I’m known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me. In ‘Vogue,’ girls were playing at being duchesses, but they were actually from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They would play duchesses, and I would play Cecil Beaton.
In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn’t fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.
I was always interested in comedy, like when I was 5 years old. I watched ‘I Love Lucy’ and ‘Benny Hill.’ I would always joke around with my sister. My mom was into comedy, too. She would go to the video store and get a couple of movies and some stand-up comedians’ tapes.
If somebody can make a joke about you on TV, that’s so beautiful. You’ve affected pop culture to that degree.
I joke that we’re not dissimilar to a rock band in the ’70s.
That’s the great thing about New Year’s, you get to be a year older. For me, that wasn’t such a joke, because my birthday was always around this time. When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that everybody was celebrating my birthday. That’s what the trees are all about.
I think the BJP is a joke. It is a party of semi-literates and has fascist tendencies. Such a party can never have real roots in India because Hinduism is the antithesis of fascism.
I don’t like a bunch of writers sitting around, puffing smoke, they like this book, he wrote this – tell me a dirty joke, you know. It’s just not my style, I’ve never been that kind of person.
I found, especially with stand-up, that if a premise works, you can make the joke work. If a premise doesn’t work, you can’t force it to.
Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don’t act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the Cain and Abel story with my brother without expecting him to be worried, though it’s always possible he was more anxious than he let on.
It’s so easy to judge everybody and for some reason extra weight is the one thing everything feels OK to joke about.
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.
The quality of life of European cities and towns of almost any size make life in America look not just like a joke, but a sick joke, a horror movie. But I’d rather stay involved and do what I can to make this a better place than move to the south of France and enjoy the good life.
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.
There’s always this joke that I say in Israel: people don’t really have discussions; they just try to convince the other people that they are wrong or they are right – they just try to impose their opinion on the others. Sometimes I think it’s easier to avoid talking about things and just make music.
Women always think that I’m Chandler, so if I don’t joke around for half an hour, they think that something’s wrong. Then I explain that I don’t have comedy writers scripting everything I’m saying at this particular dinner.
Hour-long TV is no joke. It tests you as a human being. It makes you a stronger person, but it’s really crazy.
I’m not a joke guy; I’m not a stand-up comic.
I apologize in my real life all the time. I say ridiculous things, I make mistakes constantly. But when I’m on stage, I’m at a microphone… it’s a joke!
The really funny moments you notice throughout your life are very seldom generated by one person telling a joke.
After you do a joke a few times, you have material that you know works. Although sometimes I have a joke that has worked a bunch of times, and then one night it’ll flop.
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
I have a great pic of my father and Rev. Graham laughing hysterically at some joke with George Pratt Shultz looking on back in 1972 or so.
The marvelous thing about a joke with a double meaning is that it can only mean one thing.
So, whenever Scooter was the Pilot, he never had a chance to fly the orbiter. So, the joke is: I’m going to have a chance to fly it first and hand it over to him.
I watch children a great deal; their idea is that rules are always negotiable, whereas you absolutely cannot joke at the airport about your toothpaste, and you cannot rollerblade in Grand Central Station. I keep running up against these things.
Memes just show that people are engaged about something. A meme is just a little inside joke for a group of people that care about a certain thing.
There’s a joke that I do where I make fun of myself for being bow-legged, and I compare myself to a camel and how a camel walks and sits, and that has become a joke that people – when I deliver that joke, people are in tears.
The nature of comedy is ‘just do it.’ But I think what’s interesting about it is this joke has been around and why. And it’s just saying what’s wrong and how wrong can you be if you say it.
I also had a hosting position on a home and garden television show – which is a joke if you ever see my apartment.
I once told a journalist that girls call me ‘Kitten,’ but I couldn’t have been more sarcastic, and no matter how many times I’ve said that it was a joke, it still doesn’t go away.
The joke that I make is that there are instances on the TV series that happen to me, – except on Sex and the City they always make it better or worse than real life and I am actually saying that in a joking way.
There’s no amount of money that makes you feel better when people think of you as a joke or a hack or a failure or ugly or stupid or morally empty.
People who would never think of dealing in racial or sexual stereotypes will still throw in a fat joke because it’s still OK. Really?
I really like comedy. There’s always a choice, when you’re writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.
I’d been shy since childhood, constantly full of self-doubt. And as an actor, I’d been so scared of failing that I made my career – and myself – a big joke.
When somebody says something as a joke, the British press take things and twist them.
Peas are terrible and a joke food.
I joke that I only play in World Cups.
One thing I hate in ethnic comedy is giving the audience the opportunity to laugh in a racist way at a thing. A lot of times dwarf comedians will do that, Arab comics, and gay comics will do it; everyone is laughing, but they’re not laughing at the joke, they’re laughing at this crazy character.
While Fidel Castro used to deliver his marathon seven-hour speeches in Havana, Cubans used to joke that if Spanish lacked a future tense, their leader would be speechless. He was only fluent in broken promises, they lamented.
The thing that’s changed the way I do my stand-up act is having kids and getting older and wiser and smarter. There might be a joke or two in the past that I wish I hadn’t done, but in the past, you can’t have it back.
When a kid can understand that a word can mean two things, there’s some real thinking going on. They have a vested interest in finding out what a word means, because it’s the punch line to a joke.
Sex is God’s joke on human beings.
The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scotts as a joke, but the Scotts haven’t seen the joke yet.
If I can’t face my accusers, that’s a joke. We did that in medieval times.
My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.
I don’t like it when I see a racist comedian go up and say, ‘What are we gonna do about all these immigrants?’ and they get a round the applause. I think, ‘Well that’s not a joke. That’s just your biased opinion.’
Most of my standup is about stuff that makes me uncomfortable. There are also things I don’t joke about. I don’t do jokes about the people who helped me get sober.
As I grow older, I become more and more of a Marxist – Groucho, that is. When you have lived two-thirds of your life, you know the value of a good joke.
I used to joke for years that I was a black man. I adopted the black culture, the black race. I married a black woman, and I had black kids. I always considered myself a ‘brother.’
Same thing, like my commercials are often times really funny because I tend to find 30 seconds is a really good amount of time to tell a joke.
I honestly feel like 99 percent of people have some kind of self-hate about their looks, and if I can joke about mine, maybe they can feel better about theirs.
A lot of comics aren’t their on-screen personas; Chris Rock isn’t always ranting and raving. What I do is make myself this over-the-top character that people either find endearing or they think is a joke. Then I can do anything I want.
I was a bit scared because I came from the acting world. There was a fear that people would think of me kind of as a joke. But really, people think of me as a country artist who can act. That’s my favorite compliment.
Housekeeping ain’t no joke.
