Sitcoms Quotes

Today's television sitcoms ... the father is typically depicted as a clumsy buffoon, an inane and even unnecessary appendage. In creating that caricature, producers and directors have done irreparable damage to the God-ordained image of what may be one of the most significant roles and offices in eternity - that of a father, that of a real man. ~ Robert L. Millet

Nerves are always a big problem for me, which is why I loved doing American sitcoms. Because you know when you do the take in front of the audience that you're going to do it again afterwards. A minute after you finish, you just go and do it again. So, there's that sort of safety net. And then if you made a little mistake or two, they'll go pick it up, so there's nothing to worry about. ~ John Cleese

I met an agent through my modeling agency who encouraged me to go out and audition for sitcoms, and I was absolutely petrified because I had no desire to do it. ~ Robin Wright

I love watching old sitcoms. It's very inspiring to watch 'Mary Tyler Moore' and 'Golden Girls.' I have watched them over and over again for years. ~ Valerie Azlynn

Well, I think people should be able to live in a society where they can exercise these kinds of internal drives and develop their capacities freely instead of being forced into the narrow range of options that are available to most people in the world now. And by that, I mean not only options that are objectively available, but also options that are subjectively available―like, how are people allowed to think, how are they able to think? Remember, there are all kinds of ways of thinking that are cut off from us in our society―not because we're incapable of them, but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to prevent people from thinking in those ways. That's what indoctrination is about in the first place, in fact―and I don't mean somebody giving you lectures: sitcoms on television, sports that you watch, every aspect of the culture implicitly involves an expression of what a "proper" life and a "proper" set of values are, and that's all indoctrination.
So I think what has to happen is, other options have to be opened up to people―both subjectively, and in fact concretely: meaning you can do something about them without great suffering. And that's one of the main purposes of socialism, I think: to reach a point where people have the opportunity to decide freely for themselves what their needs are, and not just have the "choices" forced on them by some arbitrary system of power. ~ Noam Chomsky

when I think of really living, living to the full - all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms. ~ M T Anderson

People still want to escape, but today's escape is different. People now want to know that there are people out there who have more problems and are a train-wreck! This is why I think it's difficult for sitcoms these days, because people are not going to believe, joke, beat, beat, joke, because there ain't nothing to laugh about. ~ Darius McCrary

Yes, 1960's North American sitcoms have led me to study the United States 1920's and 1930's crime bosses - QET Jenkins ~ Kim Welsman

Sitcoms always made the most sense to me. I grew up watching them every day with my dad. Every Monday, Tuesday night, we would be sitting in front of the television watching any kind of sitcom. I connect with that more, but I love to do whatever kind of role. ~ Hayley Orrantia

Sitcoms are usually given short shrift by the acting profession, but it's quite an amazing job. ~ Lea Thompson

'The Simpsons' basically - and 'Futurama' - are really smart shows. They're kind of disguised as these goofy animated sitcoms, but the references within the shows, if you're paying attention, are pretty smart and pretty sophisticated. ~ Matt Groening

'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. ~ Ashley Tisdale

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms. ~ Megyn Price

Americans get mad as hell with reasonable frequency but quickly return to their families and sitcoms. ~ Eric Alterman

I love doing sitcoms. I love doing comedy. I love the whole shooting match. ~ Rachael Harris

I have been approached now and again about sitcoms, but, with very few exceptions, one simply needs to move to L.A. for at least a year or two these days if one wants to develop a series - which is what writing a pilot means. I've also been approached about writing episodes for sitcoms, but in order to do that one actually has to watch sitcoms ... Life's too short for television, and I don't what it on my actual gravestone, HE STARED AT A BOX FOR 10,000 HOURS. ~ David Ives

There are so many sitcoms. So, when you get to be a part of something that feels exciting to you, you just want to be a part of it. ~ Oliver Jackson-Cohen

I decided sitcoms weren't for me. ~ David Alan Grier

I was born to do sitcoms, where you get an immediate response from the audience. ~ Kirstie Alley

Xiang wei is the character a good dish has when it's robust, flavorful, and balanced but still maintains a certain light quality. That flavor comes, lingers on your tongue, stays long enough to make you crave it, but just when you think you have it figured out, it's gone. Timing is everything. Soup dumplings, sitcoms, one-night stands - good ones leave you wanting more. ~ Eddie Huang

A lot of stand-up comedy is embarrassing: too many idiots doing it in orange neckties against brick walls. I find most sitcoms embarrassing, too, because they seem so forced. ~ Tracey Ullman

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. ~ Brad Pitt

I get one hour, really 25 minutes in a sermon on a weekend, to combat all the hours of the week that people are told you are what you have through billboards, commercials, and sitcoms, and so forth. ~ Max Lucado

I grew up doing sitcoms and theater and even playing with the Beach Boys, where you're programmed to perform, your body gets into a rhythm and you know it has to perform. ~ John Stamos

I really hate sitcoms on television with canned laughter and stuff. What really makes me laugh is the real-life stuff. I've got a dry sense of humor. ~ Katie Price

Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers. ~ Steve Erickson

Occasionally, some sitcoms still stereotype women - the old dragon or the dolly bird - but on the whole we've moved away from that. ~ Jo Brand

He convinced me - Fred Freeman - to go to Hollywood and we went to Hollywood to write sitcoms. Joey Bishop actually paid my way to Hollywood. ~ Garry Marshall

I watch sitcoms like Seinfeld, and here's a newsflash, but what a great show. ~ Scott Wolf

As she hung up on her end, she actually fanned herself with her hand, something she'd assumed people only did in TV commercials and bad sitcoms. And then she couldn't hold it in. Bursting up from her workstation, she ran around her house like a crazy person, making a bizarre kind of eeeee noise as she completed the circuit back to her desk. At which point there might have been some pirouetting. ~ J.R. Ward

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

Tyler, I'm grateful to you; for everything that you've done for me. But this is too much. I don't want this.
What do you want? Wanna go back to the shit job, fuckin' condo world, watching sitcoms? Fuck you, I won't do it. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

The Simpsons was pretty experimental at the time, but it attracted a lot of sitcom writers that felt confined by the limitations of live-action sitcoms in the '80s. ~ Eric Andre

Sitcoms are making a comeback, but you've got to have a little quirkiness in there now. ~ Jackee Harry

Cable is a great medium. It's something I respond to. I'm not doing sitcoms. People don't find me funny. That's just the way it is. ~ Diego Klattenhoff

With classic sitcoms like MASH, the characters all drove each other crazy, and that's what you loved to see. ~ David Alan Basche

More teenagers go to movies or rent a tape of a movie than sit down and watch sitcoms on television. ~ Mindy Cohn

I never had any interest in sitcoms or motion pictures or anything like that. ~ Norm MacDonald

I think the reason why I'm so alluring to networks is because on the surface I'm like a quintessential relatable, boring white guy. A great many sitcoms have been anchored by a boring white guy, so I feel like what they want to mine from me are my more generic qualities. ~ Mike Birbiglia

What they do in America in all those sitcoms is hire glamorous girls and they're never that funny ... that's because they've never had to develop a personality because they're hot. ~ Rebel Wilson

Most sitcoms and cartoons, especially, you can rely on, because they go back to square one at the beginning of every episode. ~ Scott Adsit

The entrance to the natural EM senses is now guarded by artificially monstrous EM waves carrying every kind of pattern irrelevant to nature, from TV sitcoms to defense radar broadcasts. It is as though we have covered the whole surface of the globe with a slum of slovenly, impalpable constructions during the past eighty years or so since Marconi. They are literally skyscrapers in as much as they touch the ionosphere and are reflected from it. They are tenements full of the disorderly displays of sitcoms and the sterile reflections of military radar. ~ Peter Redgrove

I love film and I love sitcoms, and I was one of those kids that would just go to the movies on the weekend and spend my whole weekend watching all of the movies. ~ Terrence J

I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business. ~ Bruce Eric Kaplan

There are only about three really, really good sitcoms on the air. ~ Sharon Gless

People are too lazy and too stupid to think for themselves that we've got sitcoms with canned laughter that let's you know when to laugh if you're to stupid to know when the joke is. ~ Marilyn Manson

People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love. ~ Helen Fisher

We have a great time on that show, and we enjoy one another's company on stage and off. And sitcoms don't have bad schedules. We started out working five days a week, but now we're down to three. ~ Kurtwood Smith

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. ~ Aunjanue Ellis

One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly - maybe - and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable. ~ Nicholson Baker

The striking thing about 'New Girl' is that under all the comedy, there's something about the emotions and reactions that feels very real - much more real than other sitcoms. Like - maybe everybody is sort of laid bare in different ways. ~ Elizabeth Meriwether

I think I get way too much credit for making what people consider to be smart choices, but it's only because I made a decision to stop worrying about making money. I had done network sitcoms. I had a nest egg. ~ Lizzy Caplan

I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: "The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it."

"Morrie true to these words, had developed his own culture – long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted not time in front of TV sitcoms or "Movies of the Week." He had created a cocoon of human activities– conversations, interaction, affection–and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl. ~ Mitch Albom

TV family sitcoms have always been about fathers who know best and mothers who are so enchanted with everything they do. I wanted to be the first mom to be a mom on TV. I wanted to sent out a message about how us women really feel. ~ Roseanne Barr

Sitcoms are designed for normal people who just want to turn on their TV and get a laugh. It's not high-brow, you don't have to work so hard, and it's meant to be a relatable genre. That's why I love it so much - my fans are from 8 years old to 80 years old, because everybody can relate to what's funny. ~ Megyn Price

I do miss the rhythms of comedy. And I've never been able to perform very well without an audience. The sitcoms I've done had them. It was like doing a little play. ~ Dick Van Dyke

I don't think American family sitcoms are mean. I guess I really love 'Arrested Development.' I guess they are quite mean in that, but that is also a very silly, surreal, absurd show as well, and it has got a heart as well. ~ Simon Bird

I think satire is a luxury of literate middle-class people. People who are well fed and relatively secure in their beds can laugh at their troubles. They can enjoy sitcoms. For those who aren't quite so lucky, well, the irony might be lost on them. ~ Harold Ramis

I grew up on network sitcoms. If those are gone when I'm 65 years old, I would never forgive myself for not stepping up to that plate, as often as possible. I'm already bummed out that DVDs are dying off because, in my 20s, those were a huge thing. ~ Dan Harmon

Horoscopes, like bad sitcoms, are created for people that I don't relate to. ~ Dov Davidoff

When you watch the sitcoms that were the big hits when I was growing up, TV was still just TV. It was allowed to just be TV. There were three channels that were competing for the whole family and you couldn't take your business elsewhere. ~ Dan Harmon

I sort of have open invitations from a lot of people to do TV. But it's very hard for me to do roles in sitcoms and movies because I'm not a great actor, so if the material isn't good, I'm in torment while I do it. ~ Norm MacDonald

I'd love to do sitcoms. I think I'm pretty darn funny. ~ Yasmine Bleeth

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms. ~ Ben Lerner

Sitcoms, I always figured that would be an easy gig, but man, it is not. ~ Blake Shelton

I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That's my tasty junk food. ~ Felicia Day

I just love the subversion of dialogue in sitcoms, stand-up is monologue and that is entertaining for a lot of people but personally I find it a bit trying, which is a weird thing to say as a stand-up! I love people aping normal conversation and twisting it so it becomes hilarious. ~ Doc Brown

There's a real sense of camaraderie with sitcoms. ~ Jack Whitehall

I just love doing sitcoms. I'd be in them till I was gray if they'd have me. ~ Jason Bateman

Emotionally, shows like 'Cheers' and 'Taxi' were classic sitcoms when I was growing up. ~ Dan Harmon

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. ~ Ari Graynor

Margaret is the first person who understands that my dull universe is the place where self-loathing blends with sitcoms and dullness like vaseline coats everything I see. She's the first person I've ever really liked who wasn't me. ~ Molly Jong-Fast

Many, many things are dangerous in our world, commercials and TV are dangerous, and so is the world of sitcoms. But nobody does anything about them because they're turning in alot of money. ~ Wes Craven

I mean, sitcoms shouldn't be doing 'Saturday Night Live.' You can't just do bit after bit after bit. You have to string it together with tight writing and performances. Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to do this. ~ Joyce DeWitt

I'm surprised how many commercials and sitcoms and movies have a need for, 'We just need something to come by the camera that's really weird.' They call Doug Jones. ~ Doug Jones

If actors could actually make a living doing theater, that would be my first choice. Sitcoms are the closest thing to being onstage in front of an audience. If I had to choose, it would be theater and doing the occasional movie once in a while, and spending time doing nothing. ~ Enrico Colantoni

I'm an actor first and foremost, who happens to do improv. I've also done sitcoms, I've done stage. ~ Wayne Brady

As far as sitcoms go, I thought Jenna Elfman in 'Dharma and Greg' was a wonderful physical comedienne who had great timing. ~ Carol Burnett

We're bombarded with liberal propaganda 24/7, from the early morning shows, Hollywood movies, documentaries and sitcoms, all major newspapers, fashion magazines, the sports pages, public schools, college professors and administrators, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Unless liberals specifically seek out Ann Coulter books and columns, which I highly recommend, or tune into Fox News or conservative talk radio, they have no idea what conservatives are thinking. ~ Ann Coulter

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There's bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying. But ~ Andrew Klavan

I was raised on the purest comedy there is: 'I Love Lucy.' I was raised watching 'Three's Company' and sitcoms of the '70s and '80s. ~ Mayim Bialik

I'm going old school. Adult comedy but you can have your kids in the room. Kind of Andy Griffith meets Bill Cosby meets Bob Newhart. Also my character isn't an idiot as all the rest of the sitcoms recently have the dad character like Homer Simpson. ~ Henry Cho

popular TV sitcoms sprang up, each a variation on a single theme: something alien is close and secretly among us, and one person is burdened with protecting all others from the unspeakable truth of their presence and power: My Favorite Martian, My Mother the Car, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, Mister Ed, Bewitched - they all pointed to the growing anxiety of middle-class whites that nothing was as it appeared, ~ David Henry

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. ~ Bea Arthur

I don't think anybody in my graduating class would have figured that I would be doing full-on single-camera comedies or sitcoms, or anything like that, but it certainly has been a part of my career. ~ Brooke Nevin

I could have stayed in L.A. and done sitcoms for awhile and will probably go back and do one I hope. ~ Andrea Martin

I sleep five or six hours a night, then crash at the weekend. I'm learning to eat properly and exercise. I relax by watching silly sitcoms like 'Scrubs' and 'How I Met Your Mother.' ~ Elise Andrew

I don't want to get pretentious, but there's an art to doing sitcoms; you have to make it work in that format. ~ Sean Maguire

A lot of people are like, "You're doing commercials?" And I honestly feel like those Sierra Mist commercials are better than a lot of sitcoms I get offered. It's hard work, and I'm paid a lot of money, and I do it because I love the soda. ~ Jim Gaffigan

There was a time when I couldn't watch sitcoms for a while because it was just cacophony, it was just noise. ~ Phylicia Rashad

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.' ~ Brad Pitt