“I say about myself that I make comedies the way John Ford might have said ‘I make westerns.’ That might be true. That might also be cloaking something. Scorsese in his survey of American cinema, talks about the American director as smuggler. You work within a given genre and smuggle your honest, artistic concerns in those film. John Ford with westerns, Hitchcock with thrillers, Scorsese with gangster pictures. You kind of declare that you make a certain kind of film because that helps them get made, get marketed, makes them more palatable to an American film going public, so I make comedies.
“That’s helped me, the fact that I can get laughs in these dramatic films. The fact that I make them funny, charming, keep them nimble, has helped me sell them to financiers and later to audiences and forge a career that way. One reason it’s great to do comedy is that it’s such a rush when the audience laughs. ‘We love you! We love you!’ When you make a drama, the only feedback you get from the audience is no walkouts.”
Writer/director Alexander Payne (Sideways, Nebraska)
WGAW article Paynefully Funny by Denis Faye
P.S. I believe the survey Payne referenced is A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)
Screenwriting from Iowa 