Daily Inspiration Quote by Harvey Korman

Comedy isn’t built on punchlines so much as on architecture, and Harvey Korman is pointing straight at the load-bearing beam. His aside about Abbott and Costello - that the straight man was “first” - sounds like a trivia nerd’s delight, but it’s really a professional’s x-ray of how a duo works. We tend to treat the funny guy as the engine and the straight man as the passenger. Korman flips that: the grounded persona arrives first, sets the rules of reality, and only then can the chaos register as comedy instead of noise.

Calling it “a very interesting concept” is classic performer understatement, the kind that lets you feel the gears without turning the comment into a lecture. The subtext is craft pride: the straight man isn’t a neutral backdrop, he’s the author of the scene’s logic. Abbott’s composure gives Costello’s panic a target; the tension between stability and disruption is the joke’s power source. If you start with the clown, you risk a world where everything is already ridiculous, leaving nowhere for escalation to go.

Korman’s own career - especially in sketch comedy, where premises need to snap into focus fast - makes this observation feel like shop talk from someone who’s spent decades calibrating tone. It’s also a quiet defense of the “support” role. The straight man goes first because someone has to build the floor before another person can fall through it.