Woody Allen (Alan Konigsberg) is quoted in this essay by Lennard Davis (hat tip: Arts & Letters):

I think that had I been better educated, I could write poetry, because a writer of comedy has some of that equipment to begin with. You’re dealing with nuance and ear and meter, and one syllable off in something I write in a gag ruins the laugh. . . . In actual one-liners, there’s something succinct, you do something that you do in poetry. In a very compressed way you express a thought or feeling and it’s dependent on the balancing of words.

Konigsberg points to his famous joke: “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Of it he notes, “In a compressed way it expresses something, and if you use one word more or less it’s not as good.”