My dad? He worked at a steel plant over in Charleston. Night shift. Nine at night to nine in the morning, no joke.
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
I always joke that my kids’ favorite holiday is Father’s Day. They love the way I celebrate the occasion by writing each of them a thank-you letter and a generous check. It’s my way of letting them know how much I appreciate the great pleasure and privilege of being their dad.
The joke around my office is that I’ve shaken many hands, but I’ve petted more dogs.
Because many squid have brain nerve fibres that are hundreds of times thicker than those of humans, neuroscientists have long used them for research. These nerve fibres have led to so many breakthroughs in the study of neurons that many scientists joke that the squid should receive a Nobel Prize.
I was raised in a family where no one had a serious bone in their body and every answer was a riddle, a joke, or a prank.
As the old joke goes, I have all the sins together. I am a woman, a Socialist, separated and agnostic.
As for pictures and museums, that don’t trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you’ve always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.
In the 1990s, it’s OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It’s acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke… about gays. The gay community is the last sacred cow in this society.
I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don’t know how to light it. And I realize it’s because I didn’t grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality – what a joke. In my district, we caught them lying to us about the results of air quality studies in the Barnett Shale. They are playing with the health and safety of our communities, and we are going to tell them that is not acceptable.
The ‘good’ mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the ‘bad’ mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.
In movies, you don’t get reactions: Live, when you do a joke, you know in a second whether it’s good or bad. But in a movie, since no one is allowed to laugh or do anything, when you’re done with a scene, you’re left asking, ‘Was that funny?’
There’s a joke that, if you can ride through Texas with somebody, which is 700 miles of just straight, flat freeway riding, then you can be friends with them forever.
The joke of being a showrunner is that people ask how you get it all done, and you don’t. The list of things I don’t get done in a given day is longer than the list of things I do. And one of the things that’s first to go is watching dailies.
There’s always been a quiet conversation and joke that if you’re not hard, if you’re not from impoverished neighborhoods, if you’re not certain constructs of a black stereotype, then you not black.
There’s no such thing as a hit joke.
You can crack a joke and make a person smile but it matters a lot when that’s on screen. It can be a very nice joke but if you shoot it badly or the actor gets the timing wrong, it won’t be funny.
My family joke that I’m really a very senior person who accidentally happens to be 11.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
I always joke that everything else that I do is to support my theater habit.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
If I sit down to write a joke about, whatever, the polluted Gulf of Mexico, it comes out mundane to me.
I don’t really know what is shocking. When you tell the story of a man who is beheaded, you have to show how they cut off his head. If you don’t, it’s like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line.
What I find shocking is that there’s this thought process that Hillary Clinton is going to be president of the United States, and to even think of Donald Trump is a joke.
People try to put ownership on things: ‘That’s mine, that’s my joke.’ No such thing. Like if you tripped or stumbled and people go, ‘Oh, that’s Charlie Chaplin.’ You know what I mean? You can’t own a joke. You can be the guy that tells it the best, but you can’t own a joke. Nowhere can you own a laugh.
When you go and meet people in far-flung parts of the world who need help, they’re not earnest; they’re having a laugh and a joke as they transport the water you’re buying for them – not trudging around saying serious things.
I joke that I learned the essentials of storytelling from Hanna-Barbera, but I pretty much did. That kind of television is what enamored me as a kid, and that’s what really got me hooked. You could say that’s where it all began.
I pretty much only drink water, Tazo passion tea, or coffee with half and half, and it’s an ongoing joke in the office that I never have less than three glasses of water and some form of tea or coffee in front of me.
It’s very gratifying sometimes to make yourself the butt of the joke because it bursts your bubble.
I think those that are holier-than-thou don’t make jokes. They take themselves too seriously and Peeta doesn’t take himself too seriously. This is what I believe in and I’m comfortable with that and I can make a joke here and there.
I get very confused about being called a comedian, because when you say ‘I’m a comedian,’ people expect you to crack a joke. Maybe I use laughter and humour to make people think. I don’t know what you call that – a humourist? A satirist? A pessimistic comedian? I don’t know. Satirists can be very dark.
There is nothing like a live performance. You can look at things on television, and you can look at things on YouTube, but when you get in a room full of people and you say one joke, and everyone’s laughing at the same thing, it’s a really great experience.
A comic strip has a rhythm and a pattern, and you got to get in and out quick. So you set up a joke, tell the joke, and done.
Anything where we’re the butt of the joke, no one tells us about it.
A joke’s a joke; you can either take it, or you can’t.
I have a file of four million jokes… I have them cross-indexed. Whatever subject you want, I have a joke on it.
Be not affronted at a joke. If one throw salt at thee, thou wilt receive no harm, unless thou art raw.
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t.
I wanted to be clever, but being funny came first. That’s how you know someone is clever. They don’t come out and tell you pi to 13 places – they tell you a joke.
Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women’s movement that liberated us, however.
Chennai is one of the scariest crowds to face. Everyone looks so conservative, but once you crack the first joke, they are so appreciatively loud that they will hit you with a laugh that will scare you stiff and yet give you energy. Chennaiites give me the loudest laughs; it’s the coolest crowd to perform for.
Looking back at my school reports, I start off as quite a swotty kid, and then when I get to 12 or 13, my teachers start saying: ‘Lee has started to joke around a lot in class.’ After that, it’s a steady graph of decline, with the jokes increasing and increasing.
A rich man’s joke is always funny.
Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don’t recognise, an attitude that doesn’t accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don’t get or of which they don’t approve.
Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.
Basically, we used to have a rule at ‘Saturday Night Live’ that you’re not allowed to bring up ‘The Simpsons’ at the rewrite table, because ‘The Simpsons’ has done every joke there is. Every week there would be guys going, ‘The Simpsons did that.’ I go, ‘C’mon.’ And ‘South Park,’ too.
I don’t think comedy is necessarily an attack. It’s finding humour in life. I don’t think if you’re making a joke about something you’re automatically demeaning it.
I don’t worry about the last shot or the next shot. I concentrate. Every shot gets a clean slate. And when a shot is over, I wipe it out absolutely. Tell a joke or something. If you worry about how you looked, how well you did, you’ll go insane.
When the Mets were on their run in the 1980s, Gary Carter was often seen hugging somebody. It was easy to joke about that. The best hug of all was with Jesse Orosco at the end of the 1986 World Series.
I haven’t had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn’t hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean – at least in my case.
Slavery is nothing to joke about. The history of this nation’s involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.
