I tell fans who ask me why I’m not doing comedy anymore that I’m a different person. I’ve grown and I’ve matured. I’ve made a transition to where I really want to be.
In a comedy it helps enhance things that were already there.
Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it’s one place you can process them.
I loved doing ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Because you have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.
All people are sad clowns. That’s the key to comedy – and it’s a buffer against reality.
Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.
The entire world is skewed from the white male perspective. If you’re a woman, they have to say it’s a female-driven comedy. If it’s a comedy with Latinos in it, it’s a Latino comedy. ‘Normal’ is white male, and I find that to be shocking and ridiculous.
Because it’s uncensored cable, I think we’ll be able to do the kind of sketch comedy that really hasn’t been seen before. We can actually finish jokes.
I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.
‘Wonder Showzen’ is one of my favorite shows of all time. When I first saw it, I thought it was so funny and new and original and edgy and insane and subversive. I didn’t know comedy could do that. It redefined what I thought you could do with a TV show.
In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
We love the Stooges, and young kids today don’t watch them. They think it’s their dad’s comedy. So we thought we could reintroduce them to a new audience.
Standup comedy is inordinately difficult. If doing something else for a living will make you equally happy, choose that instead. I’m serious. Comedy is punishing.
Unfortunately we live in a world where I think women aren’t actively encouraged or at least not empowered to make good work in every creative sphere, particularly in comedy.
Mike Myers as Austin Powers makes me laugh – that was genius – and Daffy Duck makes me laugh, but I like odd behavior. I don’t like hip dialogue and one-liners and all that sort of cool, sophomoric comedy. It’s just not for me.
With comedy, I try to steer toward, you know, talking about people that do crazy things, messed-up things. That’s what I like to talk about.
Comedy is a group activity, a verbal orgy.
Comedy to me is all about the bumps and bruises and weird tics.
I like the idea of the comedy of resilience.
If I’m in a town for very long, usually I’ll work out in the comedy club just to keep my chops or work out the beats on new stuff.
Comedy is obviously a matter of personal taste and the world always needs a clown and some people have no taste at all and any clown will do.
It just seems like the most successful, iconic love stories are not so easy or escapist. I think the ones that stay with us and resonate are full of conflict, discord and misunderstandings ’cause that’s what makes drama happen or tension even if it’s a comedy.
I’ve been driving in the city for years because, as a stand-up in N.Y.C., you can perform at more comedy clubs a night if you have a car. Getting from club to club by subway is too slow at night and too expensive by cab. So, many comics live far out from Manhattan and drive in every night.
Although I love this kind of comedy, sometimes I feel trapped by always having to be the most outrageous guy in the room. In particular, I’m working on trying not to be that guy in my private life.
Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
Comedy is all about the pause.
As long as I stay engaged with everybody else, then I’ll create more comedy. It’s just when I shut off and stay at home… What helps me is just to keep moving.
I was in musical comedy. And I did very well, but the memorization killed me. I’m not good at memorizing, and it gave me a lot of anxiety. I hated the makeup. I hated all that pancake makeup. I didn’t really like dressing for parts.
Every man imagines that he will turn his suit like a double agent, that it can be twisted to his will with irony or comedy, that the man can undermine its origins.
I did sketch comedy for years. I’ve always enjoyed it.
Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.
Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.
But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.
I think because of the Internet I was able to study comedy from quite a young age and watch a lot of comedy.
I am primarily a comedian. Sometimes I also do comedy about my cats. Now unless you find metaphors in cats, there is nothing political about those and I love doing such jokes as much as I love doing political content.
A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it’s also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.
Comedy’s the ultimate pill that helps the really hard truths and hard facts go down, right?
One of my biggest problems with comedy was that I did not understand some of the jokes.
Doing comedy and romance is easy, if I compare it with playing the role of a real-life person.
Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept.
You can’t always go by the book, even in comedy.
All of comedy at some level is trial-and-error, whether it’s a stand-up trying out jokes or a comedy show trying stories.
People expect comedy from me but I am not just a stand-up comedian anymore. I act on stage, host ‘Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa’ and also conduct interviews on my show. I have grown as a person and an artiste.
I was the sibling that kind of kept it all on a level when life at home got tough. I did it through comedy, sarcasm and distraction. All families are complicated, but my home life was glaringly uncomfortable much of the time, and it was me that took the onus.
The true essence of comedy is a baby seal hunt.
They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, ‘But doesn’t it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn’t it be set in New Guinea?’ And you say, ‘But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.’
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
Golf was my first glimpse of comedy. I was a caddy when I was a kid. I was on the golf course rather than being in lessons, but I can play better now than I could then.
Comedy to the Senate? Well, there certainly hasn’t been a satirist or a political satirist who’s done that. So, that really was uncharted territory during the campaign. But I think it’s a good thing. Some people thought that it was an odd career arc, but to me it made absolute sense.
But comedy I’d love to do as much as humanly possible.
There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
Postmodern comedy doesn’t work well with very old audiences, because it’s making fun of the comedy they enjoy.
There’s got to be structure and great comedy. When you start with that, everything else falls into place.
When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je’Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up.
You know, it wasn’t even that I’m a funny guy, I just loved stand-up comedy and I wanted to do it. It was one of the few things in my life that I knew I was going to be able to do, and I also felt as though I’d be able to do it the way I wanted to do it.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
One of my pet peeves is that sometimes the talents of my band get overlooked because, and it was the same problem that Frank Zappa had, with a lot of groups that use humor, people don’t realize there’s a lot of craft behind the comedy.
Comedy is an amazing calling. Once you get that first laugh, it’s hard to turn away. Then, of course, you’re hooked and you have to learn how to survive in the business.
Yeah, even a black comedy. Where it’s a little eerie. I’d love to do that. But there are about three really fabulous ones on the air now and I don’t know if I can do any better than that. I’d like to sort of forge new ground.
