I was so amazingly witty when I had the No. 1 movie, you have no idea. People laughed at every single one of my jokes. Then when I hadn’t had a hit for three or four years, some of these same people pretended they didn’t see me when I walked in the room.
Even before I made my high school team, I’d say I want to be a NBA player, and people laughed at me with, ‘Get out of here, you ain’t going to be a NBA player. You don’t even play basketball.’
I’m 100 percent convinced that Pablo Escobar was a human being. And he was a very interesting one. For sure, he was a very, very, very mean and awful human being in many senses, but he wasn’t an alien. He was a person. He had friends; people laughed at his jokes. And he was a very contradictory person as well.
The crew taped the intercom conversation. There’s somebody giggling and laughing all the way up. And we listened to it for quite a while to try and figure out who that was, only to come to the conclusion that it was me. I mean, I laughed and giggled all the way up. It was such a fun ride.
I’ve decided to tell my kids things like: ‘I love the way each of you tilted back your heads when you laughed.’ I will give them specific stuff they can grasp.
But I don’t distinguish between being laughed with, and laughed at. I’ll take either.
I had been laughed at my whole life through school, and I never really thought of it as a vocation. I mean, I started off as a soldier, and then I went into the university thinking I was going to be a journalist, but comedy kind of fell on my head and demanded I pursue it.
In fact, when I first came to the Senate, people laughed. I had people telling me, ‘There’s no way you’re going to get a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill done.’
I think ‘Paper Moon’ is a comedy-drama. ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ was the most severe comedy, but my favorite film of my own is ‘They All Laughed,’ which is a kind of bittersweet comedy.
In the eighties, there was a huge shift in the humor of Japanese television. Up until then, the humor was garnered by people who said humorous things, but in the ’80s, it was garnered by people who were being laughed at while the audience watches and watches.
If you told me in the ’90s that I’d be in a chart battle with Green Day, I probably would have just laughed at you.
I tried Zumba, but I laughed the entire time! I was so bad, it’s embarrassing.
When I told my friends I was going to be a comedian, they laughed at me.
If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I’d become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert’s death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.
Once, when I was about eight, my mum handed me a sandwich, and I remarked: ‘What are those weird things on your hands?’ I was referring to the visible pores, which were such a contrast to my own alabaster-smooth skin. My mum looked mortified, while my grandma laughed and said: ‘They’re nothing – look at mine!’
When I first read the story ‘Guts’ in workshop – my fellow writers that I’ve been meeting with for almost 20 years – they laughed; they didn’t have any kind of shock reaction.
I suppose when I started out I didn’t know the kind of comic I wanted to be at all. So in a way, the audience wrote my act. I went in and did stuff that I would have done in the pub, and some of it they liked, and some of it they didn’t. And I kept what they laughed at.
The world was not supportive. They look at me as a joke for 13 to 14 years until I could prove feasibility; then I had competitors. Those that laughed at me became my competitors.
I remember somebody asking me in an interview years ago if I would be interested in playing Jason Bourne. I laughed: I didn’t think anybody would want to see me run around with a machine gun. It always stayed in the back of my head that I had reacted like that. It bothered me.
When I was eight or nine, I wrote a new version of ‘Peter Pan’ for the school play. They didn’t use it – I imagine it was unperformable – but as recompense for not doing my script, I was offered any role, and instinctively went for Captain Hook. I came on trying to be terrifying, but everyone laughed at me.
My first starring role was in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ and the lightbulb moment for me came when I had to stamp my foot at the end and walk off the stage. Everyone laughed and I thought, ‘this is great.’
When I look back over my life it’s almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn’t afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.
When I was at ESPN, I would say in April, ‘We should be doing something on the NFL,’ and they laughed at me.
The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed.
When I said I could beat Alexander Gustafsson in a standup fight, people laughed at me. They thought, ‘No way.’ But I believe in what I’m seeing every day.
I believed that old people never laughed. I thought they sighed a lot and groaned. They walked with sticks, and they didn’t like children on bicycles or roller skates… or with big dogs.
There have been moments where I laughed at my own family’s culture, though it’s hard to separate out whether something funny is cultural, or just my grandma specifically.
When I was in improv workshops or doing stand-up or writing comedy with others, or just doing comedy, I just laughed. Funny was funny; I loved to laugh. I always liked people I found generally funny.
My parents were funny. My brothers were funny. We just laughed and had a good time. Growing up, it breeds that. It breeds your funny. It breeds your creativity.
Confess your sins to the Lord and you will be forgiven; confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
He has achieved success who has worked well, laughed often, and loved much.
We had our first meeting yesterday, and we just laughed all the way through, so if we can bottle that, then I’ll be happy. We just get on, and that’s half the battle.
It’s not new: In the ’70s, Archie Bunker said terrible things on ‘All in the Family,’ but it was all in Carroll O’Connor’s performance. You saw lack of intelligence, and you laughed.
I went to University of Illinois team camp. And that was a big deal for me. I got MVP of the camp, but they offered another kid from the camp, which was fine. I laughed with the couple coaches I know who were there at the time, who were part of recruiting the other guy.
I was bullied in high school. I would go through the hallways and be pointed at and laughed at because I was the new kid in a wheelchair.
When I told my father about Samantha, he simply laughed and said that he is happy and that he already knew about our love story.
I was always an exhibitionist. I liked it when everyone laughed. But I didn’t do plays in high school. I was too nervous.
I got one comment that I had a lot of double chins. I just laughed at it. I do have a double chin, so that’s legit.
When we came out from the Elysee palace, there was a gigantic limousine waiting for us and four police on motorcycles. It is probably one of the few times I have experienced my fame. I thought it was so fantastic that I laughed to the point of shouting.
Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.
Why, der language down dar in de far South is jus’ as different from ours in Maryland, as you can think. Dey laughed when dey heard me talk, an’ I could not understand ‘dem, no how.
I can’t tell you how much we laughed on the set to have Alec Guinness in a scene with a big, furry dog that’s flying a space ship.
I worked as bricklayer, operating forklifts, building scenes for TV shows. I did everything. When I worked at the TV, I told them I would come back one day to give interviews, and they laughed at me.
I was a little shocked at how adult some of the humor was, because I was never that into animation before and when I watched ‘Shrek’ I really laughed out loud.
Schedules on TV are so tight, and it feels like they get tighter and tighter with every passing year. The idea of asking where your character’s come from or where they grew up – you would just get a little bit laughed at.
You know, in 1975 I couldn’t get a job in New York City because I was American. The kitchens were predominantly run by French, Swiss, German, and basically I got laughed at. I had education, I had experience, but got laughed at because I was American.
I started to record songs and put them on YouTube and people laughed behind my back.
We always thought if ‘Beauty and the Beat’ sold even 100,000 copies, we’d be real happy and a successful group, so when it reached a million… Hey, we just laughed about it.
The prisoners eyed the clothes some time, and laughed a good deal among themselves before they put them on.
In the 1970s, family history wasn’t yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book ‘The Social Origins of Private Life.’ It should have been ‘As Pompous as You Want to Be.’ Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y.
No one got anywhere by being too scared to open their mouth in case nobody laughed.
