The safest genre is the horror film. But the most unsafe - the most dangerous - is comedy. Because even if your horror film isn't very good, you'll get a few screams and you're okay. With a comedy, if they don't laugh, you're dead.
Interpretation
Comedy is riskier than horror because it relies on audience laughter for validation.
This quote highlights the inherent risks involved in creating comedy compared to horror. While a horror film can achieve some level of success through audience reactions like screams, comedy demands consistent laughter to be considered successful. If a comedy fails to evoke laughter, the creator faces immediate disappointment, making it a more vulnerable genre.
In practice
In a stand-up comedy show, the comedian can refer to this quote to emphasize the pressure to make the audience laugh.
Tell me a story._x000D_ In this century, and moment, of mania,_x000D_ Tell me a story._x000D_ Make it a story of great distances, and starlight._x000D_ The name of the story will be Time,_x000D_ But you must not pronounce its name._x000D_ Tell me a story of deep delight.
Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.
All directors are storytellers, so the motivation was to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's what I love.
I think the only thing filmmakers can do is try to make good movies and make them as long as they allow us to keep making them. But at the end of the day, it is a business, and if audiences don't care, there's nothing we can do. It'll just go away, I guess.
This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.
A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.