I rarely joke unless I’m in front of a camera. It’s not what I am in real life. It’s what I do for a living.
My father was the kind of guy who’d always say ‘Throw out any subject and I got a joke on it.’
I’m not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone’s laughing, and then you shake it out, and you realize, ‘There’s no joke there!’
I was drawn to it much to my father’s dismay. He wanted me to be a pianist like he was, but I had coarser tastes – like that old joke: What do you call a guy who hangs around with musicians? A drummer.
It is a good deed to forget a poor joke.
Vanity was a joke. She was an image created to make money.
You’re only as good as your last joke, your last show, your last whatever. The confidence is there, but underneath, there is always insecurity.
I still think people do have racial hang-ups, but I think one of the reasons I can joke about it is people are shedding those racial hatreds.
In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.
I have defined values and I’m honest about those leanings. But I have no allegiance to any particular political team. I only have an allegiance to those values and the truth. And I’m open to hearing how I’m wrong and I’m open to being the butt of the joke.
As a moviegoer, I’m always annoyed when a big joke is ruined in the trailer, but generally, it actually makes it play better.
The joke is mightier than the sword.
In Beijing, the joke among hacks is that, after the drive in from the airport, you are ready to write a column; after a month, you feel the stirrings of an idea-book; but after a year, you struggle to write anything at all, because you’ve finally discovered just how much you don’t know.
I laugh and joke, but I don’t get distracted very easily.
Once you start thinking about it in a mercenary frame of mind, then you’re finished. You’re a joke, because there are too many mercenaries out there already.
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
I joke with my kids, who love history, that I’ll be the only governor to be elected twice in his first term.
I like writing a joke, and I like when a joke works, and I like other comics who tell jokes.
That’s the joke about confinement pigs: they taste like whatever sauce you cook them with.
I always thought security was a joke at New York airports, and in U.S. airports to begin with. You can go through any European or Middle Eastern airport and things are a lot tougher.
I like to say, ‘Chop suey’s the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another,’ because chop suey, if you translate into Chinese, means ‘tsap sui,’ which, if you translate back, means ‘odds and ends.’
I got so much out of ‘The To-Do List.’ This is a joke that I say about myself sometimes, in terms of my film career: I feel like I’m always playing the kid in serious adult movies. So, for me, it was so wonderful to suddenly be working with other people my age who were doing this on film.
I’m very careful not to tell a joke just to get a reaction.
Everybody I know is a joke writer.
You’ve really got to start hitting the books because it’s no joke out here.
When I was growing up, I wasn’t in bands, and had really no intention of ever doing music. I went out to California for college, and kind of on a whim started making music really as a joke, and over the course of the next five years started playing a lot of shows, and music became this really integral part of my identity.
I took my daughters to see Plastic Ono Band at the Orpheum in L.A. in 2012. It was an amazing experience because she is such a revolutionary artist. Everybody was like, ‘Oh, it’s Yoko, it’s such a joke.’ But it’s no joke what she did, visually and musically. It’s incredible.
I always make a joke that they transplanted Martina McBride’s eyes and put them in my head.
In order to be able to write a good joke, you have to find the truth.
My brand of humor is trying to play the situation as real as possible because I’m not the type of guy who is a joke a minute.
We get the worrywart, the hypochondriac, the money-grubbing miser, the intractable negotiator… Some would say certain of these refer to the stereotypical, or ‘stage’ Jew. But objectively speaking, the only crime in humor is an unfunny joke.
It seems to me that humour is everybody’s way of keeping sane and standing off from the situations so that they can see it intellectually, as well as emotionally, and I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but if somebody tells a joke, it’s nearly always a mini fantasy.
What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
When we’re on set, we kind of joke around, and when we’re rehearsing, we change up the scenes and make each other laugh. We lighten up the mood. The blooper reel is going to be amazing on ‘New Moon.’
Being a parent is not for the faint of heart. I may joke about knowing fear, but the fact is, the first time I ever knew real fear was the day Charlotte, my first child, was born. Suddenly there is someone in the world you care about more than anything.
There’s an old joke that politics is Hollywood for ugly people. An awful lot of the press coverage about Washington reads like coverage of Hollywood. Madonna is having some spat with Sean Penn. Who cares? And who cares which politician is mad at that politician?
I often joke that I could write ‘War and Peace’ and make it sound like Geri Halliwell wrote it.
A joke’s a very serious thing.
I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.
If I say a joke and the audience laughs it makes me feel good.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.
I always have the same thing – which is the fear of not getting a laugh – that I’ve had from the time I was a kid; obsessing over, ‘This joke doesn’t quite work, we’ve got to get this right.’ I was always like that, whether I was a member of a six-person ensemble or whether I’m the center of a show.
When I was younger, I was always willing to tell a joke and play out a scene. I would get sticks and pretend they were light sabers. I think it was just at a young age, I was so willing to jump up and perform a little play at the family picnic.
The joke I always make about myself is that I’m self-involved, but I’m not vain.
There has been nothing more impactful on my life and meaningful to me than the introduction of Christ. That, hands down, blows away every joke I’ve ever written.
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
I like to joke that I probably hold the world record for rejection letters. Yes, the truth is that I was fed up of being rejected repeatedly, and self-publication was an act of defiance at traditional publishing. But life works in strange ways.
I have a true love for the old style of Catskill comic. There’s a joy in discovering a bad joke… and then there’s the joy of delivering it like, ‘Isn’t this a hacky joke?’
Essentially a joke is creating an idea, whether sonic or visual, whether it’s something musical or a traditional joke.
With the stand-up comic on TV, whether it’s Seinfeld or Cosby or Roseanne, more important than their knowledge of how to tell a joke is their knowledge of themselves, or the persona they’ve created as themselves. So that when you’re in a room with writers, you can say, ‘Guys, that’s a funny line, but I wouldn’t say it.’
Art should be serious, not a joke. I don’t like to laugh about art.
People talk, ‘Oh your father’s a misogynist, look what he said about women,’ like, on ‘Howard Stern.’ When he gets with Howard Stern, who’s a friend of his, he’ll joke around, because it’s a comedy show. He’s allowed to have a personality.
I try to do women’s-point-of-view comedy. The joke is, ‘This is what I think; there’s the truth.’ I try to think of stuff that’s real broad, but the more personal it is, the more universal it is. All my friends go through the same stuff.
I love doing six versions of any joke, so if they’ll give me six takes, I’d love to do it.
To this day, if you gave me $1,000, I really can’t stand up – You can tell a joke. You’re a good storyteller and a good joke teller.
A source of embarrassment for Libyans, Gadhafi has never been a joke: disappearances, a police state, zero freedom of expression, and poverty for at least a third of the population of country tremendously wealthy thanks to oil.
There is always something funny going on between scenes with Adam Sandler. He’s always cracking jokes and yelling at people for no reason. It’s pretty funny. He’ll joke around during scenes, too. When he guest-starred on ‘Jessie,’ there was nothing in the script that he said first take.
Telling a joke is risk taking. Younger people are more insecure and not willing to put themselves on the line, so a quick one-liner is much safer.
I’ve been in situations where, in the midst of really hardcore events in my life, I made some ridiculous off-color joke that was in horrible taste, but made people laugh.
