A lot of people don’t realize that without a valley, there is no peak. Without information, there is no joke. You’ve got to set things up.

It always seems to someone outside the business that it is very difficult to write for a comedy show because it must be done quickly. Actually, it is much easier to write this humor than to do a joke or a show from scratch, because the audience knows the plot. Just mention what is going on and then deliver the punch line.

Comedy is a lot harder to do if you don’t go to the mean place. The cheapest laugh you can get is an insult or snarky comment, so if you take that off the table you have to write smarter.

For humor to work, it must be original. It's easy to create original humor -- or anything else original -- if you follow my formula. [...] Identify someone who has more creative talent than you do, then try to imitate that person exactly. If you're like me, you can depend on your lack of talent to make your imitation look nothing like the source. Over time, you'll drift even further from the source of your theft, thus becoming "original."

Here's the other big secret of comedy: the audience writes most of it. You kind of give them what you think is funny, and they "grade" your work, second to second. [...] "Good word", "bad word".

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can’t blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.

Learning to be a writer is the delta of success and failure in comedy.

I think people like a little more "personal revelation" in their comedy. And that's fine! They have-- There's three generations behind me doin' it. But my thing is: I want a number of jokes of a certain quality, and laughs. I want the room to just be ringin' with laughs.

Primarily we write the show to entertain ourselves. Sometimes I recognize a joke that reminds me of something that I would've busted up at as a kid. I'm happy when I see those kinds of jokes. Because the show is for kids more than anyone else, but most of the time we are just trying to crack ourselves up and trying not to worry about much other than that.

The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it.

So if I may give a word of advice to any young writer who, despite the odds, wants to take a shot at being funny, it is this: Steal. Steal an idea that you know is good, and try to reproduce it in a setting that you know and understand. It will become sufficiently different from the original because you are writing it, and by basing it on something good, you will be learning some of the rules of good writing as you go along. Great artists may merely be “influenced by” other artists, but comics “steal” and then conceal their loot.

An odd outlook on life is the beginning of good comedic writing.