I’m working on Leno. He’s from my home state, Massachusetts. And my home country, Italy. I said, ‘Hey, Jay, why don’t you have me on your show? Afraid I’ll be funnier than you?’
I think pompous accents are inherently funnier.
Your country becomes funnier the further you are from it. I remember seeing Boris Johnson on the news when I was in Hong Kong, and he looked so much more ridiculous.
I enjoy taking people on on Twitter, because often I’m cleverer and funnier.
There’s nothing funnier than religion. Try explaining it to a kid. I had it all wrong when I was a kid.
When I go out with my mates I’m never the centre of attention. Most of them, and they’re probably right, keep telling me they’re funnier than I am and I’m nicking their life.
I believe that when people try to live their life at the fullest, there’s a certain laughter that comes out of it. The more they try to live their life seriously, the funnier it is.
I do love situational comedy, clowning, and slapstick; I approach that with a lot of respect. The goofier you are, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be funnier.
I think I came back from America a funnier and nicer person than I went.
More eccentric characters can push pretty far, but if you stay on the side of reality, it’s always funnier.
The thing about working at Pixar is that everyone around you is smarter and funnier and cleverer than you and they all think the same about everyone else. It’s a nice problem to have.
The Earth will be around for a long time before you have a funnier president than Obama. He has a stand-up’s cadence and the awareness and ability to make jokes about himself before comedians can. That’s a page almost every politician should try to take from his book.
Even a liberal city will have a prehistoric homophobe. After a show in Washington State, this guy came up to me and said, ‘Your shows was a lot funnier before you started in on your agenda.’ I told him, ‘Please, please keep people like you from coming to my show. I’m glad you had a bad time.’
It’s much funnier when the comedy can happen with me just trying my best to genuinely do a good thing.
My specialty at ‘SNL’ was doing triage. There was always a great need for someone to say, ‘Make this funnier. Give me an ending for this. What’s a better big laugh for this towards the end? What’s a better physical joke in this?’ And I just really, over time, honed that specific thing so well.
I honestly don’t class myself as a songwriter. I’ve got ‘musician’ written on my passport. That’s even funnier.
When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.
I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.
The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
They will find somebody younger, somebody funnier, somebody more engaged. As long as the court genre is viable, people are going to be looking for someone to knock me off of my perch.
I will say, ‘The Michael J. Fox Show’ is funnier than ‘Breaking Bad’ – not that ‘Breaking Bad’ isn’t funny, but this is funnier and slightly less violent.
In the entertainment industry, there is this fear of getting older, because we have high definition television now, and you can see things that the human eye can’t even pick up. But the good thing about standup is that the older you get, the funnier you get.
The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more awkward it is, the more people are stumbly, the funnier it is. I like a sharp joke, but it has to say something that someone would actually say.
There’s nothing funnier for me than taking two characters and throwing them into a pressure cooker and letting them turn on each other. Especially if they already tend to be loud, aggressive, alpha types. That’s sort of everything from ‘The Honeymooners’ to ‘Goodfellas’ to ‘The Sopranos.’
There’s really no substitute for working hard. I think that’s my biggest talent. There are always people who are funnier and more talented than I am, but I don’t take anything for granted and I commit myself 100% to each of my roles.
Soon I learned that the worse the puns and jokes, the funnier they could be, if you knew how to deliver them.
Phil Hartman was brilliant, and Dave Foley is a really funny guy. Phil Hartman was actually even funnier offstage than he was onstage because he would say nasty things. Dave Foley’s very funny, very witty guy, very quick.
I’ll tell you what ‘The Simpsons’ is really good at. They’ll describe something, you don’t see it, and it’s funnier when you describe it.
Apparently, I am a bit of an exaggerator when I tell stories. But I don’t call them lies; I say they are better, funnier truths.
Comedy people like other comedy people. People hang out and are friends and do shows together, and when you get something going like a TV show or a movie, you want your friends to be in it and make it funnier. That’s just the way it should be.
By the time I got to the point where I was ‘starring’ in movies, and I had executives telling me what lines to say, that wasn’t for me. I’m really not an actor. I’m a guy who comes out of comedy, and my impetus was always to rewrite the line to make it funnier, not to try to make somebody’s precious words work.
If you watch a lot of television, the pacing, the quick cutting is so frenetic, but it doesn’t always make it funnier. What I’m noticing is that when things are allowed to unspool more slowly, younger crowds really like it. They really appreciate it.
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