That's really what 'Jokers' is - an improv show. — James Murray
There's sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy. — T. J. Miller
Our high school had a really good improv group. — James Murray
We're improv comedians, we're not necessarily actors, we don't come across that way. — Joe Gatto
We did sketch comedy, performed live improv, and then we made the transition to TV with 'Impractical Jokers.' — Joe Gatto
I started doing improv my sophomore year. — Rachel Dratch
Improvisation is terribly haphazard. — Leo Ornstein
Improvisation is the art of being completely O.K. with not knowing what the f— you’re doing — Mick Napier
Improvisation is too good to leave to chance. — Paul Simon
I got involved in improv comedy. It settled me down when I was getting wild. I was sort of an evil teenager smashing up my cars and drinking and driving, let's just say, a lot. — Bruce McCulloch
We're an improv group and a sketch comedy group called the Tenderloins, that's our alter ego. — James Murray
We sit in a room, laugh, and all come up with comedy situations, which we work out. Sometimes we cross the line, like getting a guy to pull out of his own wedding while the ceremony's taking place. — Joe Gatto
In my live show, it will feel like I'm making up everything as I go, and a lot of it I do. I riff with the audience and see what happens. — James Murray
Comedy is difficult, especially slapstick. The trick is to have fun while you are performing it. — Maureen O'Hara
The minute you make a mistake - that's improvisation! — Barry Harris
Short Improv Comedy Quotes
To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation. — Harvey Keitel
I allow a lot of room for improvisation and funny stuff. I always feel planned. — Michael Bay
A farce, or slapstick humor, does well universally. — John Ratzenberger
Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end. — Sid Caesar
What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke. — Steve Martin
Real comedy doesn't just make people laugh and think, but makes them laugh and change. — Sam Kinison
There's always some room for improvisation. — Satyajit Ray
As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets. — Fred Frith
Going from drama to just straight-up comedy with Tommy Davidson and Jamie Foxx – what a blast. — Vivica Fox
The Internet is a great place to find unconventional comedy that you can't find anywhere else. — Andy Dick
Improv Comedy Image Quotes
Accept both compliments and criticism. It takes both sun and rain for a flower to grow.
Improvisation Quotes
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. — Jane Jacobs
The secret of tango is in this moment of improvisation that happens between step and step. It is to make the impossible thing possible: to dance silence. — Carlos Gavito
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath
If you want to improve you self-worth, stop giving other people the calculator.
My game is based on improvisation. Often a forward does not have the time to think too much. You have a second, rarely more, to decide whether to dribble, shoot or pass to the right or left. It is instinct that gives the orders. — Ronaldinho
In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. — James Clear
My school life was very much a wandering experience. I was having trouble in school and I was not making a lot of friends. So coming home and actually improvising on the piano and just coming up with melodies was an escape for me. — Josh Groban
Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.
I was improvising before I was reading music. I was just trying to play things on the clarinet by ear. I think my ear is one of my greatest assets. — Pete Fountain
Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise. — Ingmar Bergman
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting. — Charlie Trotter
I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground. — John McLaughlin
Improvisational Quotes
Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan. — Brian McKnight
Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting what Mount Rushmore is to animation. — John Cassavetes
Volleyball is one of the most interactive games going. It is a game of intuition, imagination, improvisation - but most of all, of reciprocity - of teamwork. There is no way to free-lance in volleyball. — Marv Dunphy
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
I wouldn't want the pressure of a Six Feet Under or the pressure of improvising like Curb Your Enthusiasm. — Robert Englund
The best fighters are those who are calm under pressure and improvise when needed. — Joe Rogan
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts. — Ken Burns
The only person you should try to be better than, is the person you were yesterday.
I'm flying by the seat of my pants, never creating with a thought to what's up ahead! — Akira Toriyama
Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation. — W. Somerset Maugham
Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas. — Arnold Schoenberg
Improvisation is not the expression of accident but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul. — Yehudi Menuhin
Improviser Quotes
Composing is improvisation slowed down. — Wayne Shorter
If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn, and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach. — Viola Spolin
Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city. — Frank Gehry
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, by the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well. — Isaac Asimov
The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art — Wynton Marsalis
No, improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. — Christopher Walken
The mind that opens up to a new idea never returns to its original size.
But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden
Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything. — Chris Hadfield
Preparation is the be-all of good trial work. Everything else - felicity of expression, improvisational brilliance - is a satellite around the sun. Thorough preparation is that sun. — Louis Nizer
I don't even think you should tell the audience you're improvising. It's like an apology in case it's bad : 'we're just making it up' If the improv isn't better than the rehearsed stuff, then you should just rehearse it. — Keith Johnstone
Sketch Comedy Quotes
I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college, as I was walking across campus one day, I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I've ever done. — John Krasinski
That's what I love about sketch comedy: a sketch is five minutes, then it goes dark, and there's the potential for something else. — Jason Sudeikis
There's this other world where all comedians want to do is make funny videos. Typically what's happened in the past is that a comedian gets a standup career and over the course of 20 years builds it up to the point where Comedy Central gives them a sketch show. — Gavin McInnes
What you do today can improve all your tomorrows.
Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing. — Rowan Atkinson
I was very serene, and I still am, until I start talking in another voice, then suddenly I have a lot of volume and I'm frantic. But I didn't want to be one of those people who's always talking in accents in real life, so I started doing sketch comedy. — Kate McKinnon
If you look at any successful skit comedy show, ever, there is that format of introducing you to the player in the beginning, and then going on to see those sketches. — Keegan-Michael Key
Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.
Nobody wants to see sketch comedy that's the same sketch they've seen time and time again, or that's just a rehash of that thing. — Jordan Peele
Everybody needs some good sketch comedy. — Bob Odenkirk
I'm not a comedian. I didn't study sketch comedy; my background isn't that. — Paul Rudd
Because it's uncensored cable, I think we'll be able to do the kind of sketch comedy that really hasn't been seen before. We can actually finish jokes. — Aries Spears
Improvisions Quotes
Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise. — George Gershwin
Improvisation is the courage to move from one note to the next. — Bobby McFerrin
Even if you're improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure. — John Cale
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music. — Sonny Rollins
Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself. — Cecil Taylor
General improvisations often give actors an insight beyond their words by helping them to 'see the word' and achieve a reality for the scene. — Viola Spolin
Ability can take you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.
But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things. — Alan Arkin
In improvisation, there is only one time. This is what computer people call real time. The time of inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing... the time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, are all one. — Stephen Nachmanovitch
Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations. — August Strindberg
Improvisation is really not so much remembering things. And this is what I do when I play. I forget things. When I go on the stage, I want my mind to be a blank, so that I can - things can come into me without my knowing where they came from. — Sonny Rollins
Jazz Improvisation Quotes
In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others. — Wynton Marsalis
You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it! — Art Tatum
In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds. — Steve Lacy
Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own. — Sonny Rollins
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life. — Amy Tan
I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats. — Paul Bley
I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it. — Oliver Sacks
And more than anything, I like the improvisation of jazz. That's the same thing with DJ-ing. There's so much improvisation you can do with cuttin' and scratchin' that's reminiscent of jazz music, because it's all about how you feel. You're capturing a vibe and just going with it. — DJ Jazzy Jeff
We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians. — Chad Smith
As any jazz musician knows, it takes flexibility and adaptability for improvisation to create beauty. — Doc Childre
Jokers' is an improv show in disguise. — James Murray
I still do live concerts all over the country - about four a month - with singing and characters and improv. It keeps me limber. I'll never lose that. And comedy is still the bread and butter. — Martin Short
All improv turns into anger. All comedy improv basically turns into anger, because that's all people know how to do when they're improvising. If you notice shows that are improvising are generally people yelling at each other. — Albert Brooks
I love physical comedy. I love Oscar Wilde, I love Shakespeare comedies, I love improv. — Elizabeth Banks
he puppeteers really responded to it. Patrick Bistrow really responded to it, it's great fun to do improve comedy with puppets. — Brian Henson
I did sketch comedy, but I never did improv. So I've just tried to learn as I go. — John Oliver
I always loved acting and improv and sketch comedy and theater, which I did at a local youth theater. — Emma Stone
If there's one regret I have of my time in comedy it's that I really I was so obsessed with improv for so many years and I exclusively did improv for the first 6 years or 7 years. I was doing comedy and then I started doing solo work and stand up, a bit of writing, making videos, and really going into it on that end. — Chris Gethard
I one hundred percent recognize that comedy is a more narcissistic profession and that I cannot directly improve people's lives the way I could if I had stayed in the policy world. But the trade-off is that I'm happier doing jokes. — Negin Farsad
I was confident and in good shape when I first came to L.A. but nobody would cast me in any well written roles. People assumed based on my looks I was an asshole and a one trick pony. They never let me improv or do comedy. It wasn't until I built a shlubby exterior, which stood in stark contrast to my inner confidence that people gave me room to play. — Chris Pratt
The DC Improv food is amazingly edible for a comedy club. — Jim Gaffigan
We kind of lost a lot of that and puppeteers were sticking to the script and we thought everything needed to get a lot funnier, so we thought we would go to a good improv comedy instructor. — Brian Henson
I'm a goofball, so I think comedy is one of my stronger points, as an actor. I just never get to do it. But, I'm taking classes at Groundlings, where Will Ferrell and Lisa Kudrow studied, and it's all improv comedy. It feels good to be able to do that and be funny. — Tinsel Korey
I remember like that scene with Pharrell where they're at the music video shoot, we have this on camera actually, Pharrell's confused because we weren't doing the script. We were doing all this improv and then Diddy says to him... Pharrell's like I don't understand what's going on and Diddy goes, "We do a lot of improv". (laughter) I remember being we just made him into a comedy nerd. We somehow turned Sean Combs into a comedy nerd, so. — Nicholas Stoller
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
Working in comedies is not something I set out to do. But, I love it. I've taken some improv classes here and there, but I don't consider myself a comedian by any means. — Erick Chavarria
Well, I came down to LA initially to join The Groundlings, which is an improv comedy group. I didn't get in, of course, becaue I'm not a part of The Groundlings. I just assumed that I could walk in and take over. So they said: "Hit the road Jack." And I ended up getting an agent instead. They sent me out on a couple of leads and I ended up on a sitcom and Van Wilder thereafter and then pantsless with Sandra Bullock. — Ryan Reynolds
That's the nature of comedy. You always want to be improving and growing and changing with what's happening in the world. That's when comedy is most effective. — Margaret Cho
Learn as much as you can about performing. Live theater, improv classes, music, stand up comedy, dance, anything to make yourself confident and comfortable in front of an audience. It'll all come in handy when auditioning for producers and performing with other actors. The best voice actors all have a live performance background. And are competent, fearless, incredibly creative actors. — Rob Paulsen
Many of the people I've worked with over the years came from a sketch-comedy background or an improv background, and I've learned a lot from them. — Megan Mullally
In this political climate, people are so shut down to other ideas - I call it a hardening of the categories - that if you can get them to open up and laugh, there is a possibility of improvement, and a possibility of change. I think humor sneaks up on people, and before you know it, you're laughing at something you might not agree with. — Kate Clinton
There wasn't a big tradition of comedy at Dartmouth. More than that, there wasn't really anything artsy going on in Hanover, or even in New Hampshire. The cool thing about the school is that there's nothing for people to watch, so if you were to do a play or a sketch or an improv troupe, it was always packed. There's nowhere else for anyone to go. But there was no comedy. — Mindy Kaling
I guess I'm sort of spoiled because, most of the things that I get to do, people know that you're a good improviser, so they allow you at least one improv take, and for comedy, that's great. — Matt Walsh
When I finished my residency in New Orleans, I went to L.A. where I would work as a doctor during the day, and then at night I would actually go to The Improv and do standup, all the while kind of cultivating my comedy resume. — Ken Jeong
I love doing improv. I love comedy. I have always felt this way, even when I was really young. — Dakota Johnson
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