The hardest I’ve ever laughed in a cinema was at ‘Silent Movie’ by Mel Brooks. I was 12-ish and I actually fell out of my seat. I saw it 10 years later hoping for the same hilarity but it didn’t happen. I’m not sure if that’s because of me or the film.
I hate when people say, ‘Oh, they laughed all the way to the bank.’ That’s nonsense because the most cynical, unhappy people are Hollywood screenwriters. They earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for work that’s never made.
If you’d ever told me that my Broadway debut would be playing Spider-Man, I would have laughed in your face.
I’ve kept evolving the character. At first, you hated Goldust with a passion, then you laughed with him.
A light wind swept over the corn, and all nature laughed in the sunshine.
You know the phrase ‘Jesus laughed’ isn’t ever used in the Gospels. So, most people walk away with the idea that Jesus is a pretty serious guy, pretty sour faced most of the time, pretty upset at what’s going on around Him.
I believe they talked of me, for they laughed consumedly.
I was 32 when I signed for Everton, and Roberto Martinez said, ‘With your style of game, you can play until you’re 40.’ I’m sitting there laughing at him, but he was deadly serious. I still laughed.
During the Great Depression, when people laughed their worries disappeared. Audiences loved these funny men. I decided to become one.
My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn’t have any money, because Africa was the ‘dark continent’, and because I was a girl.
I’ve laughed hysterically, just trying to hold it in, at every funeral I’ve been to, because everyone’s so serious. And there are a lot of people speaking publicly, which makes you understand why it’s people’s number one fear – because everyone shouldn’t do it.
I remember, as a child, loving it when my mom laughed, but I was definitely not a class clown.
If my mother hadn’t laughed at the funny things I did, I probably wouldn’t be a comic actor. After she had her first heart attack, the doctor said, ‘Try to make her laugh.’ And that was the first time I tried to make anyone laugh.
I was in a play in elementary school and had to jump up and run away. I was nervous and tripped and fell down and everyone laughed. Their laughter made me relax, so I pretended it was part of the show.
I told my boss, ‘Thank you – but I’m not going to be here tomorrow. I’m going to pursue my career as a boxer.’ I remember the woman actually laughed at me. She giggled and said, ‘Boxing? Well, good luck.’
I always knew that I wanted to be an actor. I made my debut on stage when I was 12, and I was sure that this is what made me happy. However, nobody takes a 12-year-old’s career choice seriously. Everybody laughed it off. I also ran away from it, but acting eventually found me.
There was a solid six-month period where I was going out on castings and I was laughed out of the room because I’m much more petite than other models.
Clearly, I wanted to be a pro wrestler, but I got laughed at. I was kind of the runt. I was never the tallest kid or the biggest kid or the strongest kid, so I would get laughed at when I’d say it.
When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud – 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?
I’ve spent months living in Africa and India. So it’s not like I was sheltered when I started living in America. But my family laughed when they heard I was going to be in ‘Transformers.’ I learned a lot and got to experience Michael Bay’s mayhem. It was a very colorful experience.
If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best.
You know, my first three or four drafts, you can see, are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter, and I know everybody’s switching to a computer. And I’m sort of laughed at.
Paul Lucas had a particularly amusing accent, so I chuckled. That was terrible; I shouldn’t have done that, but he took it too big. He got up and said he couldn’t work with people who laughed at him!
I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I’m not laughing anymore, at least about mammoths. This is going to happen. It’s just a matter of working out the details.
I certainly never thought I would run for office myself. If someone had suggested it, I would have laughed out loud.
I called up and said, ‘Dad, I won a MacArthur.’ My father goes: ‘I always thought your sister would win that,’ and I said, ‘Dad, just say congratulations and keep your private thoughts private.’ At that point he laughed, then burst into tears, and it was obvious that he was so happy and proud.
The basic function of a comic is stand-up because it’s so straightforward and simple. If the audience don’t laugh, you didn’t do your job. I’ve had some audiences where I didn’t care if they laughed or not because they were either too drunk or stupid.
There came to port last Sunday night the queerest little craft, without an inch of rigging on; I looked and looked – and laughed. It seemed so curious that she should cross the unknown water, and moor herself within my room – my daughter! O my daughter!
The music played most around St. Louis was country-western and swing. Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of the country stuff on our predominantly black audience. After they laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff.
He’s the most incredible man. He’s so generous and kind, and he helps so many people, and, um, he makes me laugh like I’ve never laughed, and he’s a great friend.
Shortly after he became the first Muslim to attend cabinet, I urged Sadiq Khan to be prepared. The Islamophobes, the new McCarthyites, would at some stage come after him. He laughed it off. Yet it was only a matter of time.
I think we all fear appearing foolish in public. We don’t want to be laughed at.
I did sketches and had the best time of my life because people were laughing. I was not self-conscious, because they laughed when I wanted them to.
I go up to people and ask if I can use them in my photos. Occasionally it is the person in question, as happened with James Hewitt. How embarrassing. He just laughed and said, ‘You can’t afford me.’
The first time I read ‘Barbecue,’ I fell in love with it. I never laughed so hard in my life.
Any comedic-type person will tell you there’s no greater high in the world than someone to laugh at a joke or tell you, ‘I haven’t laughed so hard’ or ‘You made my day’ with comedy.
Even my family laughed at me because they thought this young guy who’s always stuttering in front of other people should be in front of 100 musicians and talk to them and leading them.
One day, a musician asked me what I did. When I told him I was to be a businessman, he laughed and said, ‘You are not a businessman.’ Sometimes all it takes is one person to put an important thought in your head, and he did.
When I was about forty-three years of age, I had a private secretary with a beautiful baritone voice. I told him I would give anything in the world if I could only carry a tune. He laughed and said, ‘Anybody who has a voice and perseverance can sing.’
I remember, the first few times I modelled, other girls laughed at my big behind. I felt like a fat pig, even though I really wasn’t. When you are 15 and other girls nick-name you a ‘little piggy’ and ‘fatty,’ you believe them.
If I went in to pitch this show to a network, I would be laughed out of the room.
A touring comic’s typical day roughly amounts to an hour of being laughed at and 20 minutes of being photographed. The other 22 hours and 40 minutes are spent in silence.
The best kind of comedy to me is when you make people laugh at things they’ve never laughed at, and also take a light into the darkened corners of people’s minds, exposing them to the light.
Very few have the talent to make others laugh without being laughed at.
My mother is an incredibly beautiful woman who has laughed at every single thing my father’s ever said. At a young age, my brother and I understood that if you can make girls laugh, you can punch well above your weight class.
I got into lots of fights at school: I’d get racially abused, then lash out. One day, this kid said something and instead of putting my fists up, I said something back: people laughed, and he walked away.
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
Her friends say she is very funny. At a family dinner, she stood to go, and the footman very properly pulled her chair away. At that moment I asked her a question and she sat down again, except there was no chair. Everyone, including the Queen, laughed and laughed.
I would be sitting in my flat watching TV, and ‘Doctor Who’ would be on with my flatmate there. I would have loved to share the fact that I was the new Doctor, but I couldn’t. I was going mad. My dad was rather flabbergasted. When I told him, he laughed. He was excited, elated and very proud.
As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn’t have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.
