, I can't do anything else. I can't even listen to music. I just have to write, and then I can do something else. I can't multitask. — Mallory Ortberg

I am not so secretly a comedian. I write a lot of my own material if you've seen videos I've done. I write jokes. — Laura Benanti

I think my one of my strengths in standup is my ability to adlib. I do all my best writing on stage. I can sit down and write jokes, but I'd rather go on stage with a premise or an idea and let the jokes come that way. My creative juices are never flowing any better than when I'm onstage. — Henry Cho

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate. — Jennifer Weiner

I hope I never have to stop acting. I love it. But, I think the coolest thing about acting is working with these amazing people all the time, and writing represented a new way to meet those people and to tell stories, at the same time, which I've always wanted to do, and to tell jokes. I love comedy, so writing was a way of getting these jokes that I had down on the page. — Josh Lawson

I have been writing my whole life: stories and plays and sketches and scripts and poems and jokes. Most feel alive. And fluid. Breathing organisms made better by the people who come into contact with them. But this book has nearly killed me. Because, you see, a book? A book has a cover. They call it a jacket and that jacket keeps the inside warm so that the words stay permanent and everyone can read your genius thoughts over and over again for years to come. Once a book is published it can't be changed, which is a stressful proposition for this improviser who relies on her charm. I've been told that I am "better in the room" and "prettier in person." Both these things are not helpful when writing a book. I am looking forward to a lively book-on-tape session with the hope that Kathleen Turner agrees to play me when I talk about some of my darker periods. One can dream. — Amy Poehler

Looking into blood doping. I think it will allow me to write jokes with greater intensity, and for a longer period of time. — Dov Davidoff

What I didn't realize is that the writing process for comedies is that you do your table read, and if you aren't funny on that first day during the table read, they take your jokes away and give them to somebody else. — David Morse

Notebooks. There are dozens of notebooks. I always carry notebooks with me. I scribble in them in a barely readable scrawl. I do not write jokes. I write moments. Thoughts. Fragments that I have to sweat over as if they're cryptic texts in a lost language when I try to interpret them. That shouldn't be part of my process - decoding my own writing - but it has been for my entire life. What does that say about me? Why can't I make it easy? I need to complicate everything to protect myself from success and to remain complicated and overwhelmed. — Marc Maron

She used to write all the time,' Elizabeth explained, 'before she lost all that weight. Remember? When she was the butt of everyone's jokes instead of the girl all the boys want to date? — Francine Pascal

There are a lot of great jokes you can sit down and write, but that's just a written joke, versus the comedy of the situation. Ideally, you're pulling as much comedy out of the situation as you can. — John Mulaney

I try to write three jokes every morning, although I don't know what they are. I write them as fast as I can, then I put them away for a month. So I couldn't even tell you what they are, or if they're good. I just assume they weren't. — Anthony Jeselnik

Which is an interactive sport for our family, since Gil likes to groan over the writing and point out the plot twists ahead of time, and Jeremy tears his hair out over the historical inaccuracies, and Dad makes corny jokes, till Mom reminds us, loudly, that some people are trying to watch the movie. Then we'll all quiet down for about five minutes, until Olivia remarks that the costume designer should have dressed the star in kitten heels instead, because it's a lot harder to run in stilettos. — Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

I started doing my own animated movies when I was in ninth grade; that's when I got the filmmaking bug. When I was about 16, I started writing jokes for doing stand up, and then I was 19 and started doing stand up. — Judah Friedlander

I'm really bad at writing jokes. — Glenn Howerton

Writing your own jokes, you just kind of keep working on something until you think it might work, and then you try it out and hope for the best. — Aziz Ansari

Jokes that make me laugh out loud when I write them almost always bomb. I have no idea why. — Chris Hardwick

As for jokes, I don't think it's necessarily that what I write is funny. — Peter David

I am excited about getting back to what I do best and what my audience likes best, I am writing new jokes every day and soon Ill be telling them every night. Just me, one Jew talking and that's it. — Jackie Mason

Writing good jokes requires effort. Think I'll just start dressing funnier. — Dov Davidoff

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal. — A.A. Milne

I never really write the jokes. I just sit down over a week or two and try to figure out what I want to talk about. Once I narrow that down, then I start working on the material, like "How do I make this stuff funny?" — Chris Rock

I like writing a joke, and I like when a joke works, and I like other comics who tell jokes. — Dave Attell

I think sketch writing is a good spot for everyone to start because it requires you to develop characters, have a beginning, middle and end and have a bunch of jokes in a short amount of time. — Blake Anderson

Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature
match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P.G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here ... he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes.
(Hornby's thoughts after reading "Enemies of Promise" by Cyril Connolly) — Nick Hornby

When my syndicated show got canceled, the next day I still knew how to write jokes. That was a huge revelation. Because at first you think, "I won't have any shelter! What am I gonna do? The sun is hot. Very thirsty." — Jon Stewart

If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is. — Patrick Rothfuss

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. — Chuck Klosterman

I do Twitter, but I'm still not great on it - I'm not good at writing short little jokes, so my Twitter's not really a jokey thing. — Cecily Strong

Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have. — Lorrie Moore

It was called 'We Wear the Mask', by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle's bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions.

I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more.

I stopped writing. — Catherine Doyle

I don't have to worry about writing jokes. I just tell stories about things that have happened to me. As long as I'm alive and I'm living and I'm experiencing different things every day, the show will always change. — Gabriel Iglesias

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them. — Robert Frost

I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing. — Jim Gaffigan

If you think it's easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you've probably never tried. — Scott Adams

I got a pit bull from a shelter, so my whole life is centered on this dog, and I've been writing a lot of dog jokes. I should probably give up now, because I'm writing jokes about my dog. — Joe Mande

I think things evolve into jokes. I don't generally write them down as jokes. I talk them out. — Marc Maron

Listen: Love your fiction, even if you hate the act of creating that fiction, love the stories to a fault. Cry at your tragedies, laugh at your jokes, rejoice at your character's victories - or give it all up and go knit a damned sweater, instead. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about. — Jon Stewart

The most fun I ever have is sitting in with Rick writing, and we laugh at our own jokes. — Adrian Edmondson

I was always cutting words. I even would write my jokes in my notebook. I still do this, almost like a poem. — Anthony Jeselnik

To develop your own voice, you have to keep writing a ton, and this is something where I think Twitter is helpful. I use it to write a ton of jokes. You have to write a ton of bad stuff before you know what you're good at. And that's what some people I think have trouble with, the thought of getting past the bad stuff. — Megan Amram

Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too. — Margaret Mahy

I wrote. I wrote all the things I couldn't say to him. I wrote about how much I believed in us. I wrote about how much I trusted God. I wrote that I was praying for him. I wrote down all the jokes I could remember, which weren't many. — Kimberly Novosel

Writing jokes for others is like having babies for someone else. It's sad. Like the woman who gives up her baby but needs to be close so she secretly becomes the maid in the household. — Emo Philips

I don't think I ever wrote a song. I can write a lot of jokes, but when I try to write lyrics they're the most direct, non-figurative words, like, 'I like you, I like you,' ... and that's it, for the whole song. People would go, 'Ooh, this guy's Dylan or something.' It gives me a lot more respect for songwriters, actually. — Demetri Martin

Recently I have been attacked in newspapers by two 'fabulist' writers, as far as I can make out for the ordinariness of the worlds I portray. To which the most obvious reply is that it's all very well writing about elves and dragons and goddesses rising out of the ground and the rest of it--who couldn't do that and make it colorful? (Readable, of course, is another matter...) But writing about pubs and struggling singer-songwriters--well, that's hard work. Nothing happens. Nothing happens, and yet, somehow, I have to persuade you that something is happening somewhere in the hearts and minds of my characters, even though they're just standing there drinking beer and making jokes about Peter Frampton. — Nick Hornby

It's interesting, once I have convinced people that, yes, I have a sister with a mental disability, the retard jokes really dry up, so I'm not sure how much retard humor is really going on out there, but I imagine there's a lot because it's a pretty safe group to make fun of. It's not like the Retards of America are gonna rise up and organize a protest. They're not gonna write letters. They only just recently got the Supreme Court to stop executing them. — Bonnie McFarlane

As a comedian, I'm like one of those on-the-scene reporters. I will actually go and try to find disasters so I can write jokes as the disasters unfold. — Paul Provenza

I learned as a young man that I don't write jokes, but that I can deliver more mundane material and get a laugh. I call myself a humorist. — Nick Offerman

Books are a social substitute; you read people who, at one level, you'd like to hang out with. [David Foster Wallace]'s writing self
it's most pronounced in his essays
was the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style. — David Lipsky

Sometimes my humor does offend people, and I've said it before: I don't write jokes to be offensive. I write jokes to be funny, and I guess what I find funny are things that other people sometimes find offensive. I would love nothing more than to never offend anyone, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way. — Moshe Kasher

Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I've never written jokes. I mean, I'll write things on a piece of paper and riff on them onstage. — David Cross

People can write jokes five minutes after a major world event happens, and have hundreds of thousands of people read them within 10 minutes. Whereas before you write a joke, you don't know if anybody is really touching on it or not, and you tell it onstage the next night. For joke writing it has changed things. — Nick Thune

Please use anger for something positive like hurting people that deserve it or writing jokes. — Dov Davidoff

Sure, retarded jokes write themselves. But the spelling is always way off. — Anthony Jeselnik

There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end. — Chad Harbach

Twitter taught me how to become better at writing jokes because it forces you to chip away at all the extraneous words. — Peter Serafinowicz

There's always a source for humor [in politics]. If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny. So it sort of selects itself. It has to. And plus, often something that wouldn't be funny at the time is okay to make jokes about later. — Calvin Trillin

My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done. — Woody Allen

I'm just having fun making jokes and writing books. But you see me once a year, I come on when I have a new book out, but basically, I've got my nose to the grindstone and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do in life, which is make stories. — T.C. Boyle

I've included these little jokes and mysteries in my writing for the amusement of readers. — Armistead Maupin

I start with the joke line and write backward. — Nipsey Russell