Most young comedians would be lying to say that they weren’t huge Weird Al fans when they were kids. Weird Al is probably the first person I ever realized had a career that was just making jokes.
We humans are not born alone; joining and being active in a club whose members share your passion for ideas and get your jokes is one of the great joys of life.
I’ve included these little jokes and mysteries in my writing for the amusement of readers.
Ribbing is a part of wrestling. That’s the way they show a fondness for you – they play practical jokes on you. They put your wrestling gear in plastic bags and throw it in the shower. Just stupid stuff.
Once I started getting serious about standup I got a better handle on word economy and making jokes punchier, which translated well to Twitter.
I came out of the womb singing, dancing, and telling awkward jokes.
I’m always playing jokes, even on the manager – some, not many. I want to try and keep my place in the squad.
My favorite moments are the moments everyone cries over. I see people in the audience crying, and I go, ‘I did that, too. I don’t just do the jokes. I also do the cries.’ Jokes and cries, jokes and cries. That’s all I’m here for, people.
Sometimes people get passionate about the obscure jokes.
I live in reality, and I know at any moment I could stop getting the phone calls and nobody wants to hear me sing or tell jokes anymore.
I’m never happier when writing than when I see gags taking shape – ideally, gags at my own expense. What I like is the shuttling back and forth, serious into comedy and vice-versa, ideally, both in the same sentence, or even simultaneously. The best jokes are always ideas in miniature.
My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a ’70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school.
All I do is have fun. When I’m not working, it’s about making people laugh. I love making jokes about things. Even when someone’s mad at me, I’ll deflect anger with humor. My days are filled with laughter. If I’m not laughing, I’m not happy.
I enjoy darker sardonic wit more than knock-knock jokes. I spent the first healthy chunk of my career playing all-American, pleasant, average, nice people, so it’s fun to have some complications there.
I guess they’re tough jokes. But there’s lots of things you either laugh or cry at. And you just can’t cry.
There’s a sense of spontaneity, and no emphasis on jokes in this show. People generally talk the way they talk in life if you were in this particular situation.
I used to make everything myself. I used to do my own hair, make my own costumes, write my own jokes, and write my own songs. There were definitely some days where I had to choose between having tights that didn’t have holes in them or having to buy makeup or something I needed for a show.
Comedy, surprisingly for a form that intends to bring joy and joviality, is always upsetting people. Jokes rely on broad strokes, stereotypes, caricatures, exaggerations and simplifications.
All of my jokes were about not being able to meet anybody. I didn’t have any insight into anything – even my own insecurities.
I still haven’t found the humor in getting hit by a cement truck. My knees still hurt when I think about it, so no jokes about that yet.
I realize how desperate it sounds for me, as a comedian, to ask you to laugh at my jokes.
Now, I’m not onboard with the argument that jokes are destructive to humanity. There are bigger issues, and I do not necessarily subscribe to the belief that jokes perpetuate violence and racism. They lampoon those things most of the time. But I could be wrong about that. I’m not a sociologist or an expert.
Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it’s not jokes that are funny, it’s characters that are funny. And isn’t that true! That’s why I always kill jokes. I’m terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can’t get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon.
Growing up, the one thing I noticed was that everyone seemed to laugh at my jokes wherever I went.
I like questions that tee me up to make weird jokes, frankly.
When I first met Salman Butt, he was a senior player, and he was a star for Pakistan, and I was a junior, but he had a very good image amongst the juniors. It wasn’t that he was only nice to me: he was close to all the juniors, cracking jokes and socialising with them and being pleasant to them.
I think there are brilliant jokes to be made about abortion, and we should be able to talk about this in the way that we make jokes about death – you should be able to make jokes about everything.
I got divorced, which was not a good thing for a revivalist minister. It did not go down well. I’d already been banned from a couple churches for my jokes. So one day I woke up and decided it was time to start living for myself.
From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I’ve liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.
The very phrase ‘Oscar night’ used to accelerate my pulse. For one thing – dating myself – it meant Bob Hope. He always had good, strong jokes, that faultless delivery, and always a new joke about his own films’ failure – once again – to be honored.
Way back in my mid-20s, I started making notes. I would just jot things down: lists of street names, songs, peculiar turns of speech, jokes, whatever.
My best jokes are so cheap. All I do is say things sarcastically.
I’m obsessed with reality TV anyway – I use my knowledge of that stuff to make jokes on Twitter and Facebook to get more people to sign up to be fans.
The whole experience of doing a sitcom is… Telling jokes with such precision is really exciting, but it’s also terrifying.
I’ve never considered stand-up. Luckily I’m given great lines to say. I’m not sure how great my timing would be if I actually had to come up with my own jokes.
I have to visualise my jokes, live my jokes, feel the audience because every audience is different. It’s like having a different dancing partner every night.
As a comedian who’s used to, like, punching the jokes, it’s hard to teach yourself that that’s not the strong choice in the sense that you have to really have to dial it back.
Richard Pryor – he had stories, he had characters, he had short jokes, and he had bits. He had all those things. Eddie Murphy has all those things, and he can sing. A comedian is a bunch of stuff; it’s not just one area.
The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.
I always like to make some jokes, sometimes.
Every sketch goes through a rewrite stage where a group of writers sits around a table and pitches more jokes and ideas for the piece.
There’s an audience that is paid to laugh at my jokes. I’m playing a character while I’m doing stand-up. Real stand-ups, man, they’re playing themselves. I’d be far too terrified.
In the early days of the Libertines, we used to put on Arcadian cabaret nights. There’d be some girl climbing out of an egg; we’d try and get a couple of mates to tell a few jokes, performance poets, and then we’d play in the middle of it all. More people were on stage than in the crowd.
For comedians, we’re all kind of tweeting our thoughts instead of spending time developing them. You can gauge how good a joke might be by how many times it gets retweeted, but it takes discipline to go back through the tweets and then develop jokes from them.
I’m kind of a rebound junkie. So. when a relationship goes sour, I look at the sweetness in life elsewhere. So, I date a bit. The best catharsis is to write jokes and tell 4,000 people about it.
I take a lot of pride in managing to be funny without having a victim at the end of my joke. I laugh at a really dark joke as much as the next person, but my jokes, I feel, don’t have to hurt anybody to be really funny.
I may become like an Indian thatha but I won’t stop making jokes.
I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren’t hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they’re excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.
I like jokes and one-liners. I enjoy entertaining and making people laugh, being the funny man. But when I’m launched into unfamiliar environments I shut down, and as I relax then my character emerges.
It had more layers than an onion. These writers meant business. There was a level for everybody. Your major could be celestial mechanics, and there’d be celestial-mechanics jokes.
Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.
I did the commencement speech at UNH in 2006, and one of the biggest jokes was a ‘Guts’ joke.
I recently did the David Letterman Show about my book. He was very serious and made no jokes and it caught me off guard a little bit. He was much more serious than some of the joke shows that journalists get on.
Remember, if you do the same act for 20, 30 years it gets a little boring unless you’ve got something else going for you… And the orchestra really kept you going. They’d laugh at all your jokes, even if they’d been hearing them for the last 30 years.
