Julie Bowen Didn’t Think She Was Funny Enough for ‘Modern Family’: “I Can’t Tell a Joke”

by cmaia1503

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  1. > “I was like, ‘I can’t tell a joke, I’m not funny,” Bowen recalled during an appearance on The Three Questions with Andy Richter.

    > Nevertheless, the actress almost didn’t audition for the role. At the time she told her team, “Don’t give me those three-jokes-a-page kind of things.”

    > Luckily, her managers pushed back and told her, “You know what? Helen Hunt isn’t funny.” Hunt charmed audiences as Jamie in Mad About You, which ran for seven seasons in the 1990s and then returned for an eighth in 2019.

    > “I said, ‘[Helen Hunt] just won like five Emmys,” Bowen recalled, to which her managers responded, “Yes. So she’s funny in a different way. She’s not three-jokes-a-page funny. And yet she is wildly funny. Try to be Helen Hunt.”

    > When Richter said that Bowen must have eventually found her funny bone, she said: “You’ll notice I didn’t do too many jokes. I fell down a lot.”

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