Beyond a Joke!

...it's a very American way of doing things: stand-up comedy's very American. Sketch comedy and ensemble comedy is very English. So that's why I don't think we had stand up comedy here for quite some time, because we are very English.

– Actor and comedian Alan Brough

I see myself as an entertainer, a storyteller . . . I have no hesitation in embellishing it in any way I like to make it into a good entertaining yarn. I don’t mind if people call me a bullshit artist. That's not the point. At least I've amused somebody. I like to see people laugh.

– Author Barry Crump

I think that perhaps the way we tend to talk in New Zealand, there's a shyness about it. There's a way in which we can be imaginative, but only if we are allowed to pretend that is not what we’re doing.

– John Clarke, early in this documentary

What I really like doing is combining a social message with a good laugh — entertain them and also teach them something. Inside most satirists there's a moralist I suspect.

– Tom Scott, at the start of this documentary

To some extent, Jon and my history has been responding to events. We say right, pick up the newspaper, what's in it this week? What are people talking about? What are they annoyed about? What are they happy about? Right, we’ve got ten topics, let's write sketches about those.

– David McPhail on writing comedy with his comic partner Jon Gadsby

In the end, a comedian has one simple job, is to make people laugh. If he hasn't made them laugh, he's failed. And that's it. It's a terrific thing: you walk out on that stage or you go out on that camera, and if you don't make them laugh, that’s it.

– Producer/director Tom Parkinson on the role of a comedian

...we’ve tried in our humour to send things up rather than put things down. There's a big difference. When you’re sending something up, you have to know how to do it in the first place. If you’re putting something down you don't have to know how to do it at all.

– Jools Topp on using comedy to send up rather than put down

What we do now is that when we go out on stage . . . we're actually playing; in some sense of the word we’re playing. But the concept now is because it's professional, when you play it's got to be good every time.

– Lynda Topp

One of the lessons you tell students of playwriting is write about what you know, and I knew about the public service because I was a public servant. On the other hand, so was 98 percent of the population . . . and so when Glide Time came on the stage, it was I think the first New Zealand play where people thought 'wow that is us'.

– Roger Hall, on writing what you know