My brother was listening to his transistor radio. He kept switching the earpiece from one ear to the other, which I thought was his idea of a joke. ‘You can’t do that,’ I said. ‘You can only hear out of one ear.’ ‘No, I can hear out of both,’ he answered. And that was how I discovered I was deaf in my right ear.
Making people uncomfortable is one of my hobbies. I’m always hoping that half the people get the joke and the other half are the joke.
If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what’s funny in the joke.
Even when I lecture per se, I am a joke comedian, I can do the voices.
I usually joke around, especially on set.
I like the rhythm of comedy in dramas, if that makes sense. In other words, I don’t want to write setup, punch, setup, punch, where the joke dictates the scene; I want to find comedy in which the drama is actually driving the moment in the scene.
The joke in our family is that we can cry reading the phone book.
Half the battle is that people have to like you before you say one joke, one bit of humor.
My mum had four kids on her own, so if I had one kid with one nanny and not a full-time job, it would be a joke. And I think the impossible happens when you leave your kids. I’ve seen so many nannies in the park on their phones, and the kids are running off.
My comedy notebooks are filled with random journal entries. It’s all the same. I can look back on old joke notebooks, and know exactly what was going on in my life.
I thought Twitter was a joke. I really thought it was a gag. I thought it was like National Lampoon or the Onion.
I’ve had times where I’ve joked, like, ‘I’m going to move to Vermont and become a painter.’ And sometimes that joke felt like, ‘Oh that’s a good idea.’ But it was only, like, a daydream for a moment to, like, escape.
Almost every venerable tradition at a men’s club starts out as a joke.
It’s very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that’s not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It’s a gut feeling.
My friends joke I’m a 90-year-old stuck in a young man’s body.
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.
Just like a comedian has a certain joke or a jazz musician has a riff that they know will get the crowd, a tap dancer always has a step.
When you haven’t got a job, a joke is about the only thing that’s free.
In my mid-20s, I was directing episodes of ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ and ‘Peter Gunn.’ I was pretty much on course and – as I sometimes joke – was prepared to devote my life to become the second best film director in my family.
Sometimes it takes you two or three seconds to get your head round a joke and laugh at it. With a snot-bubble laugh, it comes instinctively – almost in spite of yourself. It’s caused by something silly – like when a little kid says something unexpectedly bizarre.
Sometimes my brother and I – we’re twins, and sometimes we joke that we’re like a two-headed monster. We can be hard to deal with because we don’t break ranks; we stick together.
Somebody would think I was trying to get favored treatment because my ancestors had the name Moon. And that’s a joke.
I’m not good at telling a joke, but I can say a line in a certain way that makes people uncomfortable because they don’t know whether to laugh or not, and I love that comedy.
I was writing this really long joke about the smell of poop, and I was like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ I started to think about why I was a comedian, and then I came up with a reason for existence, which is: inserting absurdity or stupidity into strangers’ lives in order to make the world a better place.
One evening, Mike Myers and Steven Spielberg were discussing ‘Goldmember,’ and I just happened to joke, ‘If you need a Japanese character, let me know!’ The next day, they called me for audition! I find it’s always helpful to maintain a sense of humour.
What’s cool about Twitter is that you can make a joke about something very of-the-moment or random that I wouldn’t be able to joke about in stand-up.
It’s a very young mistake to assume that life is very serious. I get the joke now.
The joke is that no matter how much we think we can evolve, we’ll never escape our limitations.
When you write something, at first you might feel very defensive and protective of every single thing, but after a while, you just see what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes you do test screenings, and an audience tells you that, or sometimes you eventually just go, ‘Let’s cut the joke out.’
Many comedians and comedy writers have shared the childhood experience of learning to joke to protect themselves from neighborhood bullies when challenge or physical defense were not among the sensible options.
I hate to say it… but, yeah, I mean, our class has always been really strong, and I always joke with my buddies saying it’s not cool to be 23 and on the PGA Tour anymore since everyone that’s been 22, 23, 24, they’re all winning.
Whenever I perform, people get me because I’m talking about things that people can identify with and relate to. I’m not just up there doing jokey, jokey, joke.
When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.
I tell you it’s no joke to paint a portrait. I wonder that I am not more timid when I begin. I feel almost certain that I can do it. It seems very simple. I don’t think of the time that is sure to come when I almost despair, when the whole thing seems hopeless.
If the worst thing happening to Middle Eastern people is that Carlos Mencia is doing a joke about them being stopped at airports, that’s a pretty awesome state of affairs.
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
Being raised Catholic myself, I think people who are Catholic tend to carry a lot of guilt. It’s almost a joke.
New York was at the forefront of rap, so because of all the great people who have gone before me, being a rapper from Queens, I have to live up to those standards. I’m basically just a regular guy who says what he feels and likes to joke. I like long walks on the beach… and I love rap.
