Every sitcom needs their straight man or straight woman.
Aarti Mann
The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks. If my daughter has a mediocre sense of humor, I'm just gonna tell her, 'Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they'll have to hire you, they can't really fire you, and you don't have to produce that much. It'll be awesome.'
Adam Carolla
My favorite thing to do as a kid was pretend I was in the opening credits of a sitcom. As the theme song would play, I'd look up at the imaginary camera and smile as my name would flash on the screen.
Adam F. Goldberg
What I love about sketch is that the writing of it is idea-based. It's not story-based. It's like, 'This is a behavior, and we're going to write, in a small sample, the funniest way to heighten this behavior.' Sitcoms or movies are about story.
Adam Pally
One line on a Tom Selleck sitcom does not a career make.
Adam Scott
You'll see Dame Judi Dench in a Bond film, in Shakespeare and then starring in her own sitcom. You never see that here with Meryl Streep.
Alan Cumming
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
If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.
Alexei Sayle
Every comic is taught that you're supposed to have a great seven-minute set and then get a sitcom. And I don't want to get the sitcom.
Ali Wong
The characters are not allowed to change if you write a sitcom; they're not allowed to learn anything. There's all these sorts of rules, and you go, 'I just want to be able to write one character and then leave that behind.' Also, as a performer, and I may regret saying this, but it would be my own personal hell to be trapped in the sitcom.
Alice Lowe
The fact that 'Mom' is not joke, joke, joke - and is investing in these characters and their lives, things that really happen to people - I think it's resonating, and that's why people are tuning into it and not just dismissing it as a multi-cam sitcom.
Allison Janney
What I love most is television, and I would love to work on a sitcom.
Amber Stevens
I love working in television and in comedy, so whenever there's an opportunity to work on a TV sitcom, I'm like, 'Yes please!'
With a sitcom, everyday you do a run through, and people are judging you, and the scripts are being changed nightly, nightly, nightly.
Amy Sherman-Palladino
You simply cannot do a sitcom by committee. It will not work. You've got to have one or two clean, creative voices in charge, and there's got to be some faith by the studio and network in those people to make the right choices.
I'm ridiculously fortunate to get a chance to experience the sitcom world. The schedule is extremely easy, and you get fed as an artist because you're not only working on a project, but you get to work with cameras, and you get the audience there.
Andrea Anders
I could have stayed in L.A. and done sitcoms for awhile and will probably go back and do one I hope.
Andrea Martin
A sitcom. I hate that word.
Angela Lansbury
I hope we can see African American characters as the diva, as the villain, and also as the praying mother. We are all of those things. We tended to only be the best friend or the neighbor in everybody's sitcom.
Angela Robinson
Just saying I'd like to do a sitcom is poison words, isn't it?
Ant McPartlin
The difference between doing a live show and a sitcom is that a sitcom can live on. If you do it well, it can leave a legacy, whereas most of our live work never gets repeated because it's final, it's done, you start again.
I was genuinely shocked to even be in the frame for a sitcom role on British TV.
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.
Being Orthodox Jewish is kind of like being raised on like network sitcoms.
Everyone in L.A. talks about getting an agent or a manager in terms of getting on a sitcom or getting on a movie or doing something else.
'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.
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.
In television, a sitcom is probably the closest thing to what it's like working in the theater.
You can't erase Bill Cosby's contributions. That's the conflict. He's one of the most influential comedians of all time, and 'The Cosby Show' is one of the most influential sitcoms ever. When I watched as a kid, I wanted Cliff to be my dad. Everybody did.
I realised I had spent the majority of my adult life doing two characters - Maude from 1972-'79 and Dorothy from 1985-'92 - and I really didn't know what I wanted to do after 'Golden Girls.' I knew what I didn't want to do - any more sitcoms, or wait for the next great role that might never come.
Someone once accused me of trying to turn the sitcom into an art form, and I really believe that's what I was trying to do.
In sitcoms, the women are so beautiful, understanding and well-bred. They have humor, but sort of display it with a twinkle of the eye and not a guffaw. But there's no juice in that for me.
A lot of people say the sitcom is dead. I think they're right to some extent, in that the shows they're putting out are all the same.
There will be four ancillary shows on the MyMusic channel, and we'll be updating an entire blog with up-to-the-minute music news. You can visit it like BuzzFeed or Pitchfork and get album reviews. It's all as part of the sitcom experience, written by the characters.
We look at 'MyMusic' as the future of the sitcom.
It's very rare for the Internet to have a successful narrative show like 'MyMusic.' It's really a case study for what is the future of the sitcom.
I'd never done a sitcom until the 'Michael J. Fox Show.' I'd never even guest starred in one until then. So it was definitely a learning curve, which is what I wanted. I wanted to do something new, to challenge myself.
The writers are the stars of every really successful sitcom.
A lot of the time, you need to find the right home for ideas. You know, sometimes you think 'oh this'd be a sitcom, oh, no it wouldn't, it'd be a drama, or an educational thing, or a doco or something.' I've got loads of ideas and you just have to keep sending them and pitching them.
That's kind of my job in the writer's room. I'm always the guy going, like, 'People wouldn't say that there. They wouldn't say that.' Like, I hate when I watch sitcoms and something crazy happens, and people just kind of go, 'Huh?' and then they just go on.
Like most comics, I tried to come up with a sitcom idea that was based around my life. And it didn't work out. But maybe because it didn't work out, that's why I ended up on 'Breaking Bad;' I don't know.
My goal is for 'The Bill Engvall Show' to be a show the networks look at and say, 'Ooh, maybe we should get back to the family sitcom.'
You know as well as I do that the family sitcom was the stalwart of TV for God knows how many decades.
Sitcoms, I always figured that would be an easy gig, but man, it is not.
There are quite detailed rules with sitcom. When people can leave scenes, act structure, joke rhythm. You can't not have a straight man.
I have to warn you, I'm not just some sitcom guy. I'm now an author.
When I first started directing, I could have chosen a more lucrative path, with sitcoms and things like that. But I knew enough after the experiences I had in front of the camera that I was not going to do that, because I was just going to work on my own things or work with people I respected.
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.
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.'
Your average sitcom writer is a very intellectual person.
