Funny Inspirational Quotes

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• When you’re a kid, ‘Star Trek’ is a slower burn. It’s funny, it’s entertaining, but it also has a maturity about it – which is its universal appeal, I think.
• Do I like being thought of as attractive? I don’t know anyone on Earth who doesn’t, but I do find it funny.
• I’ve met a lot of jazz musicians in my day, and they’re all funny.
• Ignoring fame was my rebellion, in a funny way. I was insistent on being normal and doing normal things. It probably wasn’t advisable to go to college in America and room with a complete stranger. And it probably wasn’t wise to share a bathroom with eight other people in a coed dorm. Looking back, that was crazy.
• I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.
• I like bowling. I suck at it, but I like it. You know what’s so funny? I have days when I’m absolutely great at doing it, and then I have days when I just don’t understand it.
• I don’t see a lot of narratives written where a woman who looks like me gets to be beautiful and sexualized and upwardly mobile, middle-class, funny, quirky. They’re very seldom written.
• What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
• Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, women – we’re all trying to find our place in this world of cinema and television and theater. And the great thing with comedy is that most of the time, you could be orange. It doesn’t matter, as long you’re funny.
• I always enjoy conversation more if there is some substance to it – which is a just incredibly hilarious thing for me to say because for many, many years I was the guy whose only contribution to any conversation was, ‘There was a funny ‘Simpson’s’ joke about that.’
• My dad would go to work every day and write in a room full of funny people. He enjoyed it. I know great writers who find the process agonising but to me, writing has always been sheer joy.
• You want to be able to really tackle a character and make it a fully-dimensional human being who is complicated, funny, and all the things that a person could be. If you can achieve that, you feel great. You so rarely get to do that as an actress in general, but as a black actress, it’s almost never.
• I would love to do a movie with Albert Brooks; we’re so different, but I find him so funny, and I can be just as seemingly narcissistic as he comes off, the ‘it’s all about me’ kind of thing.
• Yes, I’ve seen Louis CK. I wouldn’t in any way make a degrading remark about Louis CK, but the question is do I think anyone is funny? And the answer is not too many people. He might fit right in there.
• My parents always told me to be myself. I was always funny and silly as a kid. And I would always make them laugh. And they always told me to dream big and follow those dreams.
• Mom was so funny and loving to us kids. She was our first audience. When my dad died, I was suddenly alone in the house with her because my two older brothers were away at college. I was the man of the house, and she was the grieving woman.
• To me, little Mike Wazowski is one of the best characters I ever got to play because he was funny. He was outrageous. He got angry. He was romantic. He was a full, well-rounded character.
• That’s still the greatest high, that feeling of being in control of 2,000 people. It’s me and them, and I like the odds. It’s not even so much the funny. It’s getting them quiet. In the quiet moments in ‘700 Sundays,’ I just really love that they’re getting moved.
• There’s a lot of stupid men out there who feel like makeup is a betrayal of the truth, and that is so funny to me.
• I will do comedy until the day I die: inappropriate comedy, funny comedy, gender-bending, twisting comedy, whatever comedy is out there.
• James Caan told me at the end of filming ‘Elf’ that he had been waiting through the whole film for me to be funny – and I never was.
• I was just a goofy little funny kid, who was always getting sent to the principal. It wasn’t serious because I was smart. I wasn’t like a true troublemaker, just rambunctious – like, talkative and trying to be funny. That was me in middle-school.
• It’s funny: when the press knows someone’s gonna say something stupid, they’re quick to pass them a mic and put a camera on them, and everybody talk about it.
• Big shout out to Nas: if you want to scream my name out again and put my name in your rhyme, I think it’s funny. Let’s make some money from it. Just don’t take it so serious, man.
• Most of my show is true; like, 90% of everything I say on stage is true. I just have to find the way to make it funny – that’s the difficult thing.
• I never looked at myself as the fat sister. Sometimes I would beat people to the punch and say, ‘Oh I’m the fat, funny one,’ because that’s what people would say about me. But I never really thought that.
• I showed what I can do with butter, right? Eighty-five percent increase in sales. I’m very proud of them Country Life ads. They were funny and clever and classy like the Toblerone ads I grew up with.
• What’s David’s role? David looks good, that’s what David does. David looks good, and I’m the funny one, that’s what I hear constantly. But I keep telling him that looks fade.
• I’m a little bit scared of everything. It’s kind of funny. Whenever people ask me how I’m feeling, I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I’m scared. I’m nervous.’
• If I’m doing something on stage, and it evokes an emotion, then I might show that emotion, but I also don’t believe in being a preacher. If you have a point, that’s a bonus. But the funny has to come first; otherwise, you shouldn’t call yourself a comedian.
• I never liked wrestling, but I thought The Rock was brilliant, and that is a statement to how funny he is that I’d even watch a show that I didn’t like just to see him on it.
• I remember being four or five, not understanding how to be funny, so just going around the house and my mum and dad’s friends, confusing adults by saying weird things.
• My favorite type of pet has always been a dog. They’re loyal, kind, and offer endless affection. My friend Eric says, ‘The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.’ Funny thought.
• I know what I want to talk about, but I don’t really know what’s funny about a joke until I perform it in front of an audience.
• I thought comedians were the funny guy in the common room, not understanding that the flaws in my personality were actually the funny things about me.
• If a comic laughs at their own jokes, I don’t like it. They shouldn’t find it funny; they should seriously believe in this stupid thing they’re saying.
• I grew up with interesting and funny people. We made our own fun. You had to use your imagination.
• My mum is very funny when she wants to be.
• I used to work with autistic children, and they said a lot of funny things to me.
• They’re just jokes, people. They can’t all be funny.
• It’s funny: I don’t listen to too much rap. I don’t listen to too much older hip-hop. If I do, it’s Ja Rule.
• I thought, ‘Anyone can make up a lie, but making the truth funny is really hard.’ But I actually had more problems with people believing me when I told the truth on stage.
• As a comedian, I don’t know if they’re laughing because it’s funny or if they’re laughing at me because I’m not funny. And I’m thinking, ‘Who cares? They’re laughing.’ If you go on stage, and they’re laughing at you full-on for 60 minutes? You know, whatever puts them in the seats.
• The first thing that I learned – and I understood it at a really young age – was that I could get a laugh. Really early. Because my mother and father are funny.
• There’s a funny thing about fame. The truth is you run as fast as you can towards it because it’s everything you want. Not just the fame but what it represents, meaning work, meaning opportunity. And then you get there, and it’s shocking how immediately you become enveloped in this world that is incredibly restricting.
• What I do onstage, there’s maybe .0001 percent of the population that acts like that. I talk like that because it makes me laugh, and because I know a couple of people that talk like that. They’re really that Southern. And they do funny things. I love ’em; they’re awesome. They’re good people.
• We try to make the name longer and longer every year. First, it was ‘Larry the Cable Guy’s Christmas Spectacular.’ Then it was ‘It’s a Very Larry Christmas.’ Now it’s ‘Larry the Cable Guy’s Hula-palooza Christmas Luau.’ I’ll tell you what it is: It’s funny. That’s what it is. Who cares what the name of it is? It is a funny special.
• I just developed my act way back in the late ’80s. I went to college in Georgia, so I picked up the Southern accent. I talked like that with my friends all the time, because it was fun. It was funny… All my friends were real Southern. We’re buddies, so I’d say stuff to make them laugh. So that was pretty much it.
• I’m good at being funny.
• I love practical jokes and humor. That there’s frankly no joke that I don’t think is funny. I love practical jokes, but I don’t like being scared.
• When I say something funny, I don’t laugh.
• My persona has always been what a man was never supposed to be. Outrageous, gregarious, crazy, silly, funny.
• I was a little bit ashamed of American TV because I thought, ‘None of the shows my father works on are as funny as my father.’
• There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn’t know the original, you’d lose what was funny.
• The audience is so important. Because there’s something that I might think is super funny, but if it’s just not getting the feedback, I have to let it go.
• Nothing is off-limits. There’s just some things I cannot crack. Politics I can’t do. When I start to talk about it, I just get really angry and super sincere. I have never found a way to craft all of that absurdity into funny.
• I’ve seen many female comics that a lot of people haven’t heard of who are so funny, and I saw them come up, and they were working so hard, and then all of a sudden they had a baby, and they just got tied up in motherhood, and eventually, they kind of just stopped doing stand-up, and I thought it was such a shame.
• It’s funny; it’s a real balancing act. In TV, everybody’s talking about authenticity. In order to make ‘Dirty Jobs’ authentic, I really can’t be overly informed. The minute I am, I become a host… It’s a very tricky business paying a tribute to work, because TV is very bad at it.
• My dad was a doctor, and he would tell us a lot of nasty, funny stories from the hospital. It was funny to me when I’d go over to other people’s houses and they didn’t talk about intestines at the table.
• My dad was obviously a really quirky, unconventional Asian man who didn’t care about what other people thought. When he would fight with my mom, he would be really dramatic. He would be like, ‘Devil, get away, for I am God’s property.’ He would say crazy things that were so melodramatic but so theatrical and funny.
• Maori get pigeonholed into the idea they’re spiritual and telling stories like ‘Whale Rider’ and ‘Once Were Warriors,’ quite serious stuff, but we’re pretty funny people, and we never really have had an opportunity to show that side of ourselves, the clumsy, nerdy side of ourselves, which is something I am.
• I tweet from bed. I love it because it’s so quick. And it’s funny. But it also leaves a lot of room for error because new people don’t sense the sarcasm – there’s no sarcasm font.
• It’s funny because I want my teeth to be, like, neon ‘Real Housewives’ white, but mine have stopped taking to teeth whitening. When I talk to my dentist, I’m like, ‘They can be that white,’ and he’s like, ‘Veneers can be that white.’
• The only thing that I don’t like is my kids watching comedy that isn’t actually funny. There’s a lot of supposed tween comedy on TV that isn’t particularly funny, but it’s got a lot of laugh track. And I go, ‘Please don’t watch that. Please just watch something that’s actually funny.’
• The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn’t just common to me; it’s anybody who’s funny.
• Until now, until I actually got into law class, I just never thought of it as being an interest for me, but it’s really funny because now that I’m in law, I’m like ‘Wow, I could be a lawyer.
• I’m funny. I’m a comedian. I’m not a clown.
• I have so much respect for what’s funny.
• I’m not funny in person. I mean I’m really not. I’m one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
• I wasn’t the class clown. I wasn’t that obvious. There would be a circle of guys, and they’re watching the class clown. And I’m standing in the back, and I turn to the guy next to me and I say something funny to him, and he starts to laugh. And the guy next to him says, ‘What did he say?’
• I liked comedy as a kid. When I was a kid, I’d go to sleep to, like, Bill Cosby albums every night. I’d listen to ‘Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow… Right!’ and ‘Wonderfulness,’ which are two of his most famous albums. Then the next night, I’d flip them over, ’cause it was the old stackable turntable.
• I know my strong points: I work hard, I have talent, I’m funny, and I’m a good person.
• 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.’
• I’ve always said people say on a dramatic show, ‘I was crying. It was so emotional when he went and grabbed that little girl from a burning building and handed her over to her mother.’ In comedy, the best thing you can say is, ‘I think it’s funny.’
• You shouldn’t get too close to the truth, because then maybe you stop being funny.
• Letterman is very intimidating because he’s so funny, so you have to be really prepared. Also, he’s a little squeamish about certain things, so you have to always be on guard to please him.
• I’d say Jon Stewart has remained funny the entire time. Jon always makes it funny first. And he’s just, he’s talking about serious things, but in a funny way. Other comedians will talk about serious things in a serious way, and then you don’t know what’s going on.
• Richard Pryor introduced me to the world of the inner city, and the urban world, and did it hysterically. My favorite comedian, even though we work 180 degrees differently, but funny is funny is funny.
• I’ve just seen really, really funny guys, and if I didn’t know them, I wouldn’t know they were funny from the television. I don’t know what it does, it just sucks it away.
• I like doing a funny show where I don’t have to act and fall in love with a girl.
• When I was young, I’d watch guys on ‘The Tonight Show’, Buddy Hackett, guys like that, where all they’d be is funny. Later, I remember, on ‘Late Night with Letterman’, I remember he’d have Jay Leno and Richard Lewis as first guests and the entire point was to entertain and be funny, and I think talk shows have kind of lost that.
• I auditioned for the leading role in ‘The Kissing Booth’ that came out on Netflix, funny enough.
• I know I can’t play funny roles in movies. I tried, and it didn’t work.
• It’s funny, because I have periods where I just kind of go dark. I don’t tweet, I don’t talk, I don’t interview, and then I have times where I do.
• When you write something you know, you’re making a story that will work, whether or not there’s bits taken. It’s always funny to me when people say, ‘Well, it’s clearly autobiographical,’ and I say, ‘Well, how do you know my autobiography?’ Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it’s a very interesting assumption.
• I don’t have to be bam, bam, bam, funny when I’m working. I can tell stories, and there’s some funny in them.
• When I walked in on ‘Drag Race’ and saw Katya, I had no idea she was gonna be funny, because she was stunning. She had this perfect red lip, I remember looking into her eyes and being like, ‘This is a woman!’ Then she was really funny. She kind of presents normal, and it’s a one-two punch with the comedy.
• I love Adele. Adele is my favorite artist. She’s British. She’s funny. She’s just an amazing, incredible voice, and I love to sing as well.
• I’m quite sarcastic, and I’m funny, but not kind of funny. It’s a weird funny, and some people don’t get me, and some people do.
• In terms of sheer pleasure, Tom Stoppard was very big for me because he is so funny and so smart, and it felt delicious reading him.
• It’s a funny feeling to work with people who you consider your colleagues and to realize that they actually are young enough to be your children.
• If you have doubts about someone, lay on a couple of jokes. If he doesn’t find anything funny, your radar should be screaming. Then I would say be patient with people who are negative, because they’re really having a hard time.
• It is really funny to see people that you know acting unpleasantly just because there are TV cameras on.
• The one thing I think I’ve noticed about shows that are supposed to be funny on television is that they’ve sort of become routinized, so there’s an awful lot of mannerisms and joke lines that are sort of there to trigger laughter, rather than give actors a chance to play a moment.
• What’s funny is that you can think you really value your life until you almost lose it.
• Achingly funny as it was, Larry Gelbart’s writing gave off sparks that turned a hard light on the way we are.
• There’s something that’s really fun about the challenge of making the mundane funny, too, I think.
• Comics write to their point of view. If you’re an exceedingly irreverent comedian, you’ve got to see where that point of view fits or produces the most funny.
• I just want to be known as funny.
• Be Funny. Be naturally funny. If you’re not, get out of the business. Be compassionate.
• I’ve been too funny in my life to have to play a character who’s… moderately funny.
• It’s funny, because what happens to me when I read a script, when something grabs hold of me, I start getting these flashes of people or places or things or images.
• I detest jokes – when somebody tells me one, I feel my IQ dropping; the brain cells start to disappear. But something is funny when the person delivering the line doesn’t know it’s funny or doesn’t treat it as a joke. Maybe it comes from a place of truth, or it’s a sort of rage against society.
• You could knock my teeth out and break my nose, and there’d be something funny about it to me.
• What’s funny is funny. The same thing that made you laugh a hundred years ago makes you laugh now.
• I have a funny relationship with religion. I’m a big believer in ritualistic behavior as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. But I’m not a big fan of rules. And yet, we cannot live in a world without order.
• 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.
• It’s such a funny thing when you see your daughter transitioning from your baby, your little girl, to suddenly being a young woman. If you’re not really looking for it, you can miss it, and Lily-Rose is on that road already, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
• People often can’t separate, or can’t understand, that to be funny is to be serious; it’s a way of pulling people in and not scaring them off. I think a lot of the funny stuff, underneath it, there’s a deep anxiety going on.
• I consider myself to be first and foremost a comic writer. The way I entertain myself – especially in those long and grim hours in the office – is to write stuff I find funny.
• I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, funny little dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes.
• The funny thing is that when you have any form of presentation to your band, meaning you have the foresight to see outside of your creativity, you have a bigger vision.
• My studio, nicknamed ‘Funny Farm,’ is in a hidden location. It’s very private. Not only do I create my photography there, but it is also where I write my books and create music.
• I wasn’t close to my father, but I wanted to be all my life. He had a funny sense of humor, and he laughed all the time – good and loud, like I do. He was a gay Irish gentleman and very good-looking. And he wanted to be close to me, too, but we never had much time together.
• Yes, we do defend our office as we do defend our homes. This is a constitutional right everybody has, and nothing’s funny about that. The only reason they get mad at the Black Panther Party when you do it is for the simple reason that we’re political.
• I exaggerate all our selves, our beings. I make fun of everything: of our life and what we are. But I don’t tell jokes, really. I just exaggerate life, and it comes out funny.
• Every day after school for 10 years, I was on the set of ‘Married… with Children,’ which is a really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a Catholic school uniform to grow up.
• From the first time I saw Sid Caesar be funny I knew that’s what I had to do.
• When I’m not thrilled, I get funny.
• Two things I really wanted to be: a stand-up comic or a New York Yankee – or a really funny New York Yankee.
• It’s funny – almost every comedian that I started out with moved to L.A., except for my two friends Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer. And my two friends that are doing the best in comedy, the most successful friends I have, are Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer.
• With any of the movies I’ve had a chance to do, or any of the TV shows I’ve had a chance to contribute to, people approach me and say, ‘Hey, would you like to do this?’ I laugh out loud and say, ‘Yes, that’d be funny.’ Or, I’m very moved by what I read and say, ‘Yes. How can I help you?’
• I can’t be funny if my feet don’t feel right.
• I recently spent quite a bit of time in Sheffield, England, which is where I’m from. I wouldn’t move back there, but it’s funny when you spend a bit of time in the place where you were brought up. You kind of realize how that place has had quite a big effect on you or made you a certain way.
• I listen like mad to any conversation taking place next to me just trying to hear why this is funny. Women’s restrooms are especially great. I wash my hands twice waiting for people to come in and start talking.
• It’s harder to be funny if you’re handsome than if you’re very normal-looking. It’s just more relatable. You’re the underdog. I mean it’s funny to see people struggle, and you don’t buy that Brad Pitt is struggling, you know that guy could be the most skill-less guy in the world, but if you look like that you will be fine for the rest of your life.
• TV is easier: it’s all planned out for you and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over.
• It’s funny because I’m a sucker for glitz and glitter when it comes to clothes and nail polish, but with my makeup, I’m more comfortable with a natural look. It feels more like me.
• I’m on so late I’m definitely the last seconds of anyone’s attention. So I just want to give them something dumb to laugh at, so they go, ‘That’s funny,’ then fall asleep.
• In terms of the creative side of it, it’s really been a thing where you come up with the funny stuff is usually at a bar or out talking to people or whatever.
• It’s funny because I think a lot of it is simply… We’ve never considered ourselves satirists, but because we’re on Comedy Central and because we’re South Park on Comedy Central, we can do any topic we want.
• No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, ‘Well it’s obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.’
• Nothing’s funny about someone who’s successful.
• It’s funny because it’s funny.
• I don’t just try to be funny.
• Especially with a comedy, you’ve got the clear cut goal of trying to make a scene funny. It’s not like drama where you’re trying to achieve some kind of emotion or trying to further the story along. You’re trying to figure out what’s the funniest way to do something.
• I’ve started looking at my own father a bit funny. He assures me, though, that I really am the son of a Scottish postman.
• I don’t know now if I’m funny. I just keep talking and hope that I hit something that’s funny.
• This may sound funny, but as much as the ‘Today’ show matured me, it also was something of a cocoon. I’d been happy there. I never went into the boss’s office and pounded my fist on the desk, saying, ‘Give me more money! Give me a prime-time show!’
• It’s funny how the hippies and the punks tried to get rid of the conservatives, but they always seem to get the upper hand in the end.
• I show them the funny part, the silly part, the laughing part, the crazy part and then the really deep, deep part where I’m talking from my heart to these people. Because I’ve been through everything they’ve been through.
• It sounds funny, but the 2008 Olympics were something that just kind of happened, and I was lucky they came at a point when I was uninjured and well prepared. As a gymnast, you can’t ask for much more.
• I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple, that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I’m not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I’m certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.
• Funny things tend not to happen to me. I am not a natural comic. I need to think about things a lot before I can be even remotely amusing.
• I don’t really necessarily think I’m a funny guy, but I like the opportunity to take on something that I don’t feel I’m the best at doing.
• I’m never afraid to try something if I think it’s funny. And I know I’ll regret it if I don’t.
• Here is my prescription to heal all wounds. Watch the film ‘Funny Girl’ at least five times, eat at least 45 chocolate bars, and hang out with all those friends you blew off to hang out with your ex. I truly believe that, through a combination of Nutella, old pals and Barbra Streisand, we can achieve happiness and, very probably, world peace.
• It’s painful for me to watch someone who isn’t funny. It’s horrifying to sit in the back and watch some guy who just totally sucks.
• If you are a great dramatic actor then you often don’t know if people are enjoying your stuff at all because they are sitting there in silence. But with comedy it’s a simple premise. If it’s funny, people laugh. If it’s not, they don’t.
• The surprising thing is that I was not funny in high school. I was always jealous of the funny kids because they always got the girls. I couldn’t tell a joke to save my life.
• I’m so single. It’s funny. I’m usually a relationship girl. I love being in love and having a partner in crime. But it’s good to be your own partner in crime. God, that makes me sound like I have multiple-personality disorder.
• I think things are funny when the character is taking it totally seriously.
• The word ‘Spanx’ was funny. It made people laugh. No one ever forgot it.
• Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a form of service journalism. To be successful, I think it has to be a combination of a good story, it has to be funny, and it also needs to be packed with useful information.
• Sometimes I feel like there are people just waiting for me to fall. The funny thing is, I can’t give them anything. I have just never been a partier, even in school.
• It’s funny. When I saw the script in my inbox and it said ‘Sparkle,’ I thought, ‘For real? It’s really called ‘Sparkle?” I was wondering, too, how does ‘Jordin Sparks as Sparkle’ sound?
• Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they’re being trusted as a friend.
• I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you’re not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.
• It’s funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They’re usually quite nice comparisons I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other, more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate.
• This is going to sound really funny. I have a poster of Zac Efron on my wall! I think every girl has a poster of him in their room so, why not join the club!
• I’m an unorthodox type of guy, a funny guy – at least I think I’m funny. And one of the things I like to do is come up with nicknames for myself.
• In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They’re short, they’re intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.
• I think Chris Rock at the Oscars was a great example. I thought that was intellectually hilarious. The Gap starts a war with Banana Republic… That to me was funny.
• You know, I’ve always thought that it would be really funny if somebody made a romantic comedy where absolutely everything went well from beginning to end.
• I’m very silly as a person, but quality silliness on-screen has more of an art to it. Harrison Ford, whom I was in ‘Morning Glory’ with, has mastered that dry funny better than anyone.
• I don’t have a caustic sense of humor. What I find funny, that humor comes from a much gentler place.
• On the stage you’re there, it’s live. There’s a beginning, a middle, an end. When something is funny you hear it right away.
• With improv, it’s a combination of listening and not trying to be funny.
• It’s funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that’s causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it’s in the Bush Administration.
• If you use tact you can say anything, then make it funny.
• Hurried and worried until we’re buried, and there’s no curtain call, Lifes a very funny proposition after all.
• It was always a fantasy of mine growing up – my favorite program was always ‘Little House on the Prairie’ – so I always wanted to wear those looks. When I was a child, I wouldn’t let my mom put me in anything but calico dresses and now… whaddaya know, every day I’m in a calico dress, basically, so it’s kind of funny.
• Something about New York, man: You can do more comedy there probably than you can anywhere in the world. If you’re interested in being funny, New York is the place to go.
• It’s funny with fiction – once you cut something, it hasn’t happened anymore.
• I don’t think, ‘Gee, I’d like to dress this person.’ There was a picture in Us magazine. It was a jersey dress, and Courtney Love was wearing it. I have this thing about Courtney Love, this funny worship.
• I grew up in a funny way.
• I got to dress up in funny clothes and run around New Zealand with a bow and arrow for 18 months, how bad could that be?
• As a writer, or as a filmmaker, you have to present yourself, and part of what yourself is is what you’re interested in, or what you think is funny, or what you think is sad, or what you think is horrible.
• People ask ‘do you make a conscious effort not to swear?’ – if you’re doing silly stuff you’re not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood, who were funny without swearing, were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway.
• I always find it kind of embarrassing, kind of funny, and kind of exciting. In New York I’m recognized a lot, although nobody says anything. You know, they stare at you just a second too long. But in Paris it’s not as commonplace to be recognized.
• It’s funny when you’re a kid how you can acclimate to almost anything.
• I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.
• My father was always a straight-up funny guy. He was silly. He was my inspiration.
• Maybe I’m delusional but I’m usually funny. It’s not 100% but I have a pretty good batting average.
• Laughter is involuntary. If it’s funny you laugh.
• If Joy Behar or Sherri Shepherd was a dude, they’d be off TV. They’re not funny enough for dudes. What if Roseanne Barr was a dude? Think we’d know who she was?
• It’s funny – if you impersonate somebody, they have no idea it’s them.
• Being funny, it turns out, is like being a bank. It’s a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you, you are fine.
• It’s funny, as you live through something you’re not aware of it.
• It’s funny, when bands or younger musicians ask me: ‘So, what does it take to make it?’ Well, first explain to me what you mean by ‘making it’: Do you want to be a rock star or do you want music to be your livelihood?
• I mean it’s funny, playing music, how of course you want it to do well, you want them to like it, but it’s not competitive like an election, it’s the Olympics, it’s not a Formula 1 race. The Billboard charts are just to show you what people like.
• I love things made out of animals. It’s just so funny to think of someone saying, ‘I need a letter opener. I guess I’ll have to kill a deer.
• It’s not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it’s what you learn about yourself, really. It’s a funny old hippie thing, but it’s true as well. You find out a lot about yourself and your tolerance, and about your inclusiveness.
• I think there have always been funny women, from Carol Burnett to Joan Rivers. When the audience sees a woman, they innately know she’s worked twice as hard to get there, she’s had to prove that she can be the leader, first, and then be funny on top of it. She has to emit a confidence that she’s in control.
• When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it’s just wonderful.
• I turned down ‘Some Like It Hot.’ See how smart I am? I felt I couldn’t bring anything funny to it. The outfit was funny. I don’t need to compete with the wardrobe.
• I mean, sometimes… a comedian becomes an actor, and they just don’t deliver, because the bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of acting is to be truthful, and they get that mixed up sometimes, or don’t even notice that that’s the thing.
• Boston is actually the capital of the world. You didn’t know that? We breed smart-ass, quippy, funny people. Not that I’m one of them. I just sorta sneaked in under the radar.
• People used to be funny about approaching me, but now they seem to think I’m as sane as anyone who’s done what I’ve done in movies can be.
• You know, you can touch a stick of dynamite, but if you touch a venomous snake it’ll turn around and bite you and kill you so fast it’s not even funny.
• Well, I mean, if a joke or humor is bawdy, it’s got to be funny enough to warrant it. You can’t just have it bawdy or dirty just for the sake of being that – it’s got to be funny.
• I can never tell when something is funny. I just have to do it onstage and find out.
• My parents are very funny when they have to deal with anything racy or off-color. They usually pretend they don’t speak English.
• In this world, everyone wants to know everything about you, and I think that’s funny.
• It’s funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can’t afford the music.
• It’s funny, I can sit through the worst horror film ever made but even a quite good romantic comedy can drive me nuts.
• Life’s pretty funny when you’re objectively on the outside looking at it.
• The funny thing is, Dennis Miller got me back into comedy.
• I’m half Jewish, I’m half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It’s like, What is he doing?
• The fans of ‘The Hunger Games,’ of the book, are very passionate. It’s funny: Even at my concerts there are people holding up ‘Cinna’ signs.
• Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what’s serious. I think that’s true. Sometimes things are really funny if you’re absolutely earnest. If you’re really serious, it’s hilarious.
• I never know when I am being funny, and the other way too. I don’t think you can think about that. I don’t think you can try to be funny. Some people are just funny.
• I tend to head for what’s amusing because a lot of things aren’t happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.
• Our records, if you have a dark sense of humor, were funny, but our records weren’t about comedy. They were about protests, fantasy, confrontation and all that.
• It’s funny how people who ain’t never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be alright. It’s funny that the people who have their foot on our neck are telling us, ‘Get up. What’s wrong with you?’
• It’s a funny show. The characters are surprisingly likable, given how ugly they are. We’ve got this huge cast of characters that we can move around. And over the last few seasons, we’ve explored some of the secondary characters’ personal lives a bit more.
• It’s funny, I do try to maintain health. I started doing Bikram yoga which is that hothouse yoga, the 105 degrees yoga for 90 minutes. It’s great, you purge out all the sweat and you’re drinking water.
• It’s funny how many people will come to Vegas to see your show where they might not come out to see you unless you come to their hometown.
• It’s funny: I’m a lifelong musician, but because I principally play the piano it’s been a solitary thing.
• I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up.
• When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.
• It’s funny how making odd noises can get you into strange situations sometimes.
• People don’t want to listen to a celebrity tweeting about their charities and shows. That’s why comedy writers do well – we put out little funny ideas.
• The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks. If my daughter has a mediocre sense of humor, I’m just gonna tell her, ‘Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they’ll have to hire you, they can’t really fire you, and you don’t have to produce that much. It’ll be awesome.’
• I don’t hate humanity and I’m not interested in people who do. Although, it’s funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. ‘London Fields’ is one of my favorite books ever. And it’s indefensible! But he’s so funny… I forgive him everything.
• Who do I like? I am a big fan of French and Saunders – not that that they are particularly stand-up I have to say, but I think they have been great for women and they are of themselves just incredibly funny whether they are male or female.
• The thing I thought about doing it was it’s Comic Relief and you’ve got to be funny. So although I did try to sing properly it obviously has hilarious results when you can’t sing.
• It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your ‘portrayal’ of women. Even when I started out on ‘The Office’ eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it’s completely different.
• At the end of the day it’s got to be a good movie, it’s got to be a funny movie, and it’s got to make people think, ‘Hey, I couldn’t have spent my time any better.’
• At home in L.A., Sunday is lazy. It’s the wife and me lying in bed with coffee, watching ‘The Soup’ or something funny on TiVo. The kid will occasionally join us. Eventually, breakfast is at a place down the street called Paty’s. And we always have some kind of great dinner – my wife makes a great roast beef.
• The funny thing is that I’m the girl who no one sees at the beach. Ask anyone who’s traveled with me. Normally, I’m in so many layers, I look like Lawrence of Arabia!
• The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it’s a way to care about things, but also not to alienate yourself from the rest of the world. But it’s so much more alienating than vegetarianism.
• I’m not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I’ll be funny in real life. It’s the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.
• You find out in life that people really like you funny. So what do you give ’em? Humor. And then if you show them the other side, they don’t like you as much. I find, too, that I can hide behind the idiot’s mask being funny, and you never see the sorrow or the pain.
• When you’re out of sight for as long as I was, there’s a funny feeling of betrayal that comes over people when they see you again.
• I’d like to do a film which is funny.
• Japanese people have a funny habit of abbreviating names.
• There’s always an article coming out, saying, ‘The new thing is funny women!’
• It’s funny, I never considered that people are going to see me on the show and maybe stop me on the subway.
• I never thought of myself as like, a funny person.
• Funny enough, if you are looking at people these days who are putting Botox in their face and getting all sorts of plastic surgery, we look at them and go, I can tell you’ve had Botox. I can tell you’ve had plastic surgery. You look really strange to me. But no one’s saying anything. We’re just accepting the fact that they’re strange-looking.
• No one ever thought Clint Eastwood was funny, but he was.
• I mean, I – it’s so funny, I am, you know, I am, you know, a working woman out in the world, but I still live with my parents half the time. I’ve been sort of taking this very long, stuttering period of moving out.
• The funny thing is people won’t let me pay for things. I’ll be in a restaurant and the manager will say, ‘Oh no, it’s on the house.’
• The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny, you’ve immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.
• I watch things that are fun, or funny, or interesting.
• Some people can do things and get away with it. Comics are famously like that. Why is it that some guys can say the most horrible things and it’s not offensive, it’s funny?
• I always like to watch comics and it’s interesting that you can tell if someone’s funny in 10 seconds.
• Comedy’s so subjective, and if someone comes to watch, doesn’t get it, doesn’t find it funny, then fine.
• The word ‘funny’ is a bit like the word ‘love’ – we don’t have enough words to describe the many varieties.
• A romantic comedy has to be funny and make you think about life but the obstacle that has to be overcome is key.
• There’s something dangerous about what’s funny. Jarring and disconcerting. There is a connection between funny and scary.
• I’m just not one of those naturally funny, relaxed actors who enjoy the spotlight and are so good at it.
• It’s a funny thing: You want so badly for people to see what you do – you’re proud of it – and I like the effect that movies have on people. But the attention can also make me uncomfortable.
• And I like to keep whatever is mine remaining that way. It’s a funny little game to play and it’s a slippery slope. I always say to myself I’m never going to give anything away because there’s never any point or benefit for me.
• I find it very easy playing Bond. I think he’s hilarious. He gets himself into some extraordinarily funny situations.
• What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.
• I thought I was funny as a kid.
• Always remember your kid’s name. Always remember where you put your kid. Don’t let your kid drive until their feet can reach the pedals. Use the right size diapers… for yourself. And, when in doubt, make funny faces.
• I had to act in a school play when I was about ten years old. I really didn’t want to do it. But everyone had to do it so I didn’t have a choice. A talent agent came and watched it and later gave me some work. It’s funny because I’d always known that I wanted a movie career. I just didn’t think that I would be in the movies.
• I’m like, bursting. I should be working. I don’t want to take a break. It’s funny, on set, I don’t have to go to the bathroom, I don’t have anything wrong, I’m perfectly fine, so through-and-through. I’m not hungry. I’m literally not even in my own body.
• Kristin Bauer is so funny. Half the time I’m working with her I’m just trying to keep a straight face.
• I don’t really get shaken very much. People could heckle me, a spotlight could go out, I could forget a lyric… I’m not operating on somebody’s brain, you know what I mean? So I just think it’s all funny.
• Without hurting anybody, we all tend to laugh at others’ discomfort. When someone slips on a banana skin and falls it’s funny.
• I try to play serious scenes a little funny and the comedy a little serious.
• When people come up to me and ask for my autograph and everything… I find it funny that people want my autograph.
• I became good friends with Jack Whitehall. I think he’s great, such a great dude, and really funny.
• If you’re sick, watch funny movies.
• It’s funny that I’m so popular with seven-, eight-, nine-year-olds.
• I’m a drag queen who is thoughtful and serious about drag in addition to being funny, ambitious, and glamourous.
• It was pretty clear that I was a funny guy, just as a guy.
• My whole life, I knew that I was going to be funny for a living.
• My name is Steven Crowder, and I happen to find blatant gayness funny. I mean really funny.
• If you’re funny, if there’s something that makes you laugh, then every day’s going to be okay.
• People thought I was funny, so I kind of took entertaining for granted… it was inevitable that I’d start giving little performances.
• The funny thing is that everyone thinks I’m naturally dark because all of my siblings are, but I’m naturally dirty blond.
• I try to be funny and not ignorant.
• My color’s not a crutch. See, funny crosses a lot of color barriers.
• I don’t do it often, but I do cry. I also laugh a lot; people tell me I’m funny and I do like to laugh.
• I’ve never been married, but I tell people I’m divorced so they won’t think something is wrong with me.
• We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
• The ‘Billionaire’ song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It’s funny.
• When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
• Too much agreement kills a chat.
• I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.
• If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
• There’s one thing about baldness, it’s neat.
• An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.
• Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
• Let’s have some new cliches.
• Include me out.
• Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it’s a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
• We’ve seen some insane signs: ‘Is that a loaf of bread in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?’ Funny stuff along those lines. Very original. One just said, ‘I will do unspeakable things.’ I thought that was very interesting – and mildly terrifying!
• You know what’s funny? I don’t ever feel the need to escape. I have a strong marriage. I like my life. You hear about these guys having midlife crises – I don’t see that happening to me.
• Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can’t identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn’t yet historical.
• It’s funny to be a critic.
• I find it so funny that people find me so interesting.
• I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.
• I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful, but I’m annoying, and a phony.
• I’ve thought for the last decade or so, the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment, pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages, and had the ability to make it all funny, entertaining, and pertinent.
• Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
• Actually I never did stand up. I’m not that funny.
• I have only been funny about seventy four per cent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four per cent of the time.
• The funny thing is I’m not bothered or sad about being on my own – after all I’ve never had a husband.
• I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can’t get rid of.
• When I was a little kid, I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there, and a mummy. When they were all hassling him, this guy who bought the house – I can’t believe I remember this – he said to them, ‘Who’s paying the mortgage on this haunted house?’ I thought that was really funny.
• Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
• Don’t remember me as too nice or beautiful or funny, because then you’ll be disappointed.
• I don’t like comedy. I like funny things. I don’t like comedy. Like, comedy movies are just, ‘Oh Jesus.’
• There’s also a certain rhythm to the way Jews talk that might be funny.
• Very often, I don’t make it through moments of recording because it is genuinely funny and absolutely ridiculous that a 60-year-old grown man is making these noises.
• I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It’s embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.
• Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
• It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.
• You have to discover when you’re inadequate to be funny and you don’t know you’re inadequate when you’re a kid.
• I like reading Ball Tongue lyrics and all that stuff. And they published a book, and I wouldn’t give my lyrics, and it’s all wrong in the book, and I giggle. It’s funny.
• I don’t think I’m funny.
• It’s funny, but you get to a time in your life when you think you have all the friends you will ever have.
• I wanted to be that quirky girl who writes funny songs that still have meaning.
• I’m a pretty funny guy, and I would love to do a comedy with a bunch of funny guys – movie-star guys, where they could help me through it.
• It’s only I have seen enough of it and the funny thing is now, I know that I’m skinny, because I know there are even smaller clothes in the store. I think I’m big, when I was big, I never thought about it.
• The nightmare is you spend the rest of your life being funny at parties and then people say, ‘Why didn’t you do that when you were on television?’
• The funny thing about me that most people never really understand is that, at heart, I’m really a jock.
• I was a hop-around. I hung out with the rockabilly crew, the guys who were trying to be rappers, the funny kids.
• Funny things happen to you in movies for silly reasons.
• Chris Hemsworth is like Christopher Reeve in that he can do two things: he can wear a big red cape without a shred of self-consciousness. But he’s also funny as hell, and he’s so sweet. So with all the fish-out-of-water stuff, he’s so funny. So he does almost two jobs in a way.
• I like funny guys and those, for some reason, tend to be nerdy guys.
• As soon as you are trying to be funny or dramatic, that’s when things start feeling fake and boring.
• What’s funny is that the idea of popularity – even the use of the word ‘popular’ – is something that had been mostly absent from my life since junior high. In fact, the hallmark of life after junior high seemed to be the shedding of popularity as a central concern.
• I mean I’ve seen 3D films so far and I think it’s a long way to go before they replace actors. It’s a funny thing with 3D, I haven’t quite got it yet. Yet.
• If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.
• I think we’re all good and bad, but good’s not funny. Bad is funny. Suppress the good and let the bad out, and then you can be funny.
• It’s funny what a few no-hitters do for a body.
• I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.
• I was so afraid to even read a paper in front of my classmates. It is very funny because at that point my teachers would never have believed that I could speak in front of an audience of over 2,000 people.
• It’s funny how social activists usually protest against the only things that have a credible chance of achieving the activists’ goals.
• One time I went into a restroom and a girl followed me in. I signed an autograph for her in the sink. It was pretty funny because she was in a guy’s restroom and she wasn’t embarrassed at all.
• Karaoke isn’t fair when you’re a comedian. The whole idea is to get people laughing and enjoying themselves, and I’m a professional funny guy.
• The people I grew up around who I really liked were quick on the draw. It always just wowed me. And my mum would make weird funny comments. I can see in myself her self-deprecating, hippie humour. I can’t take myself too seriously.
• A good artist is willing to die many times over. What’s funny is, I’ve died so many times.
• Hollywood’s just not funny.
• It’s funny. You succeed, but now where are you gonna go from there? I’ve got to keep proving that I can laugh or cry more real each time.
• The comedians I liked were Bill Cosby and Steven Wright, like just always as a comedic actor. I always liked Gary Larson, who’s really funny for a cartoonist, obviously.
• I wear black skinny-fit jeans – I can’t get away from them. It’s funny because I wore baggy jeans for ages, then one day my friend convinced me to try on a skinny pair and I thought they were great.
• I never smoked. I never drank and I never took drugs. The funny thing is, nothing is more boring, people like this. For me, it’s OK. But most of my friends, at least they smoke and drink.
• Stand up is really fun because if I think of a joke or a funny idea, then I can just go and tell some people and if they laugh, they laugh right away.
• I think a lot of stuff I find funny is from day dreaming.
• I think since I was kid people told me that they thought I was funny.
• Funny is only something that others know about you – you can’t be funny by yourself.
• Cheryl Cole and Katy Perry are two of the hottest girls in the world – and so normal and funny with it. If I was a few years older they are the kind of girls I’d like to date. I want a younger version of Cheryl and Katy – a mixture of the two would be hot.
• Jon Stewart is exactly the same guy he’s always been, only with money. He knows that the moment he really believes he’s important, the funny goes away and he becomes Bill O’Reilly, except shorter and Jewish.
• Comediennes are the lucky ones, because if you’re funny, you can be 125 years old and they will still accept you.
• Being funny is one of my greatest strengths. I can make girls smile when they’re down, and when they’re having a good time, I can carry on the joke.
• Do you know, it’s funny, but I never thought of being blind as a disadvantage, and I never thought of being black as a disadvantage.
• That’s what I hate about a lot of comedies, when you’re hitting a line or making it funny.
• I read a lot of scripts that I just don’t find very funny.
• My hair has never been my greatest feature, so that was funny enough unto itself that my hair became so focused on.
• I’m smart and I can be really funny and interesting and I can go toe-to-toe with anybody in a conversation.
• You know being relevant or coming up with something interesting, funny to say about what’s current is just as hard as it might ever be depending on the serendipity of it all.
• It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.
• I got attention by being funny at school, pretending to be retarded, and jumping around with a deformed hand.
• I think it’s funny to be delicate with subjects that are explosive.
• Life can be dramatic and funny all in the same day.
• You know how old I am? I’m so old, I remember when Letterman used to be funny and it was presidents who were serious. That’s how old I am.
• In my circle of friends, I’ve always been loud and funny and talkative. But as soon as I step out of that circle, I get very quiet and introspective. I don’t want the spotlight on me.
• I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny.
• I thought ‘Borat’ was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn’t some studio-produced script with 14 writers.
• ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ is a good one because it not only turned out, I think, to be a really funny movie but it was also a delight to shoot. We were in the South of France, working with Glenne Headly and Michael Caine and Frank Oz the director – who were just fun.
• You need to be silly to be funny.
• It’s a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.
• I don’t care what the haters and naysayers say. If they make jokes about me, I’ll laugh because they’ll probably be funny.
• No matter how popular you are as a stand-up – you can go out and fill a 10,000-seat arena and be smart and funny – it’s delicate to host an awards show and know where your place is and know that it’s not about you, that it’s about the people who are nominated, and respect that, but at the same time have your moment to show them who you are.
• My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.
• Certainly there are things in life that money can’t buy, but it’s very funny – Did you ever try buying then without money?
• I could party in a cardboard box with people who are funny and don’t care. For me, it’s really about who I surround myself with, so I just try to always be with hilarious people.
• It’s funny about men and women. Men pay in cash to get them and pay in cash to get rid of them. Women pay emotionally coming and going. Neither has it easy.
• A funny thing happens in real estate. When it comes back, it comes back up like gangbusters.
• I know some people say I can be funny. But there is always a deeper meaning to what I say. I am a socialist at heart and have the interests of the poor in mind. When people see how I manage to work my way out of tough situations, it gives them hope in their own life.
• Do I have a long-term plan? Kind of. I have a general direction, I think. But it’s funny what comes down the pike.
• If you tell the truth about how you’re feeling, it becomes funny.
• It’s funny when people say, ‘I don’t think Julia likes me.’ Honey, if I don’t like you, you’re going to know about it.
• There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
• I had everything I’d hoped for, but I wasn’t being myself. So I decided to be honest about who I was. It was strange: The people who loved me for being funny suddenly didn’t like me for being… me.
• I had an idea of what I thought was funny. It’s kind of based on how I am.
• I’m blonde and tanned and normal-sized! I’m sweet, shy, funny, have a big heart and I’m nice – and I like to eat.
• I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don’t know. I mean, how can you tell?
• As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one’s friends’ and relatives’ children.
• You know the funny thing, I don’t get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.
• I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
• There’s nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It’s a total turn-off.
• It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
• To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.
• It’s always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it’s just hilarious.
• Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
• I think being funny is not anyone’s first choice.
• It’s funny how you never think about the women you’ve had. It’s always the ones who get away that you can’t forget.
• Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren’t so exciting.
• It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.
• God writes a lot of comedy… the trouble is, he’s stuck with so many bad actors who don’t know how to play funny.
• I’m odd looking. Sometimes I think I look like a funny muppet.
• I am odd-looking. I sometimes think I look like a funny Muppet.
• Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
• Most comedy is based on getting a laugh at somebody else’s expense. And I find that that’s just a form of bullying in a major way. So I want to be an example that you can be funny and be kind, and make people laugh without hurting somebody else’s feelings.
• I don’t mean to be funny.
• It’s a funny old world.
• A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
• Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.
• All these jokes have been pre-approved as funny by me.
• It’s hard to be funny when you have to be clean.
• I’m not funny. What I am is brave.
• If I studied all my life, I couldn’t think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress.
• I saw 28 Days. I don’t remember rehab being like a day camp or being that funny. Rehab is a dumping ground. It’s a big landfill.
• It’s funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead, you are made for life.
• Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.
• You know, fame is a funny thing, man, especially, you know, actors, musicians, rappers, rock singers, it’s kind of a lifestyle and it’s easy to get caught up in it – you go to bars, you go to clubs, everyone’s doing a certain thing… It’s tough.
• It’s funny how most people love the dead, once you’re dead your made for life.
• But you can’t focus on things that matter if all you’ve been is asleep for forty years. Funny how sleep rhymes with sheep. You know.
• I was asked to act when I couldn’t act. I was asked to sing ‘Funny Face’ when I couldn’t sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn’t dance – and do all kinds of things I wasn’t prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.
• There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God.
• It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.
• I’m the only man in the world with a marriage licence made out to whom it may concern.
• Someone told me that when they go to Vermont, they feel like they’re home. I’m that way at Saks.
• Trust is hard to come by. That’s why my circle is small and tight. I’m kind of funny about making new friends.
• I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.
• I’m kidding about having only a few dollars. I might have a few dollars more.
• I’d never been in play long enough for the flowers to die in the dressing room.
• I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
• Parrots make great pets. They have more personality than goldfish.
• Here in Hollywood you can actually get a marriage license printed on an Etch-A-Sketch.
• I’m thankful for the three ounce Ziploc bag, so that I have somewhere to put my savings.
• Whoever is my relative, I will not be nice to them.
• I’m a misplaced American, but don’t know where I was misplaced.
• All my children inherited perfect pitch.
• Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know.
• I read part of it all the way through.
• If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?
• If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
• I quit therapy because my analyst was trying to help me behind my back.
• My mother was against me being an actress – until I introduced her to Frank Sinatra.
• I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
• I cannot sing, dance or act what else would I be but a talk show host.
• I think serial monogamy says it all.
• It all started when my dog began getting free roll over minutes.
• Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.
• Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?
• I can speak Esperanto like a native.
• Ever notice that Soup for One is eight aisles away from Party Mix?
• Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint.
• The way taxes are, you might as well marry for love.
• I recorded my hair this morning, tonight I’m watching the highlights.
• I was born in very sorry circumstances. Both of my parents were very sorry.
• If I have to lay an egg for my country, I’ll do it.
• I wish I had the nerve not to tip.
• How long was I in the army? Five foot eleven.
• Never put a sock in a toaster.
• I’m going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.
• We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.
• Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
• Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
• The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder.
• When the sun comes up, I have morals again.
• Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.
• I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.
• I rant, therefore I am.
• It is easy for me to love myself, but for ladies to do it is another question altogether.
• My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe.
• I don’t have a bank account because I don’t know my mother’s maiden name.
• Defy your own group. Rebel against yourself.
• I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.
• My father would take me to the playground, and put me on mood swings.
• When I go to a bar, I don’t go looking for a girl who knows the capital of Maine.
• I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
• There’s no such thing as soy milk. It’s soy juice.
• Who picks your clothes – Stevie Wonder?
• There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.
• Television has brought back murder into the home – where it belongs.
• Communism is like one big phone company.
• There’s nothing wrong with being shallow as long as you’re insightful about it.
• I used to sell furniture for a living. The trouble was, it was my own.
• Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.
• The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl.
• My theory is that all of Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.
• God did not intend religion to be an exercise club.
• My uncle Sammy was an angry man. He had printed on his tombstone: What are you looking at?
• I’ve never been married, but I tell people I’m divorced so they won’t think something’s wrong with me.
• I like marriage. The idea.
• I spent a year in that town, one Sunday.
• Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.
• Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.
• Have enough sense to know, ahead of time, when your skills will not extend to wallpapering.
• The digital camera is a great invention because it allows us to reminisce. Instantly.
• If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.
• Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt, not swallowed.
• I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.
• Every man has his follies – and often they are the most interesting thing he has got.
• Never floss with a stranger.
• If you have a secret, people will sit a little bit closer.
• If at first you don’t succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.
• As I get older, I just prefer to knit.
• If at first you don’t succeed… so much for skydiving.
• The first time I sang in the church choir two hundred people changed their religion.
• Polite conversation is rarely either.
• That’s my only goal. Surround myself with funny people, and make sure everyone has a good time and works hard.
• The IRS! They’re like the Mafia, they can take anything they want!
• Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
• The reason there are two senators for each state is so that one can be the designated driver.
• Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
• I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing.
• A James Cagney love scene is one where he lets the other guy live.
• If you can’t tell a spoon from a ladle, then you’re fat!
• If it’s the Psychic Network why do they need a phone number?
• I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead.
• Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
• Men are liars. We’ll lie about lying if we have to. I’m an algebra liar. I figure two good lies make a positive.
• If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.
• We’ll love you just the way you are if you’re perfect.
• Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I’m afraid it did.
• Never fight an inanimate object.
• Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.
• I think they should have a Barbie with a buzz cut.
• I’ve always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives.
• If at first you don’t succeed, blame your parents.
• Until you walk a mile in another man’s moccasins you can’t imagine the smell.
• TV is chewing gum for the eyes.
• I was the kid next door’s imaginary friend.
• Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!
• I’d luv to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair.
• I failed to make the chess team because of my height.
• If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.
• You see much more of your children once they leave home.
• One man’s folly is another man’s wife.
• Never raise your hand to your children – it leaves your midsection unprotected.
• All the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911.
• Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.
• Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
• Do not let a flattering woman coax and wheedle you and deceive you she is after your barn.
• There’s no better feeling in the world than a warm pizza box on your lap.
• Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease.
• When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.
• I have a love interest in every one of my films: a gun.
• I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.
• My life needs editing.
• Men are only as loyal as their options.
• My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
• Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
• If God wanted us to bend over he’d put diamonds on the floor.
• Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
• I wanna make a jigsaw puzzle that’s 40,000 pieces. And when you finish it, it says ‘go outside.’
• I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.
• California is a fine place to live – if you happen to be an orange.
• It is a scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it from another person’s plate.
• This shirt is dry clean only. Which means… it’s dirty.
• All men are equal before fish.
• It’s simple, if it jiggles, it’s fat.
• When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.
• If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.
• The superfluous, a very necessary thing.
• The next time you have a thought… let it go.
• What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?
• My Father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.
• A lot of baby boomers are baby bongers.
• When we talk to God, we’re praying. When God talks to us, we’re schizophrenic.
• Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
• Every man’s dream is to be able to sink into the arms of a woman without also falling into her hands.
• The only time I ever enjoyed ironing was the day I accidentally got gin in the steam iron.
• I’m not a real movie star. I’ve still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.
• A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree.
• I’m undaunted in my quest to amuse myself by constantly changing my hair.
• I love to go to Washington – if only to be near my money.
• I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they now do.
• O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.
• I like children – fried.
• I’m for whatever gets you through the night.
• Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
• The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
• I wear a necklace, cause I wanna know when I’m upside down.
• It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
• Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country.
• I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.
• If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?
• If something strikes me as funny, I’ll put it in my performance.
• If I were to insult people and mean it, that wouldn’t be funny.
• I like Ben Stein. I think he’s funny, creative, and an insightful commentator on a host of issues.
• ‘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.
• I don’t think I would do a straight late-night talk show, like a ‘Tonight Show’ kind of thing. But I’m open to whatever is done well. I don’t have any agenda. I’m not like Fugazi – I’m not trying to be just so punk rock until I die. Whatever is funny is good.
• Things have to be funny first, and if they want to have a point, that’s awesome.
• It’s been very funny to try to act like an adult. Even getting dressed. Every day, I’m like, ‘Should I wear a blazer and walk around with an umbrella? Do I carry a briefcase?’ Because I’m trying to be some image of the adults I saw on TV growing up.
• I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively – I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
• Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.
• If something is very, very funny but possibly controversial, if it’s truly funny, then it’s worth doing. Things aren’t worth doing for the sake of being controversial.
• My dad is and was very funny and had a really dry sense of humor, which, as a kid, seemed un-fun. But in retrospect, it’s kind of hilarious.
• I love comedians that dive into politics. I personally don’t feel comfortable, with my background, weighing in unless I have a take that I think is funny enough that I would put it in front of an audience.
• It’s hysterical how kids have their own personalities, even at like 3 or 4. And, it’s funny what they tend to like.
• I have found that people who really want to work at ‘Saturday Night Live’ and pursue it get pretty close. You have to be funny – but everyone who works there, it was their dream to work there. So it’s kind of nice in that way – there’s a lot of people who say, ‘I just always wanted to do this, and now I’m doing it.’
• There’s not many comedy characters that make me laugh as much as The Rock does; it’s nice to have a big muscly guy being funny and stupid.
• The funny thing about the people I don’t like – they’re very self-centered.
• I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don’t really need a distinction between them.
• Show me one guy or woman as funny as Rodney Dangerfield or as good as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Joan Rivers. There are a lot of good comics out there, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics.
• The men I idolized built their bodies and became somebody – like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger – and I thought, ‘That can be me.’ So I started working out. The funny thing is I didn’t realize back then that I was having a defining moment.
• I like making fun of myself a lot. I like being made fun of, too. I’ve always enjoyed it. There’s just something really, really funny about someone tearing into me.
• Now a ‘funnyman’ can get a laugh before opening his mouth – looking funny. Lou Costello was one of your great funnymen. Harry Langdon, Larry Semon; they were all funnymen – they looked funny. W.C. Fields was never a comedian. Slim Summerville was a comedian, yet looked funny. Now if you have both attributes, you are in good shape.
• I see fighters make funny videos about me and stick them on Facebook and get 20 likes. When I make a video, I sell it to Fox and make seven figures. That’s the difference.
• It’s funny, when you have a theme so particular to cows – or it could be anything like hair or nails – when you’re rapping about a specific thing, you can have more punchlines about it.
• What you do with it and things like that, but I basically chose this after I read it because I thought it was different and funny and unique and dark – things that I like to do.
• It’s funny, I get a little quieter with time. I don’t want to chase my tail and one day repeat myself and repeat myself and one day have kids going to college and not have memories that I should, because I was too busy doing my thing.
• There’s a difference between being a comic and a comedian. A comic is a guy who says funny things, and a comedian is a guy who says things funny, and he has a style and point of view that will last much longer.
• I truly think comedy is – being funny is DNA. My dad was a doctor, a wonderful doctor, and people still come up to me today, ‘Your father helped my mother die.’ You know what I’m saying? He made her laugh ’til she died. My father was always very funny.
• I particularly like Twitter, because it’s short and can be very funny and informative. It’s a little bit like having your own radio program.
• Well, you know, I feel like it’s about a lot of things. The reason that I made it was because I thought it was really funny and unique and just a different genre.
• Certainly there are things in life that money can’t buy, but it’s very funny – Did you ever try buying them without money?
• It is funny to me that because I can run, because I’m athletic, people tend to see that as my only asset.
• Part of my act is meant to shake you up. It looks like I’m being funny, but I’m reminding you of other things. Life is tough, darling. Life is hard. And we better laugh at everything; otherwise, we’re going down the tube.
• Prince Charles is so funny. So, so funny.
• Life goes by fast. Enjoy it. Calm down. It’s all funny. Next. Everyone gets so upset about the wrong things.
• I have no line. If I think it’s funny, it’s funny.
• I don’t care whether people say, ”The Office’ is rubbish, ‘Extras’ is worse, ‘Flanimals’ is a waste of time. He’s not funny; he never has been. I hate him.’ I don’t mind that at all. In fact, not only do I expect it, I celebrate it, because I think the haters are really important.
• Comedy is learning to be funny, and you learn to be funny in small rooms with young audiences.
• I think anyone who’s perfectly happy isn’t particularly funny.
• I like the ironic pomposity of a stand-up comedian. Like all those comedians thinking they can bring down Coca-Cola. They forget to be funny.
• 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.
• It’s funny because I was offered film parts the first week after ‘The Office’ went out. I was sent a script, and I said, ‘Who’s the lead?’ They said, ‘We want you to be.’ And I said: ‘Well, who’s going to go and see that? You want John Cusack.’
• Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn’t funny. It’s a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it’s not a surprise anymore.
• I always have a funny story at communion time that underscores that no one is perfect, and that communion is not for perfect people but for hungry people.
• Ego is hilarious – especially the vanity of a comedian. As soon as you see one start worrying about how cool he is or about how many stadiums he can fill, he stops being funny.
• I’m a Twitter addict. Jose Andres is a serial tweeter. It’s funny to see which chefs have embraced it, and the different paths they take.
• Fame is a funny thing. I like doing normal things. I like going to fairs. I like going to ball games. I like going to Disney World or a big field on the Fourth of July and having picnics with friends. The problem is you’re either worried you’re going to be recognized, or you’re thankful you’re not. It’s always there.
• The funny thing about directing is that you have your own opinions, but it’s a collaboration. Directing is a group effort. Even though you might think something works, the smartest thing you can do as a director is try and weigh the opinions of the people around you.
• The first thing I ever got my hands on was Andy Griffith’s ‘What It Was, Was Football.’ I was fascinated with the fact that every syllable made it funny, and I would laugh even though I didn’t know what any of it meant.
• My uncle was a preacher, and I used to go watch him preach. He was also funny, so I’m very ‘preacher-ish’ on stage, not by intent but because that’s where I learned to talk in front of people.
• I know I’m more on television, and I’m more recognisable than maybe even the players because they run and train, but I just stand there, and my face does all these funny things that everyone can see all the time.
• All I know how to do is take what’s on my mind and spit it out funny. I don’t know what else I could do besides comedy.
• I was always a funny guy. I don’t think anybody that makes it to this level of stand-up wasn’t a funny guy when they were young.
• As a small child, I could watch anything happen and tell a story, and it was funny.
• It is really funny when people say you’d be obvious for a great villain.
• I’m definitely guilty of thinking something is funny but thinking the audience won’t. Then three years later I will finally try it and it’ll kill them. I got to give them more credit.
• I just try to keep it fresh without sacrificing funny.
• I still remember the first gig where I got people going, it was Rascals in New Jersey, and the place was packed. I was scared. People were expecting me to be funny. I gotta be honest, every time I walk into a club, it’s that same fear.
• My favorite kind of humor is basically, if it was happening to you, it wouldn’t be funny, but to observe it, it’s hilarious.
• 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.
• People don’t expect me to be as funny as I am.
• Music is funny. I shouldn’t even ever talk about music, because you can have all the ideas in your head, and it never goes exactly the way that you think it’s gonna go.
• The only time I get sick of making people laugh is when I’m in a non-writing-joke mode, and I just can’t seem to come up with anything new that’s funny. That’s a tough place to be as a comedian.
• Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.
• I don’t need you to be funny. I don’t want to be entertained.
• Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.
• I’ve had an experience through music that has touched almost every part of me. It educated me in ways that I didn’t get educated in school. So we try to lay on a bit of that, through being funny, being serious, playing hard.
• I try to sign for as many kids as possible. Kids come first, and I’ll always sign for a kid before an adult. It’s funny, because I was never big into autographs as a kid. The only player who I ever wanted an autograph from was Dave Winfield.
• I would love to act. I would love to do movies. If it was the right part, it would be really cool… I love funny movies.
• I’m thankful enough or blessed enough to be able to say that Miles Davis was a friend when he was alive, and he was a wonderful mentor and really, really funny, you know.
• I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren’t any rules, how could you break them?
• I went window shopping today! I bought four windows.
• He taught me housekeeping when I divorce I keep the house.
• I bought some batteries, but they weren’t included.
• I have never been hurt by what I have not said.
• Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
• I used to jog but the ice cubes kept falling out of my glass.
• They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.
• I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty.
• I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.
• There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.
• In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.
• Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
• I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.
• I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it.
• Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.
• I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.
• Money won’t buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem.
• A vegetarian is a person who won’t eat anything that can have children.
• I never said most of the things I said.
• I distrust camels, and anyone else who can go a week without a drink.
• Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m schizophrenic, and so am I.
• Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.
• A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
• A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.
• My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.
• One picture is worth 1,000 denials.
• I saw a woman wearing a sweatshirt with Guess on it. I said, Thyroid problem?
• I knew I was an unwanted baby when I saw that my bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
• Do not worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older it will avoid you.
• Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
• Electricity is really just organized lightning.
• The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby.
• My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.
• By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
• Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.
• I’m an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.
• Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
• I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.
• A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.
• Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.
• I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three.
• Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance?
• Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
• Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
• My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the hell she is.
• People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
• When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.
• Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.
• A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
• I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade… And try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.
• A word to the wise ain’t necessary – it’s the stupid ones that need the advice.
• I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.
• A man doesn’t know what he knows until he knows what he doesn’t know.
• All people are born alike – except Republicans and Democrats.
• A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap.
• Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement.
• Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.
• I find, when you’re an optimist, life has a funny way of looking after you.
• My mother was very funny. My dad had a great sense of humor. My grandmother, too.
• Every time I do something silly, it comes off really funny because it’s natural.
• There’s only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.
• Almost anything can be funny if said the right way – but it has to be said the right way.
• Diane Keaton is good for women in and of herself. She’s smart and funny and real.
• I was extremely lucky that I had two great wives. It sounds a bit funny to say that, but it’s absolutely true.
• An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it.
• It is to be observed that ‘angling’ is the name given to fishing by people who can’t fish.
• Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing for something.
• Why don’t you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.
• The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
• When I was born I owed twelve dollars.
• I think the eyes flirt most. There are so many ways to use them.
• How can you analyse what is funny? What’s funny to one isn’t funny to another… What’s funny to you is a personal thing.
• There’s a lot more to me than just funny.
• If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true, and that’s unacceptable.
• My goal is really to just make people laugh with integrity, like, with something that I still find funny.
• You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.
• I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.
• What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.
• Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.
• My mama never wore a pair of pants when I was growing up, and now that’s all she wears. It was so funny for me when I first started seeing Mama wear pants. It was like it wasn’t Mama. Now I’ve bought her many a pantsuit because she just lives in them.
• Justice Scalia and I served together on the D.C. Circuit. So his votes are not surprising to me. What I like about him is that he’s very funny and very smart.
• When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, ‘Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.’
• I basically started performing for my mother, going, ‘Love me!’ What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection. When I was little, my mother was funny with me, and I started to be charming and funny for her, and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person.
• When Jonathan Winters died, it was like, ‘Oh, man!’ I knew he was frail, but I always thought he was going to last longer. I knew him as being really funny, but at the same time, he had a dark side.
• I don’t feel that I’m explaining the world or teaching people anything. And I’m not trying to be a mirror, showing them what’s really going on the world. All I’m trying to do is think of stuff that’s funny, just like when I’m kidding around with my friends.
• Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.
• If two wrongs don’t make a right, try three.
• A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.
• I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.
• By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.
• Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it.
• After all is said and done, sit down.
• Me carrying a briefcase is like a hotdog wearing earrings.
• I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
• All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
• I’m an optimist, but an optimist who carries a raincoat.
• The tax collector must love poor people, he’s creating so many of them.
• What I am looking for is a blessing not in disguise.
• I’m attracted to women who are smart and funny and ambitious and have lives of their own and great families. Isn’t that what attracts anyone?
• It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.
• I’m a funny person, but I take my music seriously.
• It’s funny how most people love the dead, once you’re dead, you’re made for life.
• Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.
• I think being funny was a coping mechanism because I was always the new kid in school.
• Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.
• I have a wonderful make-up crew. They’re the same people restoring the Statue of Liberty.
• Forty for you, sixty for me. And equal partners we will be.
• Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.
• The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
• I’m like old wine. They don’t bring me out very often – but I’m well preserved.
• I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.
• You can always tell when a man’s well informed. His views are pretty much like your own.
• I have an unfortunate personality.
• If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.
• When God sneezed, I didn’t know what to say.
• What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
• One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
• A word to the wise is infuriating.
• I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.
• If I had to live my life over, I’d live over a saloon.
• He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
• As for our majority… one is enough.
• Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
• The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.
• Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
• If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
• I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.
• May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.
• The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.
• Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
• Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
• I’m very, very amateur, which is funny because I’m not in the amateur leagues.
• If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.
• I don’t say things to be offensive; I say things because they’re funny to me. It amuses me.
• Since childhood, I’ve been a clown. I’ve always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It’s my original self.
• I like funny girls.
• If you’re serious, you really understand that it’s important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you’re the funniest person you ever met. You have to laugh. Admit that you’re funny. Otherwise, you die in solemnity.
• When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.
• I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.
• A reputation takes years and years and years to build, and it takes one press of a button to ruin it. Don’t let that happen to you. You’ve done so much work; you’ve put in so much effort. Don’t let one moment ruin your entire life because you wanted to be funny or you were mad or because you had a mood.
• Being funny is a symptom of what’s underneath. You’re pumping out all that energy because something else is going on inside you, some opposing force, something uncomfortable.
• What’s great about stand-up is that you can say whatever you want and go around the country, and sometimes the world, and work on it and see how people react. You don’t need Standards & Practices or notes from lawyers or producers to tell you what’s funny.
• What after all, is a halo? It’s only one more thing to keep clean.
• I would ask my mother to show me how to walk – and she did show me. That’s why I think it’s funny when people say, ‘Did so-and-so teach you how to walk?’ And I always say, ‘You must be talking about my mother, because it was my mother who taught me how to walk.’
• It may sound funny, but I love the South. I don’t choose to live anywhere else. There’s land here, where a man can raise cattle, and I’m going to do it some day.
• Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
• Only the mediocre are always at their best.
• I own and operate a ferocious ego.
• There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
• I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It’s chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one.
• I’m going to take this God-given gift of being funny, and I’m going to spread it out like peanut butter on everything I do.
• Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
• The first time I walked by a crap table, I felt kind of funny.
• Everybody I know who is funny, it’s in them. You can teach timing, or some people are able to tell a joke, though I don’t like to tell jokes. But I think you have to be born with a sense of humor and a sense of timing.
• Funny is funny. I dare anyone to look at Tim Conway and Harvey Korman doing the dentist sketch, which is more than 40 years old, and not scream with laughter.
• My favourite comedian, of course, is Tim Conway. He has a way about him – being that belly-laugh kind of funny, and he has the improvisational skills, too. I’ve never seen anybody better.
• Believe it or not, I make myself laugh. Sometimes when I have thoughts or say some things that are funny, it just makes me laugh, and I don’t mind laughing at it before you guys do.
• The funny thing is, all my friends are short. I wasn’t aware of tall people till I got to high school. I didn’t know they existed. I was sheltered.
• Leave America and you’ll find that the consumers in many other countries enjoy watching advertising. Not because the products are better, but because the ads are produced to be entertaining. Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they are dramatic. Sometimes they are just beautiful.
• The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.
• Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.
• My mum passing away wasn’t funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.
• When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.
• When I’m being funny, I try not to offend. I don’t think much of what I’ve done has been in really ghastly taste. I don’t think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.
• 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.
• Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; we’ll find it.
• I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
• You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.
• A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
• Before the Kennedys were elected, there had been older Presidents. Then here was this devastatingly attractive young couple with two beautiful children. They were so intelligent, graceful, gracious and funny. They enjoyed life so much. That’s what caught America’s eye.
• It’s funny how seeing a love story never gets boring, because it’s the dream, isn’t it? It’s the dream to have a true connection with another human being.
• It’s funny how you can be thought of as somebody who humanizes bad guys, and I’ll take that, but it is something that gave me pause, and I started speaking to my team about finding a good guy.
• When I was a boy, I had a grand, big tape recorder, and I made late-night radio shows with glasses of water and funny voices. I just loved radio plays.
• One man is as good as another until he has written a book.
• To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.
• I saw a stationery store move.
• I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I’ve ever met.
• I don’t write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.
• My wife, my daughters, even my grandchildren are funny. You’ve got to keep a sense of humor because anger destroys you.
• You know, it’s funny how songs continue to grow and evolve and become a new and deeper reflection of your life.
• I don’t want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place.
• In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.
• I do come across people who don’t like me, don’t like my comedy, don’t think it’s funny, it’s too cutesy, or whatever they hate. And it’s like, ‘Okay. That’s your opinion. Somebody liked it, so that’s good.’ Hopefully it balances out.
• I love every minute of fatherhood, staying up all night, changing nappies, kids crying, I find it really funny and inspiring. It connects you to the world in a new way.
• Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.
• I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block… pretty funny.
• I don’t know, maybe Australian humour isn’t supposed to be funny. It’s as dry as the Sahara, and I think people miss that.
• I grew up in a time when women didn’t really do comedy. You had to be homely, overweight, an old maid, all that. You had to play a stereotype, because very attractive women were not supposed to be funny – because it’s powerful; it’s a threat.
• I know that I’m going to die and that you’re going to die. I can’t do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure.
• Although I have guitars all around, and I pick them up occasionally and write a tune and make a record, I don’t really see myself as a musician. It may seem a funny thing to say. It’s just like, I write lyrics, and I make up songs, but I’m not a great lyricist or songwriter or producer. It’s when you put all these things together – that makes me.
• As a youngster, my mother and father always drilled into my head having something to fall back on. My father was kind of funny. I’d score 40 points. I’d come home and say, ‘Look dad, I scored 40.’ He’d never have a smile on his face. He’d be like, ‘I saw that move you did. What if you’d hurt your knee?’
• It’s funny: when people always talk about the importance of role models, I used to think that was so exaggerated, but as I get older, I start to realize I don’t feel that way so much anymore. If you see somebody like you who’s doing something, an older version of what you are, it does make you feel like it’s more possible.
• Expert: a man who makes three correct guesses consecutively.
• I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house.
• Macho does not prove mucho.
• To be or not to be. That’s not really a question.
• Every dogma has its day.
• One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody’s listening.
• Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening.
• He looks as though he’s been weaned on a pickle.
• As far as I’m concerned, ‘whom’ is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.
• I don’t believe in angels, no. But I do have a wee parking angel. It’s on my dashboard and you wind it up. The wings flap and it’s supposed to give you a parking space. It’s worked so far.
• If you’re naturally kind, you attract a lot of people you don’t like.
• The reward of energy, enterprise and thrift is taxes.
• I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
• Instant gratification takes too long.
• Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they make a good excuse.
• You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.
• She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
• I never liked you, and I always will.
• Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
• I could sooner reconcile all Europe than two women.
• Cure for an obsession: get another one.
• The first day one is a guest, the second a burden, and the third a pest.
• Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.
• Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
• We owe a lot to Thomas Edison – if it wasn’t for him, we’d be watching television by candlelight.
• We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.
• But I think funny and talent will always win out I mean, of course there are hurdles, but I think if you’re funny you will get over all of that.
• My parents are both very funny but they’re also relatively soft-spoken, normal human beings while I’m just a lunatic. I don’t know where this loud, ballsy, hammy ridiculousness came from. I’m just glad I followed my goals and my parents did too. It’s not like we even had a plan when I dragged my mom to Los Angeles.
• It’s funny, though, because when I first started going to races after we met, I was extremely nervous. It’s like being backstage and hoping you don’t trip over something or break an amp or accidentally speak into a live microphone, so I was really hesitant.
• People are funny, and in the most tragic situations, when comedy erupts from nowhere, it can turn on its head within the space of a second or a minute. You’re laughing one minute and you’re crying the next and that’s just life for me, and that is what people are like.
• When we criticize in Iran the actions of the government, the fundamentalists say that we and the Bush Administration are in the same camp. The funny thing is that human rights activists and Mr. Bush can never be situated in the same group.
• It is funny because the guy who is my boss now, Howard Stern, has a similarity there. He got big being a regular guy. He wasn’t the greatest looking guy in the world.
• My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles were all funny, and I felt that energy, that delivery, that timing, that sarcasm. All that stuff seeped into my brain.
• Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies – and it is free, and it is fast.
• The last person they expected to connect with a screenplay was the comedic, blonde actress with the funny voice.
• I don’t write literary fiction – I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
• Do you want me to apologize after every joke? If it doesn’t offend somebody it’s probably not a joke. It’s probably an observation that’s not funny. It’s gotta offend somebody somewhere.
• It’s funny, because ‘1600 Penn’ was the first time I really started to read the reviews, because I am an executive producer and I wanted to see what people were enjoying and not enjoying as a means to an end, right?
• I mean, I talk about being Jewish a lot. It’s funny because I do think of myself as Jewish ethnically, but I’m not religious at all. I have no religion.
• It’s funny because ‘The Book of Mormon’ is ‘The Book of Mormon’ now. When I was doing it at the very beginning, and I was a part of it for four years and always believed in it, I never really knew if it was going to be more than a convention for ‘South Park’ fans.
• I know people will think it’s funny because I’ve done glamour modelling in the past, but I felt embarrassed about my body and just wanted to cover it up.
• I got the wake-up call that no one is policing our oceans. I wondered, how can I do anything? What really can I do to make things better? There are some perks to being a celebrity. My job is to be funny once in a while, but it’s my responsibility to make good use of it.
• This is funny because I just had a job over the summer for VH1, a project I did called Strange Frequency where I got to play a Goth rock band singer.
• I mean, I’m married first of all to one of, if not the most wonderful women in the world. She is everything – funny, attractive, hard-working, she has integrity, she loves me to bits.
• A film that I love is ‘Raising Arizona’ and that’s funny but it’s quite indie and weird and odd and quirky. I’d love to do something like that. Who knows?
• And of course Marc Cherry heightens it and makes it hilarious. But there’s so many universal themes in the show, and he made it so funny. We knew he was onto something if he could keep it up and, thankfully, he did.
• It’s so funny when you’re actually directing because things start popping that you don’t expect to pop, and something that you think is going to pop, maybe doesn’t quite have the impetus that you thought it might.
• Well, I’m not afraid to say something if I think it’s funny, even if it’s harsh or racist.
• But I think you can make fun of anything as long as it’s funny enough.
• Billy Tauzin is one of the most interesting people in Washington. He is smart, funny, and interesting.
• I’ve actually tried to roast somebody that I don’t like, and it doesn’t go well. Either they’re a bad sport or I’m not as funny as I could be.
• The music industry is really funny, when you have a hit record, everyone knows who are you, everyone wants to do duets with you, then if you have a miss, people suffer from amnesia.
• The prospects for a coherent, hilarious and consistent American comedy seem to lessen every year, as the poor waterlogged, gassy corpse called ‘Evan Almighty’ proved when it floated ashore recently. So there’s a temptation to think too highly of Robin Williams’s uneven but occasionally funny ‘License to Wed.’
• ‘Lucky’ is for laughs, and there’s really nothing funny that I’m doing on ‘Dexter.’ I think more than anything, both comment on the fact that anybody is capable of anything. Just because they are the shy guy in the corner doesn’t mean that they are a harmless little bunny.
• There have been times when I felt suicidal and I would stop my head from going in that direction of negativity because I thought there’d be something I’d miss that was funny in the future. If there’s a chance I’m going to laugh tomorrow then want to live to experience that.
• And remember, it’s also very funny, because side by side with grief lies joy.
• I liked getting the best villain award. I thought that was funny.
• I remember interviewing someone I actually felt bad for, and therefore didn’t want to take an ironic stance against him. It actually turned out to be a really funny piece.
• I don’t think my judgment is that good. I don’t know what is funny.
• It’s funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it’s fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh.
• Sometimes we have to actually say, I think you’re really funny, but none of your jokes are going to make it on the air. So just answer my questions. Seriously.
• I’m not a comedian. I’m an actor who just happens to be funny on occasion.
• If you take a bunch of superstars and put them in a room where they don’t have their assistants and entourage, it’s funny to see what happens.
• Because death and illness are the most horrible things in life, of course that’s where the most absurdly funny things are going to happen.
• I think one of the basic tasks in life – one of the nice things we can do for each other – is to take things that are horrible and scary and make them acceptable and less frightening and, if possible, funny. It feels great to succeed at that.
• I appreciate humor so much, but I’m actually not a funny girl.
• During the Great Depression, when people laughed their worries disappeared. Audiences loved these funny men. I decided to become one.
• I don’t think the public is dying to see me necessarily be funny all the time.
• I love New York. I was sad, depressed and incredibly moved by our fellow countrymen and what they’ve done. I wanted to give people a chance to see something funny, have a distraction.
• Jim Carrey, a comic genius, has a harder time overcoming the public’s desire for him to be funny simply because he’s so good at it.
• So it was just funny to read a script that was just similar to what had been going on in my life.
• I have a funny family, but none of them are remotely in show business.
• You know, if I started worrying about what the critics think, I’d never make another comedy. You couldn’t pick a less funny group than critics – you couldn’t find a more bitter group of people!
• When I was a kid I had this funny blonde hair and everyone called me ‘Chick’ because I looked like Tweety Bird.
• I think that ‘Hangover II’ is as funny as ‘The Hangover I,’ honest to God, but I think that it’s a little bit darker, and the stakes are a little bit higher.
• I don’t think know if anything’s going to translate anywhere. You’re making a movie, you hope it’s going to be funny, you can’t think about how it’s going to go over.
• If you can find the line between sympathetic and creepy, you have reached a very funny area.
• It’s a funny thing because you look at the careers of other filmmakers, and you see them sort of slow down, and you realize, maybe this becomes harder to do as you get older. That’s sort of a cautionary thing. I hope it doesn’t happen to me.
• There’s a darkness under ‘The Hangover’ because ultimately there’s a missing person and it’s not really that funny. There’s a sort of darkness under it that I love, and still people are laughing as hard if not harder than they did in ‘Old School.’
• Now that I’m more mature, in a funny way, I can even appreciate that I’ve bad to become more aware of my body. Since I’ve chosen acting as my career, I have to keep my weight down anyway-I’ve been used to it for years, so it’s no problem. And there’s nothing I can’t do.
• Comedy is so subjective. You could be in a room with 400 people laughing at a joke and you could just not think it’s funny. You’re just sitting there like, ‘Am I in the twilight zone? Why is everyone laughing?’ It’s such a personal thing. People have such a personal visceral response to comedy.
• I would do it today because the thing that appealed to me was not necessarily the mechanics of the robot, but it was his personality and how funny and charming he was.
• I’m an off-road racecar driver. And I think every woman in my life has told me that’s not a sensible hobby. But when I was growing, even more than I wanted to be funny, I wanted to be a racecar driver. That’s all I thought about. I worked for a race team when I was 15 and I traveled with them.
• Kyle Baker’s work is really funny, but it’s also got a very clear vision.
• I think people like comedies and I think concept driven comedies seem to be working when it’s a clear concept and you deliver funny stuff.
• It’s funny: I’ve been very successful and done a lot of films, and I don’t really have an agent – I don’t really pursue jobs, I let people come to me.
• If you look at the game and everything, it’s not quite like looking at an animated film, because that’s total character. This, this is really movement, but it’s got funny little things if you look for the humor. They’re actually getting to the character.
• It’s funny, but we were living on this small island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina when I was 9.
• I have no agenda except to be funny. Neither I or the writers profess to offer any worldly wisdom.
• In my experience, it’s not just that serious books get a hearing on comedy shows. But serious books get a serious hearing, as well as a funny one, on comedy shows.
• It’s a bit like school camp, shooting a film. Everyone’s on heat. It’s a strange energy. It’s full of adrenalin. I funnel my excess energy in funny little ways. I do a lot of dancing in my trailer. I love music.
• I like the hot-cold, the sugar-salt, being able to play over-the-top and dramatic things – in the same film. Just as in my life, I can be very funny and at other times almost extinguished.
• It’s so different when you change your hair color, you’re treated so differently. It’s a very funny experience. It’s fun – I love changing up my hair.
• I’m a big fan of certain new acts. I love any genre of music, and I think it’s really great to see that there are new artists coming through. It’s kinda funny to think that I’m like the old man on campus now. But I’m really happy for groups like One Direction. I think they’re really good guys.
• When I turned about 12 or 13, I realised that being funny wasn’t about remembering jokes. It was about creating them.
• They’re great girls. They’re very funny, they’re very smart, they’re fun to be with. They’re very lively, as I think people can tell. And you know, they’re very confident girls.
• And regardless of the fact that in this country, certainly in the arts, we treat comedy as a second-class citizen, I’ve never thought of it that way. I’ve always thought it to be important. The last time I looked, the Greeks were holding up two masks. I’ve always thought of it not only as having equal value, but as the craft of it, being funny.
• I wasn’t even 20 at the time, but it taught me something about drugs. They can take a good man, a warm, funny, loving family man, and turn him into a loser and worse.
• I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.
• We all know how funny Morrissey is. Actually, you know what? I say that sarcastically. His songs are some of the funniest songs I’ve ever heard in my life. I mean, really. I mean, not that the ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ is, like, really funny.
• What’s funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.
• I auditioned for a solo in church and got it. I was about seven and I sang a song called, ‘Jesus, I Heard You Had a Big House’ and I remember people standing up at the end and me thinking, ‘Oh, I think I’m going to like this.’ That’s how it all began. Sounds funny to say you got your start in church, but I did.
• When you are not treated seriously, you develop comically. Its sense of oneself is so fractured and fragile that it’s like the picked-on kid who has to become funny.
• Billy is a funny, cheeky, lovely boy and I love being with him. Parenthood is terrifying though. I can barely walk past a building without panicking that it’s going to collapse on his head.
• The funny thing is the songs that people think are about me probably aren’t. And the songs that are probably are the ones they wouldn’t think… so that’s where it kind of is funny.
• The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.
• Sometimes laughing isn’t the best judge of what’s funny, ’cause I think there’s a lot of things that are really funny that don’t make you laugh, that don’t make you physically, audibly make a noise, but is something that is much more powerful than that.
• Comedy is still alive, and there are still funny people. Jews are still overrepresented in comedy and psychiatry and underrepresented in the priesthood. That immigrant Jewish humor is still with us.
• What I fell in love with as a child was ‘My Fair Lady,’ ‘Funny Face,’ ‘American in Paris,’ and ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ Just perfect movies to me and I was dancing. I started ballet when I was three. And I fell in love with those movies and fell in love with Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron.
• Sometimes you have to take the focus off of you and put it on someone else and it’s funny what you can accomplish and how much strength you really have.
• I don’t think I was funny until college. I lived with some Harvard MD/PhD students – they were so smart, and what I contributed to the house was, I was the funny one.
• When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who’d get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.
• When I hear somebody like Hayes Carll write a song that’s touching and poignant and sad and funny all at the same time, it motivates me to step my game up and try to figure out a way to get more different emotions into one line or one song.
• People were stopping me on the street to say, ‘Oh my God, it’s Crazy Eyes!’ Which is kind of a funny thing to have people shout at you on the street.
• It’s kind of low brow, but the show ‘Bob’s Burgers’ is hilarious, and being from the Midwest, I can kind of relate to a lot of the jokes. ‘Orange is The New Black’ is a Netflix Exclusive, I think – that’s really funny.
• There is a cliche that probably has some anecdotal evidence on the side that comedians are very depressed people, but that’s because no one is ever going to seem as funny in a normal conversation as compared to when they’re up there onstage in the spotlight making a huge audience keel over with laughter.
• I guess I’m pleased and proud of the respect of my peers, and that when I disappear from the scene or from this earth, I will have left a mark. They’ll say, ‘He did it well.’ I like being funny; it opens people up.
• What really irks me is the snide victimizing suggestion from some that I have tried to be lighthearted and funny… Oh my God – this is so offensive.
• A dear friend of my early childhood has worked as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea for much of her life, and from the tiny island where her main work has been focused, she has brought me many funny and beautiful stories over the years.
• Your funny gets developed pretty early on. Comedy requires that you understand as much as possible about the viewpoints of all people and everything that’s going on around you. It genuinely requires a true point of view, a real sense of your own view of things in the world.
• Working for President Nixon was the most extraordinary professional experience of my life. He was endlessly fascinating: brilliant, visionary, kind, generous, warm, funny – and yes, a good man.
• If you can write someone off as a bad person, then it’s easier, but when someone is also great and noble and generous and kind and funny and contradictory, it gets harder.
• Life is funny and weird.
• Gene Wilder is so funny.
• When you live in a leading lady’s body, which I do, you have to constantly prove that you are funny.
• I was on an army show, and in the army – especially in Korean culture – there’s a very, very strict hierarchy. Obviously, you would not talk informally or disrespectfully to your commanding officer. But me, in my limited Korean, I basically told my commanding officer, ‘Thou shalt forget!’ The Korean public thought it was really funny.
• I loved being in the film called ‘Carnal Knowledge’ – the one with Jack Nicholson, which was very dark but a really brilliant movie. I loved being in ‘The Ritz.’ ‘The Ritz’ I think is just hilarious. I just saw it again recently and by God, it’s still funny!
• Sometimes people think they know you and they go, ‘Hey!’ and then they realize that they’ve just seen you on the television. That’s kind of funny sometimes.
• I haven’t done Vine in a long time, and when I first started, I just did stuff that I thought was funny.
• I watch vlogs on YouTube. I watch Jenna Marbles a lot – I think she’s really funny – and a lady called Daily Grace.
• I’ve had chronic back pain since I was a preteen – like, 12. I have really funny posture. I developed this funny posture where I hunch my back a little bit when I’m playing, and I overuse my back muscles instead of my abs. My posture has put a lot of strain on my lower back.
• There is something about sex that always brings out the funny in me. I think it’s because we make such fools of ourselves over it.
• I buy so much fake jewelry, it’s funny. It’s not real. I don’t wear real diamonds or anything.
• My job is to bring the tickle. I know what’s funny.
• There was a time where I knew I was as funny as many dudes, but I had people telling me, ‘You have to wear a dress onstage. You need to be more feminine.’
• I just knew that I was funny, and I knew that it was just a matter of time. I didn’t know what was going to actually happen – this is definitely way bigger than I thought – but I knew there was no way I was going to be that funny, and nobody was going to notice it.
• Bill Murray was just so funny to me – there wasn’t anything spooking him.
• I think it’s so funny because straight people just don’t think about gender in their songs, or making a statement by talking about love.
• I had it just Lil Nas at first because every rapper has a ‘lil’ in front of his name, and that’s funny to me. But then I got stuck with it because I already built a fan base at that point.
• I just liked making funny videos, content that people would enjoy. The likes and retweets – that was, like, a plus.
• When I first started, I wasn’t trying to go viral. I just liked making funny videos, content that people would enjoy.
• I get a kick out of people saying I was funny.
• Being a black woman, there’s so many different sides of us. We are funny, silly, romantic, professional, smart, and we have good jobs.
• I would love to do something like ‘Beverly Hills Cop’. I’d get to be funny and cool and heroic all in the same breath.
• To a straight man, the notion of walking around as a coiffed, waxed, nail-polish-wearing, lispy dude is uproariously absurd. As people, we find absurdities funny. That’s our first step in making sense of them.
• I definitely spent a lot of high school isolating myself because I didn’t feel like I fit in. I learned how to be funny.
• It’s funny ‘cos I think a lot about kids who grow up with their parents being really important members of their fields, and they just go the opposite way.
• ‘Smart Funny & Black’ came about because I felt that black comedians were being considered as only capable of a certain type of comedy – sort of physical, kind of silly – and I felt like we are not a monolith, and our comedy isn’t, either.
• In music, you ain’t really got to be able to sing. In comedy, you may be cute, you may be able to add a little extra to your routine, but if you’re not funny, no one’s really rocking with you – and if you’re a black woman, you better be hilarious. As usual, we always have to do the most.
• To act like everyone has had the same access to share their funny is willful ignorance at its best – and just a good ol’ fashioned front at its truth.
• When I speak of diversity, I don’t mean replacement of white comics. I don’t mean acceptance by white comics. We comics who weren’t born into the white guy paradigm of ‘funny’ don’t need a handout. We don’t need a PC push. We don’t need ‘a look.’
• I’m constantly fighting the angry black woman stigma, the ‘You’re pretty, you can’t be funny’ stigma.
• I say funny stuff in my songs sometimes, but it’s still all in the seriousness of the music and the craft.
• ‘Smart, Funny and Black’ is about celebrating, critiquing and learning about black culture, black history, and the black experience.
• ‘Smart Funny and Black’ is basically a live black pop culture game show that I created. We have a live band. We have two contestants that we call ‘blacksperts.’ They come on stage and compete in games that I’ve created that test their knowledge of black culture, black history, and the black experience.
• If I couldn’t get to where I wanted to by being my organic self – which is a smart, funny, unapologetically black woman – then I felt like it’s not worth doing it if I can’t do it the most organic way possible. Which is why I left the music business.
• I’ve always been funny, but I never considered it as a particular career path until my early 30s, when I realized that hip-hop wasn’t going to be the long term.
• There’s so many other talented women of color who write funny things every day, and I want them to be recognized, I want them to have a seat at the table because we’re out here.
• I remember trying to be funny, and both of my parents were terribly funny. My father was also very dignified, but my mother was an absolute ding-a-ling, a ripper.
• In ‘The Sound of Music,’ I was a von Trapp daughter in a white dress with a blue satin sash, and my line was, ‘I’m Brigitta. I’m 12, and all I want is a good time.’ I got a laugh. And I was so delighted, I laughed, too. Sadly, that’s a problem I still have – onstage, I laugh hysterically at how funny I am.
• I say funny stuff in my lyrics to make people laugh, but it’s all in the seriousness of the music. I’m just being witty.
• I made a Twitter account when I was 10 years old. I wasn’t even trying to be funny. I was still tweeting in Indonesian. I didn’t really speak English yet.
• Some guys may play around and say a couple of things, but if I say it, I mean it. I may laugh, it may be funny, but if I say I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you.
• I think that because I struggled and did get very bullied, that definitely made me learn how to be funny and let things roll off and be able to laugh, and I think that has definitely helped me when it comes to being in the public eye with ‘Gay of Thrones’ and ‘Queer Eye.’
• When I was coming out of depression, I made one random video. It wasn’t funny or anything, but just the idea that people I didn’t know were watching it made me feel less alone than I’d felt in a long time.
• The funny thing is, I’m so used to not caring what anyone says, good or bad, that unfortunately even when people say good things… I wish it made me feel good, but it doesn’t.
• It’s a funny thing. I’ll be in my home town of Columbus at a restaurant or something, and the waiter maybe asks, ‘What do you do?’ and I say, ‘Oh, I’m in a band… Twenty One Pilots,’ and he’ll say, ‘Cool, I’ll check it out. I never heard of them.’ And then I say, ‘In September we’re playing the Schottenstein Center,’ and it’s like, ‘What?!’
• You can hate me for being a woman, you can hate me for being smart, you can hate me for being funny, but you hate me because I am doing something you could never do. End of story.
• I grew up in a bit of a vacuum. And as a kid, you see ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a cartoon.’ There’s mixed media. It’s funny, and there’s stop-motion. But as an adult, you figure it out, how the entire underpinnings of their comedy was poking fun at the rank and file of the British aristocracy and the monarchy.
• Something that I’ve always been really keen on representing is some honesty with the way that we view ourselves. That’s something I’ve always appreciated watching actors that I’ve looked up to, is when they look like you and me, or they have a funny elbow, or they have, you know, a hairy face.
• I used to be the class clown. I was the funny kid. That’s why it was so hard for people to understand that I rap, because for a long time, they didn’t take me seriously for who I was. By, like, eighth grade, I was really rapping.
• It’s so funny because all those years I was working, I basically always felt that whatever job I was doing would probably be the last one I would get. I really never thought that I stacked up with the other girls.
• My family is funny. I think you’re born with the gene.
• I was always rewarded for being funny. I liked being funny.
• A lot of comedians are really funny onstage, but they can’t do a podcast.
• I liked Lady Gaga’s meat dress. It was funny.
• I know how to make adults laugh pretty well. I don’t know if kids think I’m that funny.
• It’s just so funny that when I was growing up, I was very much of an Australian. I just thought it was funny that there was this war, like, ‘No, she’s ours, she’s practically a Miss Australia.’ But I am a Miss Philippines.
• I’m 42 and the age of a guy who has kids, so I guess I’m playing right where I’m supposed to be. I’m comfortable with that, but in the same breath I’d do something edgy. If someone came to me and offered me an edgy and funny story, then I’d do it.
• Every now and then, when I think about it, I think, ‘What would I even talk about onstage?’ It’s never been, ‘I wonder if I’m funny. I wonder if I can come up with jokes.’ It’s more, ‘What would it be like without the leather suit and the anger?’
• I had a band before I did standup – I’ve always done music. I got known for being funny, and that’s how I make a living – and from acting – but I never stopped playing and producing and recording music.
• I believe in choosing your words very carefully. It’s funny: I’ll get comments like, ‘Oh I love you. You don’t care; you have no filter.’ On the contrary, I absolutely have a filter, because I understand decorum, and my objective is not to upset people.
• There’s nothing I dislike more than being in a photo shoot where they say, ‘Be yourself.’ That’s not why I became an actress. That’s what I find so funny: that you become an actor, and all of a sudden, everyone wants to know about you. But I didn’t become an actor so I could show you me.
• Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you’re just unable to focus.
• There is a saying that if you get something for free, you should know that you’re the product. It was never more true than in the case of Facebook and Gmail and YouTube. You get free social-media services, and you get free funny cat videos. In exchange, you give up the most valuable asset you have, which is your personal data.
• Scenes change all the time. Scenes will change while you’re shooting them, and you just have to roll with it ’cause that’s what makes it funny. It’s not being stuck in your character and how you’re gonna do something, but to react to other people and to really have a real-life conversation.
• My career only took off because of one football game. I thought it was funny. ‘Playboy’ called and offered me a cover just like that. I turned them down initially, because I was nervous about it and my boyfriend at the time didn’t want me to do it, but they kept coming back, so I eventually said yes.
• I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600’s. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican.
• I was so inspired by Beverly Cleary’s funny and wonderful books.
• It makes me mad to hear these popular orchestras make a jammed-up comedy of a song like ‘Wreck on the Highway.’ It ain’t a funny song.
• With rap, it’s a funny thing. You can say things, and people can take ’em the way they wanna take ’em.
• I am the ultimate California girl, which is funny, being that I’m Canadian.
• I’d love to become like Bill Murray, who was so funny on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and has gone on to do some of the landmark comedies people like. And then to add this whole other phase to his career with ‘Lost in Translation’ and ‘Rushmore.’ I always felt to be able to have something similar to that would be great.
• There are a lot of really funny guys who are very natural in what they do: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen.
• There’s always going to be someone as funny as you or funnier.
• It’s so funny, you go to acting school thinking you’re going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it’s in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person’s circumstances and another person’s experience.
• I don’t like forcing comedy and people just trying to do things just to find a funny beat all the time.
• I know the nature of comedy, and you never know what will happen with the next movie or whether people will find it funny.
• I think anyone who has, you know, is in any sort of artistic pursuit, kind of goes up and down with the way they feel about their work. And I, for the most part, am pretty happy person. But, yeah. I go through definite periods of time where I’m not funny. I’m not good. I’m – I don’t feel original.
• For people who have done comedy after a certain point in time, I think there’s a base level of, ‘O.K., I think I’m decently funny.’ But unless you just have some massive ego, I really think you’re still fighting against that.
• When a dramatic actor does a funny film, people are like, ‘Wonderful! I didn’t know he was funny!’ But when it flips, people can get really thrown by it.
• My kind of wanting to be funny didn’t come from need, necessarily. The closest I can analyze it is that it was an easy way to make friends, I found out. It was just a great kind of social tool.
• Do you know who I would love to play? Morticia Addams – then I could use all that darkness to be funny.
• Joy Behar… Is never even funny accidentally.
• Folks, it’s okay to find flamboyant homosexuality funny.
• I always find it actually funny that the analysis is that the characters I play in comedies are the manchild, the adolescent, characters that refuse to grow up. And yet, if you look back in the history of comedy all the way back to the Marx brothers, that’s a big part of comedy.
• The funny guy doesn’t get the girl until later in life. High school, college, everyone still wants the brooding, dangerous guy you shouldn’t have.
• It’s funny, because there are so many stereotypes out there about actors and movie stars in general, but I’ve had a great opportunity to meet a lot of them, and maybe it’s just because they don’t behave that way around me, but I rarely see that kind of abuse of power.
• Its funny, because for females in general – not just in music, but the corporate ladder as well – anything we do has always been harder for us. When it comes to music, the industry wants you to conform, to look like this and to sound like this and do this or that. It makes it harder. It’s harder for us to come out and be bosses and lead the pack.
• I didn’t understand key signatures or anything, you know. I’d say silly things at the top of a trumpet part like, ‘Note, when you play B naturals, make the B naturals a half step lower because they sound funny if they’re B naturals.’ And some guy said: ‘Idiot, just put a flat on the third line and it’s a key signature, you know?’
• All you have in comedy, in general, is just going with your instincts. You can only hope that other people think that what you think is funny is funny. I don’t have an answer but I just try to plough straight ahead.
• I wasn’t very funny or flashy, I was kind of boring.
• It’s true; I have a skill and it’s… it has not related to acting, it’s not related to auditions, it’s not related to studios, not related to public whim. It’s whether I’m funny or not and whether I can entertain people.
• I’m sure all actors have trouble. The guy who always plays the funny guy, he wants to be taken seriously. And there’s the action guy who wants to do serious stuff. Everyone’s grass is greener.
• I remember watching Margaret Cho with my grandmother on TV. She was my hero, not only because she was funny, but because she showed me that it’s okay to be yourself, that it’s okay to be a brash yellow girl and to be a strong and brave woman.
• I like to rap about things that are funny but mostly things that are relatable. I remember there was this one song with Ja Rule, and I forgot, exactly, but it was with Ashanti, and there’s a line in it that was like, ‘She hit me up on AIM.’ But that wasn’t the actual line; it was something else, but I was like, ‘Oh my God, he uses AIM!’
• I can’t tell if I want to be a rapper who’s funny because I kind of enjoy just doing really stupid songs about nothing. But I want to have a career that’s long-lasting, and I don’t think people want to listen to a straight-up comedy rapper all the time.
• I got my sense of humor from my grandmother. You know, my grandmother was very funny.
• I hate to say it but I hate black humor. I feel like a Klan member saying it, but it’s just not funny.
• No, it’s funny, when I eat out it’s not typically in the kind of restaurants people might imagine.
• I used to love being the class clown. I loved to make jokes and make people laugh. There was a set of students who would find it funny. But the cool students were like, ‘Eeew!’
• I’ll stick to finding the funny in the ordinary because my life is pretty ordinary and so are the lives of my friends – and my friends are hilarious.
• I think when someone who’s known for doing drama does a comedy but just tries to be funny, that’s a mistake.
• You never saw Peter Sellers the actor trying to make you laugh. All he was doing was the character. What I’m saying is that I don’t think you should know you’re in a movie. I don’t like it when actors are winking at the audience and saying, ‘Right, isn’t this funny? Are you with me?’
• My wife is way funnier than I am. As much as I don’t really feel I share a sense of humour with my family, I definitely share one with her – we find the same things funny.
• I don’t think of myself as funny – I don’t fill up a room with my humor… I would fail miserably as a stand-up comedian.
• Robin Williams learned technique. He has the technique of being funny.
• Cheech and I used to call ourselves musicians; we never called ourselves comedians. We were musicians that were funny.
• I’ve always enjoyed watching characters that aren’t aware that they’re doing anything funny. And I think that inherently makes them funnier.
• I had a friend who, after 25 years of marriage, found himself trying to date again, and it was completely different. Everything had changed, and he had to reacquaint himself. It was funny even talking to him about it. For someone who has been out of the loop, it’s a different world.
• You know, what’s funny to one person is not at all to someone else.
• I think anyone loves to play a character that is either evil to a certain extent or has a real definable character flaw. Those are always really fun, and, I think, funny.
• It’s funny that until I actually met my husband, I never thought I’d get married.
• Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.
• What I like about the jokes, to me it’s a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won’t be funny.
• There is nothing funny about a well-adjusted, intelligent person making the right choices.
• I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang, Tod Browning, and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don’t care about the genre.
• I can do comedy, so people want me to do that, but the other side of comedy is depression. Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don’t realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.
• What’s funny is my husband doesn’t have any tattoos at all, so he must be the very conservative one.
• My job is mostly to entertain and be funny.
• Funny, I don’t feel any more powerful today than yesterday.
• Most of my ideas just come out funny.
• And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that’s funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there’s all kinds of advantages to it.
• It is funny what a year can do.
• It’s funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It’s not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.
• Stealing, you’ll go far in life. Actually, there is something funny about getting away with it.
• Movies don’t look hard, but figuring it out, getting the shape of it, getting everybody’s character right and having it be funny, make sense and be romantic, it’s creating a puzzle. Yes, having been a writer for so long, I have an awareness of when things are going awry, but it doesn’t mean I know how to fix them.
• I got to play with Nintendo’s Wii, yes it’s a funny name and not very revolutionary but it was fun whipping your arms around.
• Jon Stewart hires people that he thinks are funny. That’s it. That’s the only requirement.
• It is possible in this world to be pretty and funny and successful all at the same time.
• I think it’s always funny when somebody thinks you’re going to do something super sexy and then you don’t.
• Sometimes in the most tragic situation, something just profoundly funny happens.
• Inappropriateness is funny to me. Rudeness is hilarious.
• There’s a constant flow of child actors. It’s kind of funny to watch the new crew come through. I think, You poor little things. You’re going to have to struggle for a long time.
• It’s funny, growing up there was never anybody around me with any kind of artistic bent.
• When I was in college, I was in the theater department, which for anyone who has been involved in any kind of theater program, you know that it’s really wacky and tight-knit, a real family. Me and my good friends from college would do random shows and plays that were sometimes serious, but most of the time really goofy and funny.
• With Portlandia, I don’t think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We’re okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.
• Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He’s got 30 years on stage… there’s no telling him what’s funny.
• I’m not a believer in the pratfall. I don’t think it’s funny just to have someone fall down.
• They did that little thing on South Park, and they mentioned my name and had a character of me judging a Halloween contest. It was really funny.That made me the coolest aunt on earth.
• I’m always in situations where you can’t be funny, and yet I want to do it anyway.
• Funny, how moms can tell you what to do no matter how old or big you are.
• I feel funny about owning art. I don’t really want to say: ‘Wow, come and see my Monet – it’s in a dark room at the bottom of my cellar.’
• I love Mikhail Bulgakov. He is very original and takes the story to unexpected places. I didn’t realise political writing could be so funny.
• And there’s a visceral fun in watching Team America and making it, like taking a puppet and throwing it against the wall. Because it’s not CG, there’s something funny about it.
• So often, I read scripts and am like, ‘This would never happen in real life. It’s not trying to be funny. It’s trying to be serious.’
• Acting is all about big hair and funny props… All the great actors knew it. Olivier knew it, Brando knew it.
• I remember listening to the radio as a kid and finding that the songs always made me feel more peaceful. Funny, but the more hurtin’ the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin’ the blues myself, but I’m writing them for other people who have a hard life.
• What was funny if you were there is that we were all immensely sophisticated people who knew exactly what she was going to say and we’re chatting away, nice to see you.
• It’s funny that it all becomes about clothes. It’s bizarre. You work your butt off and then you win an award and it’s all about your dress. You can’t get away from it.
• I think it’s so funny when people think they can’t control a movie star. They can. We’re just women, you know.
• I always approach comedy roles pretending they aren’t funny.
• I’m so unprofessional on set it’s not even funny.
• I was not particularly bright, I wasn’t very athletic, I was a little too tall, odd, funny looking, I was just really weird as a kid.
• I would love to play ‘Funny Girl’ or ‘Evita,’ but I idolize the women who have played those parts. I don’t know if there needs to be another version of those shows.
• I understand a woman who validates herself by getting attention from the opposite sex. I have a friend who is that to a T… Doesn’t mean she isn’t a good person. That’s a funny character to play.
• I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I’m sure I’d love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music.
• I don’t think of myself as a comedian, but as an artist, a scientist and chemist who just happens to be funny. I started doing stand-up to add another level to my game. I feel that I’m a young rookie with a veteran’s skill.
• I feel cheesy when I see ‘Silver Spoons.’ Some of it was funny, but some of it was just cheese! My kids love it, but I look at it and cringe.
• I’ve got to get on myself to be sharp, funny and loose.
• Sometimes I am so dry that people don’t know I’m kidding and think I’m being serious. I enjoy this because their reactions are often funny.
• At school I was very shy. I wasn’t funny really.
• If you could cross a lion and a monkey, that’s what I’d be, because monkeys are funny and lions are strong.
• I’m good at coming up with wacky characters and funny dialogue.
• Comedy clubs can be brutal. Those people are for real, and if you aren’t funny, they aren’t laughing. They don’t care who you are.
• Gotta stay in the gym, stay funny, stay sharp. I just love working.
• I think it’s actually a misperception that I am a comedic actress. I do more drama than comedy but very little of it has been seen. When you are in big funny movies and they do well and your little part in it kind of explodes people perceive you as a comedian.
• It’s funny, but when I arrived in California to start college I was much more interested in becoming a surfer and cruise along in life from one beach to the next. I didn’t plan out any huge career for myself.
• I was going through a little bit of turbulence in my career. And so, it’s funny how turbulence itself will make you hold onto something for security. And so the only thing I knew is trust in the Lord and lean not unto your own heart, in all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy path.
• I actually feel like, for a lot of my career, I wasn’t able to show my comedic range. I did a lot of dramas and dramedies. I was on ‘E.R.’ That’s not generally thought of as a funny show.
• I have an older sister named Haley and she wanted to be an actress. So I wanted to be an actress. It’s really funny the way that some people don’t give kids enough credit for like really being driven, and really wanting to do things so badly.
• If I’m in something funny, I like to try and find some kind of serious line in it that people can relate to.
• That’s a funny thing, fame. People definitely do treat you differently. When you begin to be successful, people say, ‘Don’t go changing.’ Well, that’s easy to say, but the fact is, you don’t change at all – other people do.
• I tell girls all the time that the men that have fallen in love with me, have all fallen during a man repeller stage… funny how life works out like that.
• I really love ‘Soapdish.’ I wish ‘Soapdish’ had more of a moment because I felt that that is a really strong, funny movie. Kevin Kline is hilarious in that movie.
• To this day, I’ve found that it doesn’t matter what a guy looks like if he’s really funny. His sense of humor makes him attractive. On the other hand, you don’t hear men saying, ‘No she’s not pretty, but is she ever funny!’
• Everything seems fine until you’re about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, ‘While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it’s a funny thing, but I’m an exception to that rule.’
• Mmmm… the comedy that matters is the comedy you pull out of thin air. It’s a bit like when something funny has happened and you try to explain it to someone else and end up saying, ‘You had to be there.’
• It’s funny, because I’m a man of strong opinions and when I make one, I stand by it even if it starts to appear incorrect to me after a while.
• Well in the book Carrie was my alter ego. In real life, Sarah Jessica and I don’t look anything alike. But people do say that we sound alike. Sarah Jessica is an adorable girl and she is very funny.
• I’m not a very serious person. You know how they say that clowns are very funny in public and are really sad at home? I’m really kind of stupid at home and more serious in public.
• It’s funny, because I did all of these interviews as soon as I had the baby, and they were asking questions, and I really didn’t have an idea of anything, because I was so blurry.
• It’s sad and upsetting when you see somebody crying hysterically, but at the same time it’s real funny.
• Back in the ’70s, like one of my favorite movies ever was ‘The Bad News Bears’, and that was a kids’ movie, but I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as just a great movie because Walter Matthau was so funny and so harsh with those kids.
• I just couldn’t go back to Suddenly Susan after David Strickland’s suicide. I didn’t see how we could make the show light and funny any more.
• One can always come up with funny lists and jokes. You know what? I take it back. Not everyone can always come up with funny lists and some jokes. I’m very lucky to have a gift where I can do that pretty ably.
• People forget how outcast ‘They Might Be Giants’ can be. They have a reputation for writing really deft, funny, clever melodies, and they also make a lot of music for kids, which is terrific, but when you see them in concert, they can rock the house.
• It’s funny, because I sometimes feel that I’m most creative when I’m pregnant.
• Johnny Rotten. He’s a big fan of mine. I used to see him out in the audience in England and he’d stand up and holler. He’s funny. Smart too, and a nice guy. Don’t think he’s a jerk because he isn’t.
• If people want to compete for leadership of a religious group, they can compete in piety. A chilling thought. Or funny.
• Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.
• I think I have a dark view of the world. I have to make everything funny, otherwise it all seems so sad.
• The token gay character is always so funny and so fantastic. That’s happened a lot. Or they’re often purely victims.
• You can’t be funny if you don’t have good material.
• I have funny bones. If there’s ever any kind of tension, I’ll always be the one to try and be funny to loosen things up.
• Being funny with a funny voice is more my comfort zone, a broader character that I try to humanize, a kind of silly or wacky persona that I try to fill in.
• You can’t be funny for funny’s sake. You try to get as outrageous situation as you can but it always has to be believable and based in real character motivations and what people would really do.
• But, sooner or later I’d love to do a comedy. I mean I think that, you know, people don’t think that that’s in my wheelhouse because I’ve sort of played a lot of dramatic stuff and that’s certainly a side of myself that I want at some point in the right context, in the right stuff, that I find really funny.
• I love nerds. Comic-Con junkies are the tastemakers of tomorrow. Isn’t that funny? The tables have turned.
• I think the Cold War works as a great analogy or simile for different kinds of conflict. It’s funny, when you look back at it, it’s one of the last times that the boundaries were clear. Now, as we see on ‘Homeland,’ there are no clear boundaries and enemies.
• I always just wanted to be funny. I never really planned to be scary.
• I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.
• I like all Jim Carrey films. They’re really funny.
• Yes, I believe blue material is funny, but if that’s all you’ve got, you’re dead in the water. It’s not good.
• The most important thing is to write material that YOU think is funny. If you don’t think it’s funny, but you’re convinced that other people will think it is, well they won’t.
• When it comes to war, we focus more on the mainstream coverage of the event, rather than the event itself. People dying is never funny. Protest puppets are always funny.
• We want to be funny. We want to make people laugh… We’ll do whatever it takes.
• It’s funny that I got to do ‘On the Road’ because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree.
• It’s funny – I read that women look to chiseled-faced guys for one-night stands, and to round-faced guys for marriage. When I’m rounder in the face, I like to say, ‘This is my long-term look.’ Or ‘This is my wife-and-kids look right here.’
• This is the great thing about Northern Ireland. I walk down the street and people stop me and say things like, ‘I know you. You’re that wee golfer, aren’t you?’ I say, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ They say, ‘Keep it up, wee man.’ It’s very funny and that’s why I want to stay here as long as possible.
• I think if actors don’t think of themselves as funny in real life they think they can’t do comedy.
• I joke around a lot about the manic times because they’re funny. We manics do outrageous things and it is part of our colorful nature.
• I think sometimes my humor is extremely dry, and a lot of times I would say things that I thought were very funny but… I have a reputation of – people think of me as a very fundamentalist, humorless fellow.
• I don’t dismiss the music that I was involved with, I don’t think it was a joke, I don’t think it was funny or a phase, I don’t think it was just something I was doing back then, to me it was who I am. It connects all the way through. I don’t distance myself from any of it.
• Even as a kid I was never the generator of humor, but I always knew who was funny, who to hang out with.
• In Italy, I had an Afro, and a lot of the kids came up and felt my hair. It really was funny. I wish I had understood Italian.
• Life is funny and it is interesting how we make it as serious as possible.
• I think there’s something in the fact that it’s hard to be good looking and funny. You have to have an oddball quality people have to sympathise with you to find you funny.
• One of the things I like about acting is that, in a funny way, I come back to myself.
• For a Catholic kid in parochial school, the only way to survive the beatings – by classmates, not the nuns – was to be the funny guy.
• It’s sort of an action flick. You can’t be that funny trying to steal diamonds.
• I do find comedy difficult. I don’t know why. Maybe I think about it too much. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure to be funny.
• I’m one of those hovering mothers and I know it’s really important to have an independent child, so I’m trying to back off, but it’s hard. I love him so much, and he’s so funny and cute to me.
• I actually was class clown, but I don’t know how that happened because I’ve never been considered an outwardly funny person.
• Comedy is surprises, so if you’re intending to make somebody laugh and they don’t laugh, that’s funny.
• Scream was great for what it was. For a horror film, it was intelligent, it was funny, it took a laugh at itself.
• I actually was class clown, but I don’t know how that happened because I’ve never been considered an outwardly funny person-as the people in this room will attest.
• And the funny thing is, I’ve always been an optimist – it’s practically a congenital disorder with me.
• It’s funny how intimate it feels to get a text.
• I knew exactly what to do on Alien, it was funny.
• I come more to Scotland than I ever used to, so I feel more connected to it, more part of the zeitgeist. You know when you realize you have a choice and I’m choosing my homeland. It’s funny: when you get older these things creep up to you.
• It’s funny, because when you’re younger you’re in a rush to be 18 or 21 or whatever. But then you hit 30. And now, the days go by like hours. You think, 40, man, this could be the halfway point. It could be the three-quarters point, you know? Who knows?
• I had a very funny family.
• I think I would say ‘The King’s Speech’ is surprisingly funny, in fact the audiences in London, Toronto, LA, New York commented there’s more laughter in this film than in most comedies, while it is also a moving tear-jerker with an uplifting ending.
• The funny thing is that I write and I act a lot about being Jewish, but I don’t really think about it as a regular person.
• It’s funny, when people talk about the 70s I can tell you the year of every album but when it comes to the later efforts I can’t remember the exact years, it’s funny isn’t it?
• I’ve always found it easier to be funny than to be serious.
• I’ve dated some women who have turned me on to some funny things that are strange for men to actually do, but these things have become part of my process. I think the things I do for my appearance help make me look better. I even colour my hair because I like how it makes me look.
• I’m terrible at practical jokes. I do them too well, so they’re not funny. I end up saying, ‘Oh, no, I’m joking, I’m joking.’
• Everybody’s funny if you love them.
• People don’t realize that I’m really funny and I’m an excellent bridge player.
• People say funny things all the time during really serious moments in life.
• It’s funny how I use social media because I don’t use it to promote my restaurants that much. I use it for social issues and I think that’s what it’s for. I do a few things – I mess around with music a lot because that’s a passion of mine. If something strikes me and I want to share it, I do.
• He is very dry but also very funny… I think people tend to feel odd when I do my act. Unless you are an ironic person, it’s not a good place for you to be.
• You know, the funny thing about Lorne and that show is that, you can go over one million things, but in a business of bean counters, he still likes to laugh at small things and creates a show around it.
• Marie Antoinette was funny, I’m sure she was just misinterpreted. You know the ‘Let them eat cake’ line. She seems like she was kind of funny, like a Chelsea Handler or Kathy Griffin type.
• You know how it is with writing. You just write what you want to write. There’s no way to predict what is good or bad. You just do what you think is funny, and either it works or you’re finished. It’s impossible to predict anything.
• Who knew Rob Lowe was funny? On ‘Parks and Rec,’ we’ve got some of the funniest comedy writers, some of the funniest comedians in the world working there. And if anything, we don’t just effuse to one another and be like, ‘Oh, Rob Lowe’s really funny,’ if he wasn’t.
• The American audience has really opened up to women being A.) funny and B.) kinda crude. ‘Bridesmaids’ is R-rated, and I think it was a major coup for women to have an R-rated comedy that did really well. Same as ‘Bad Teacher.’
• It’s interesting – I always thought when I was doing more melodramatic stuff like ‘Everwood’ that the directors were constantly reeling me in and stopping me from being funny.
• The key is just to ignore the pain, because physical comedy only works if you see someone get hurt and they aren’t actually hurt. If someone gets hit in the face with a bat, falls down, and gets back up, it’s funny. If they stay down and their jaw is wired shut in the next scene, it’s really tragic and weird. You have to pretend it doesn’t hurt.
• I love Charlie, Billy Burke’s character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he’s so funny and wry and every scene he’s in he just takes. There’s a scene in ‘Eclipse’ where Bella tells him she’s a virgin, and it’s the funniest, most awkward scene I’ve ever seen on film.
• Some people say funny things, but I say things funny.
• Most of the gaffes I’ve made have not been funny – they’ve been stupid.
• It’s a required part of your film history to know who Woody is. His movies are so wonderful, and not just funny but so insightful about human behavior.
• We are supposed to enjoy the good stuff now, while we can, with the people we love. Life has a funny way of teaching us that lesson over and over again.
• I also think if you’re an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you’re just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and you can just say one funny line that’s not in the commercial they think you’re a genius.
• Animals are sentient, intelligent, perceptive, funny and entertaining. We owe them a duty of care as we do to children.
• Strange questions are the more interesting ones. Children by and large don’t try to trip you up… they want to find out how you do this funny thing that you do… if they’ve loved a story they love to know how it started.
• It’s so funny, because right now I’m very tired and my brains a little dead, I tend to get very focused and serious. So, I’m probably coming off a lot more like Scully right now.
• I tend to play characters that I can infuse with certain kinds of humour. Even the baddest guy can be funny in his own particular way. I want the audience to engage with the character on some deeper level so that they leave the cinema still thinking about him.
• I have no idea what I’m going to say when I stand up to give a toast. But I do know that anything I say I find funny.
• We all know funny people who can’t get it down on the page – even funny writers who can’t get it down on the page.
• If it’s inappropriate to write about, if there’s nothing funny about it, then it’s not funny.
• It’s funny how a chubby kid can just be having fun, and people call it entertainment!
• Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it’s not jokes that are funny, it’s characters that are funny. And isn’t that true! That’s why I always kill jokes. I’m terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can’t get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon.
• I would call it a comedy variety show. We have some people just doing straight standup. We usually try to have one musical act of sort. So its just people being funny in different ways, not just sketch, not just standup, not just characters, all of those things.
• I really don’t know what makes a comedian. I think it’s a family background and environment. Yet if you put the same ingredients in another person, he may never utter a funny line.
• You can go to a play that is enjoyable because it’s funny, and then on the next night you can go to a play that’s enjoyable because it’s ‘disturbing.’
• I don’t happen to have a sense of humor personally, so I don’t know what’s funny about a character… This happens to be a feature of my life generally.
• I was making my living from a joke about my appearance that I didn’t understand, and in a way still don’t, because when I look in a mirror it doesn’t seem funny to me.
• For some reason, people find me funny. It’s quite hard to define why a thought is funny. It’s even harder to define why a person would be funny. It’s a word that I can’t define at all. But whether I know quite what it is or not, I seem to be it.
• Funny is funny is funny.
• My little dog, he did not get ill. It is so funny that people get ill on a boat and dogs do not.
• It’s a funny relationship that makeup artists have. I always feel kind of like a dentist. People look at me and think of pain.
• Everybody’s funny in different ways.
• You can’t make everybody laugh. You gotta just do what you think is funny. Just be obstreperous to everybody.
• I’ve been to many funerals of funny people, and they’re some of the funniest days you’ll ever have, because the emotions run high.
• I think a lot of times on TV we see caricatures – that’s what’s funny.
• It’s funny how most activists are pacifists.
• So what I do now is to pre-empt that by making the up into a virtue, and telling funny stories about how crap I am before people have a chance to notice it for themselves and think maybe I haven’t realised.
• If you think something’s funny, go with that. Most comedians pull jokes from a place of honesty.
• The things that make me angry still make me angry. George Carlin is 67, and he’s still as funny as he’s ever been, and he’s still angry. And that makes me feel good, because I feel like if I stick around long enough, I’ll still be able to work.
• The fact that the Kardashians could be more popular than a show like ‘Mad Men’ is disgusting. It’s a super disgusting part of our culture, but I still find it funny to make a joke about it.
• ‘Funny People’ is my favorite performance of myself to date. Even though it’s a comedy and there are serious moments, I really felt like Leo felt like a real person. It didn’t feel like I was playing myself. Whether it’s a comedy or drama, I just try to make it as realistic as possible.
• I don’t want to be the one to break it to you, but the future ain’t that funny.
• Twitter, to me, works if you’re funny. Twitter doesn’t work as a promotional tool unless you do it very, very, very occasionally.
• I think when you do comedy, you play by a different set of rules. No one really wants you to be in that good shape. Being in good shape implies a level of vanity that isn’t necessarily funny.
• I can’t watch other people doing comedy. As soon as somebody starts being funny I have to turn off because it upsets me. I get comedy indigestion. I just hate anybody else being funny. That’s my job.
• As a five-year-old in Berlin in 1965, I didn’t know that funny women existed. It wasn’t until I got back to England that I realised women could be funny.
• We live in a funny time. If you don’t go corporate, you can’t compete. You’re relegated as irrelevant. People used to admire that.
• You can’t teach somebody how to be funny. You’re either funny, or you ain’t.
• I don’t know who the hell Paul Lynde is, or why he’s funny, and I prefer it to be a mystery to me.
• As soon as I realized you could be funny as a job, that was the job I wanted.
• To me, what separates a funny movie from a good movie is something personal.
• Leno, Conan. They are both really funny. They really know how to land one.
• Straight men just can’t imagine the bliss of being in a relationship with someone who finds farting as funny as they do.
• I think ‘Saturday Night Live’, starting in the 1970s, really gave women an outlet to be funny. A lot of those women went on to have film careers, from Kristen Wiig now to Tina Fey and Gilda Radner.
• I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It’s not very funny, but it’s sincere. My commitment is to sincerity.
• When I was doing ensemble theater and comedy work, I felt I had some talents. But when I started doing my shows in Berkeley and found that I could be funny on my own, I was shocked.
• Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
• There’s always something funny about men chasing women.
• Also, in a funny way, if you have been happily married there are no unresolved areas, nothing to prove to yourself after the other dies.
• People often ask me how I make things funny. I don’t make things funny.
• If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what’s funny in the joke.
• For some reason and I don’t know why, but I don’t think that I’m funny in California. So I always want to do my movies east somewhere.
• I took ‘P.S. I Love You’ thinking it was going to be a little funny, and I ended up crying every day on that film.
• I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
• It’s funny, though, with films, because you can incorporate a variety of elements, and sometimes that can work for you and sometimes I think it can work against you.
• Comedians don’t laugh. They’re too busy analyzing why it’s funny or not.
• What was really funny is that as I got older all those guys who called me a sissy in junior high school wanted me to be their best friend because they wanted to meet all the girls that I knew in figure skating.
• I can’t not find humor in elements of most parts of life, but at the same time nothing ever seems perpetually funny to me.
• The great thing is that the funny side of getting old is fuel for my comedy.
• I think it’s always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare.
• But with comedy it’s a simple premise. If it’s funny, people laugh. If it’s not, they don’t.
• Hitchcock had a charm about him. He was very funny at times. He was incredibly brilliant in his field of suspense.
• Working with Chaplin was very amusing and strange. His films are so funny, but working with him, I found him to be a very serious man. Whereas the films of Hitchcock are macabre, he could be a very funny man to work with, always telling jokes and holding court. Of course, when I worked with Charlie he was getting older.
• It’s really funny because the same people who loved me as Stringer Bell were the same people that were watching ‘Daddy’s Little Girls’ literally in tears.
• I had seen movies before that that had made me laugh, but I had never seen anything even remotely close to as funny as Richard Pryor was, just standing there talking.
• I wouldn’t totally rule out doing Letterman or the Tonight Show if I had a set that I just happened to write that I thought was funny but was still appropriate for network censors. But I’m not going to go out of my way.
• The audience changes every night. You’re the same person. You have to speak your mind and do the stuff that you think is funny and makes you laugh.
• The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don’t know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time.
• Everyone comes up to me saying, ‘Cooee, Julie! Hello!’ as if I know them. Of course I don’t bloody know them. Am I flummoxed by it? Sometimes. I think, ‘Ooh, love, go easy.’ For a time, I did feel this pressure that I had to be funny, but it passes.
• Oh all the time when Victoria Wood and I did our series. There were people asking ‘Can women be funny?’ People still ask that. It’s like asking: ‘Can women breathe in and out?’
• I was the little, funny one. I felt I was the child among grown women.
• It’s a real primal thing, watching someone get hurt. It’s funny and accessible.
• It’s a funny thing – when I’m crazed with work, spending time with my children relaxes me. Yet, at the end of a long weekend with them, the very thing I need to relax is a little work and time away from them!
• It’s interesting that whenever I meet some of the other Bond girls, I always have something in common, and it is an interesting sorority. We all share about our Bonds. ‘Did your Bond do that?’ ‘Yes mine did!’ So it is quite funny conversations. We may as well be in high school.
• I don’t believe that anybody has come to a conclusion on why something is funny. It’s funny because it’s ridiculous and it’s ridiculous for different reasons at different times.
• There are so many funny women in the world, and there has been for so many years, so I’ll be happy when people can just move on from that, and things can just be ‘comedies’ and not ‘female’ or ‘male,’ and everyone gets an equal opportunity.
• I would like to do something modern and possibly funny.
• I’ve always enjoyed making people laugh. But in order for me to be funny, I have to get ticked off about something.
• See, I don’t really go after girls. Most of the girlfriends I’ve had have come after me. So it’s really funny when girls get offended because I don’t hit on them.
• My main point is to be funny if I can slip a message in there, fine.
• Things can be funny only when we are in fun. When we’re ‘dead earnest,’ humor is the only thing that is dead.
• Funny is not a color. Being black is only good from the time you get from the curtain to the microphone.
• But if something funny happens, I can’t resist. I have to tell the people.
• What’s so great about working with really funny women is that vanity comes second. Whatever makes it real and funny, they’re going to go for, and it’s just great.
• What I don’t like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there’s no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don’t want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here’s the epiphany scene and then the movie’s over.
• Women’s humor seems to be a little more supportive. It’s just kind of trying to make the other one laugh through funny voices and kind of talking about other people. I respond to that. I feel less like I’m going to get beat up in a room full of women than I do in a room full of guys.
• It’s funny when people say you have sex appeal or call you the next Brad Pitt. I just laugh. I’m not that. I don’t want to be that.
• By no means do I want to be a piece of meat for the rest of my career. It’s funny when you get asked to do a talk show, and then they follow it up with requesting you take your shirt off.
• ‘Funny Games’ was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are, or respond to them as provocation, then that’s quite different. ‘Funny Games’ is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience.
• When I first envisioned ‘Funny Games’ in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
• I have an inability to enjoy things, but that’s why we’re in comedy. If we were happy, we wouldn’t be funny, I guess.
• For years, it’s driven me crazy that women don’t have better roles, especially in comedies. I know so many funny women but I always felt… misogynist streak is too strong a term – but a dismissiveness.
• I love funny people, and when I’m with funny people, or people who are amusing in their weirdness, I love it. Because that to me is funny, as opposed to someone who stops and says, ‘Hey let me tell you a joke.’
• One lion thinks it’s just hilarious to tackle us. He’s very funny about it… and we always know when it will happen.
• I’m not a movie guy, I’m not a TV sitcom guy, but whatever seems to fit and is funny is good for me.
• It’s funny that all these goths paint their faces with such white make-up and that is the actual colour of my skin, I am that pale!
• I think if they put a laugh track on ‘Intervention,’ it would be funny.
• It’s unbearable when someone changes around you. Just imagine that your life partner changes, then it is difficult to cope with. Or your mother. Or your father. They were strong and now they’re like a baby – it’s not so funny.
• Only bad golfers are lucky. They’re the ones bouncing balls off trees, curbs, turtles and cars. Good golfers have bad luck. When you hit the ball straight, a funny bounce is bound to be unlucky.
• Music is more difficult – try naming a political band. The Dead Kennedys. The Dead Kennedys are political, but they are more funny than they are political.
• We sit in a room for months trying to think of funny things.
• I love a smart, well-written show, and ’30 Rock,’ well, you can’t get any better than that. Tina Fey poos funny. There’s nothing that she does that isn’t funny. That show is an example of how brilliant she is. It’s so smart. They’ve done some brilliant commentary about the ‘Housewives’ with ‘Queen of Jordan,’ their show-within-the-show.
• I am accusing him of stealing my best material, he was a very funny man.
• I wish I could be as thin as Jessica Simpson. I think she looks gorgeous! I have had Jessica on my show several times, and I can tell you that girl is genuine and funny with a great self-deprecating sense of humor.
• And at the time, it is funny how you can look at something and say, for example with my shoulder injury, when it first happened I said this is the worst thing that could happen to me. Why me, why now? Now I look back and say it was probably the best thing that happened to me.
• We’ve got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It’s bizarre, and they’re writing some very funny stuff.
• Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons’ subversive story telling, but there’s another message in there, which is a celebration of making wild, funny stories.
• I didn’t plan to be the rude middle-class comedian. You write a certain type of joke that you find funny, and mine happen to be often rude. Yes, it’s juvenile, but that’s me.
• It’s funny recently I’ve started to notice people’s impersonations of me, and it’s basically like a hyperactive child.
• It’s funny I actually made poorer decisions when I sobered up then when I was screwed up.
• My mother was a terrific force in my life. Wartime-generation woman, hadn’t gone to university but should have done. Was very funny, very verbal, very clever, very witty.
• It’s funny, having the same name as someone. Me, Emma Watson and Emma Stone, the amount of times I’ve been called Emma Watson or Emma Stone is so funny. It’s just ’cause we’re all named Emma. None of us look alike.
• But I think Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang really got that thing where, if a movie reads really funny and then has some dramatic or violent or sinister stuff in it, you can’t forget that primarily it has to be even funnier than you read it or that other stuff doesn’t work.
• I’ve never really understood that. It’s a funny thing people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.
• Ninety-eight per cent of laughter is nothing to do with jokes, which do not deserve to bear the weight of all the funny stuff in the world.
• The history of the relationship between comedy and swimming is short indeed. Of course it is always funny when someone falls into water, but that’s about it.
• ‘Married with Children’ was racy. It was sexist. It was a lot of things, but mostly it was funny.
• I was doing sketches that were funny but socially irresponsible. I felt I was deliberately being encouraged and I was overwhelmed.
• Funny is funny.
• Memories are doing funny things to us.
• Europe is scooters. Europe is five young people on one bench sharing a chocolate bar. Their idea of entertainment and fun is so much different than ours, which is exactly why a movie about them would be funny.
• So that’s why one of my rules of parody writing is that it’s gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.
• People never ask people doing serious music, ‘Do you ever think about doing funny music?’
• I want to be in ‘Funny Girl.’ And I want Ryan Murphy to direct it.
• It would be pretty funny to see a Beverly Hills white girl with mad rap skills.
• Being a funny person does an awful lot of things to you. You feel that you mustn’t get serious with people. They don’t expect it from you, and they don’t want to see it. You’re not entitled to be serious, you’re a clown.
• Comedy is not funny. Comedy is hard work and timing and lots and lots of rehearsals.
• That’s why I like to get out there, and get people to see the other side of Mitt, and know us in a different reflection when you see the family and how funny he is with the boys and with the grandkids. And you know, just what a super guy he is. That’s part of what I am doing, is letting people see the other side of Mitt.
• I don’t really have a type of guy I like. It’s just like nice guys, cute boys I mean, ones that are funny.
• I can always get better. A lot of my ex-girlfriends don’t think I’m funny.
• Movies these days have made killers into funny people. What’s that all about? I’ve got kids and family and friends, and I don’t like bad things. I don’t think they’re funny, and it’s irresponsible to make movies that don’t show you how that’s not good.
• I tell you, it’s funny because the only time I think about HIV is when I have to take my medicine twice a day.
• A comedian’s body is funny as well as his mind being funny, his whole personage is funny.
• It’s funny, because I never think of myself as Little Miss All-Together.
• When I was a kid I didn’t feel like I fit in because – this is really silly and I probably shouldn’t say it, but, I didn’t think anything was funny. So I used to go home and literally cry to my mom and my step-dad at the time and I didn’t think anything was funny. I couldn’t laugh.
• You know what? I never really factor Hollywood into anything. I’m a black actor, so I can’t really control what Hollywood thinks. I gotta go do my thing, and my jokes have got to be funny. Whatever I do has got to be great.
• I really wanted to just be a musician. I didn’t want to be anything else, but I was funny and all that.
• For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.
• What turning forty means to me? I need to take my pants off as soon as I get home. I didn’t used to have to do that, but now I do.
• A Harvard Medical School study has determined that rectal thermometers are still the best way to tell a baby’s temperature. Plus, it really teaches the baby who’s boss.
• Confidence is 10% work and 90% delusion.
• Blorft’ is an adjective I just made up that means completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum. I have been Blorft every day for the past seven years.
• In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, ‘Keep your facts, I’m going with the truth.’
• If I had a dime for everytime that I was wrong, I’d be broke.
• The more you know, the sadder you get.
• There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good.
• Contraception leads to more babies being born out of wedlock, like fire extinguishers lead to more fires.
• Here’s an easy way to figure out if you’re in a cult: If you’re wondering whether you’re in a cult, the answer is yes.
• The summer movies are coming out! My advice: just stay home and burn a good book.
• Contrary to what people may say, there’s no upper limit on stupidity.
• Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It’s sort of a blog for people with attention spans.
• Don’t cry over spilled milk. By this time tomorrow, it’ll be free yogurt.
• We’re not kissing. We’re feeding each other like baby birds.
• If you find me, please let me know where the hell I’ve been.
• People in LA are deathly afraid of gluten. I swear to god, you could rob a liquor store in this city with a bagel.
• Bob Ross is very calming. 5 min into this show, it feels like you’ve been fucked to death by a thousand pillows.
• Went to Disneyland because my daughter’s obsessed with Mickey Mouse. She was so excited when I got home and told her.
• Airplane toilets are aggressive. It wasn’t until I got back to my seat that I noticed my pants and testicles were missing.
• Anyone know the number to 911?
• What would you say to your barber? I’m really protective of my penis. Which haircut will make sure it never meets anyone?
• No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.
• Our job is improving the quality of life, not just delaying death.
• You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.
• For a while you get mad, then you get over it.
• Please, don’t worry so much… Because in the end none of us have very long on this earth.
• I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.
• I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy.
• You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.
• The only weapon we have is comedy.
• Ah, yes, divorce… from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man’s genitals through his wallet.
• If women ran the world we wouldn’t have wars, just intense negotiations every 28 days.
• Never pick a fight with an ugly person, they’ve got nothing to lose.
• People who criticize you have usually never achieved anywhere near what you have. Most of them would be too scared to even try. Keep going.
• No one wants to see cool people doing brilliantly. I want to see the struggle. That’s the fun bit.
• Never confuse your right to say what you believe with a right to never be disagreed with and ridiculed for saying what you believe.
• You should bring something into the world that wasn’t in the world before. It doesn’t matter what that is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a table or a film or gardening – everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say, I did thatx9d.
• That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.
• It’s a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It’s the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.
• Enjoy life. Have fun. Be kind. Have worth. Have friends. Be honest. Laugh. Die with dignity. Make the most of it. It’s all we’ve got.
• If you can’t joke about the most horrendous things in the world, what’s the point of jokes? What’s the point in having humor? Humor is to get us over terrible things.
• Beliefs do not change facts. Facts, if one is rational, should change beliefs.
• My greatest hero is Nelson Mandela. What a man. Incarcerated for 25 years, he was released in 1990 and he hasn’t reoffended. I think he’s going straight, which shows you prison does work.
• The best advice I’ve ever received is, ‘No one else knows what they’re doing either’.
• I see Atheists are fighting and killing each other again, over who doesn’t believe in any God the most.
• You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.
• Just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right.
• Here’s how my brain works: it’s stupidity, followed by self-hatred, and then further analysis.
• It’s a positive thing to talk about terrible things and make people laugh about them.
• I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. You live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of.
• Kids are like buckets of disease that live in your house.
• Of course, if you are fighting for your country and get shot or hurt, it is a terrible tragedy. But maybe, if you get shot by the dude you were shooting at, it’s a tiny bit your fault.
• Thank you, 2:30 in the morning, for always being the first sign that tomorrow’s gonna suck.
• Thank you, horseradish, for being neither a radish nor a horse. What you are is a liar food.
• Thank you, Apple, for adding a camera to the iPod Nano. Now it’s just like the iPhone except it can’t make calls. So basically, it’s just like the iPhone.
• Honestly, I just want to keep people awake. Or at least give you one joke to go to bed with.
• I don’t even read the papers. I read ‘USA Today’ because it has color photos.
• I’m going to North Pole to help out Santa this year.
• I want to be a dad. That’s floating to the top of my list. I think it’s such an important thing. I’m at the age where everyone has kids, and I ask them, ‘Is it like a puppy?’ And they go, ‘It’s 10 times a puppy.
• New Scientist magazine reported that in the future, cars could be powered by hazelnuts. That’s encouraging, considering an eight-ounce jar of hazelnuts costs about nine dollars. Yeah, I’ve got an idea for a car that runs on bald eagle heads and Faberge eggs.
• If you’re a sports fan you realize that when you meet somebody, like a girlfriend, they kind of have to root for your team. They don’t have a choice.
• Sometimes I wish I had a terrible childhood, so that at least I’d have an excuse.
• The one thing you shouldn’t do is try to tell a cab driver how to get somewhere.
• Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world.
• Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period.
• Life opens up opportunities to you, and you either take them or you stay afraid of taking them.
• My soul is not contained within the limits of my body. My body is contained within the limitlessness of my soul.
• It is better to risk starving to death then surrender. If you give up on your dreams, what’s left?
• I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.
• I can tell you that the effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is.
• My focus is to forget the pain of life. Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it. And laugh.
• Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass.
• I don’t want to be a vampire. I’m a day person.
• Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.
• Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.
• If you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong.
• I have nothing but respect for you – and not much of that.
• Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well I have others.
• The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
• From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
• When you’re in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, ‘Damn, that was fun’.
• I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
• Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
• Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men – the other 999 follow women.
• I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.
• Laugh often, long and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath.
• Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
• Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read, teach them to question everything.
• We’re all fucked. It helps to remember that.
• If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?
• Try explaining Hitler to a kid.
• Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music.
• Here’s all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.
• When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.
• Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
• Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
• Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.
• Weather forecast for tonight: dark.
• It is failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.
• I think beauty comes from actually knowing who you are. That’s real beauty to me.
• It’s funny how the universe guides you to where you’re meant to be. I wanted to make people happy.
• Do we have to worry about who’s gay and who’s straight? Can’t we just love everybody and judge them by the car they drive?
• Embrace who you are. Literally. Hug yourself. Accept who you are.
• I think we need more love in the world. We need more kindness, more compassion, more joy, more laughter. I definitely want to contribute to that.
• I work really hard at trying to see the big picture and not getting stuck in ego.
• Find out who you are and be that person. That’s what your soul was put on this Earth to be. Find that truth, live that truth and everything else will come.
• Be open to learning new lessons, even if they contradict the lessons you learned yesterday.
• The thing everyone should realize is that the key to happiness is being happy by yourself and for yourself.
• My point is, life is about balance. The good and the bad. The highs and the lows. The pina and the colada.
• Why don’t they give us things we can actually use? I don’t need a thinner phone. You know what I need? I need to tortilla chip that can support the weight of guacamole.
• Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days.
• Follow your passion. Stay true to yourself. Never follow someone else’s path unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path. By all means, you should follow that.
• People always ask me, ‘Were you funny as a child?’ Well, no, I was an accountant.
• Procrastinate now, don’t put it off.
• Mick Jagger’s lips’ so big, black people be going, You got some big-ass lips!x9d.
• White people can’t dance. I’m not being racist; it’s true. Just like when white people say black people have big lips, it’s not racist; it’s true. Black people have big lips, white people can’t dance. Some brothers will be in the club and white people are like, What are those niggers doing in here?x9d They watchin’ y’all dance. And they’re like, Look at these crazy muthaf***as.x9d Y’all be stepping on people’s feet and hitting one another.
• If you have a flop movie, so what? And if you have a hit movie, it’s ‘so what,’ too – it’s on to the next movie.
• I’m sadistic. I go to the supermarkets to watch mothers lose it and beat the shit out of their kids.
• The advice I would give to someone is to not take anyone’s advice.
• Fame for me is like a place, a country I’m taking a tour through.
• You know you must be doing something right if old people like you.
• They say love is more important than money…Have you tried paying your bills with a hug?
• You can only offend me if you mean something to me.
• Wealth is not about having a lot of money; it’s about having a lot of options.
• What the fuck do women want? I know what you want: everything.
• Only dumb people try to impress smart people. Smart people just do what they do.
• If you can keep your son off the pipe and your daughter off the pole, you’re ahead of the game.
• You know, some people say life is short and that you could get hit by a bus at any moment and that you have to live each day like it’s your last. Bullshit. Life is long. You’re probably not gonna get hit by a bus. And you’re gonna have to live with the choices you make for the next fifty years.
• If a woman tells you she’s twenty and looks sixteen, she’s twelve. If she tells you she’s twenty-six and looks twenty-six, she’s damn near forty.
• I live in a neighborhood so bad that you can get shot while getting shot.
• There are only three things women need in life: food, water and compliments.
• It’s extremely powerful to say no; it’s really the most powerful thing to say.
• Life is so damn short. For f*ck’s sake, just do what makes you happy.
• It’s hard to be an artist. It’s hard to be anything. It’s hard to be.
• A moat can be a pretty good thing. It can be lovely. It keeps rodents away from the castle. It can have fish in it. Even fish that talk. … If you give people access, they take advantage. My phone would ring 75 times in a row. Finally, I would pick it up and say, ‘Who the hell is this?’ ‘Oh, hi! I’m calling from so-and-so’s office…’ What kind of person would ever, ever let the phone ring 75 times? And I guess that’s when I started thinking: I can do without these people.
• I don’t believe that you can give the same performance every take. It’s physically impossible, so why bother? If you don’t do what is happening at that moment, then it’s not real. Then you’re holding something back.
• The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything,Axa0the better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with your enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself.
• I live a little bit on the seat of my pants, I try to be alert and available for life to happen to me. We’re in this life, and if you’re not available, the sort of ordinary time goes past and you didn’t live it. But if you’re available, life gets huge. You’re really living it.
• There’s a wonderful sense of well-being that begins to circulate…up and down your spine. And you feel something that makes you almost want to smile. So what’s it like to be me? Ask yourself, ‘What’s it like to be me?’ The only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself that’s where home is.
• Don’t think about your errors or failures, otherwise you’ll never do a thing.
• People are like music. Some speak the truth, and others are just noise.
• Nothing prepared me for being this awesome. It’s kind of a shock. It’s kind of a shock to wake up every morning and be bathed in this purple light.
• A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
• Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring… ‘How to Build a Boat.
• I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
• I will never put off until tomorrow, what I can forget about forever.
• Humor is a universal language.
• Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
• Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
• Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
• Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keep friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.
• My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.
• Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly; devils fall because of their gravity.
• And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
• Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.
• When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing each other.
• I like nonsense. It wakes up the brain cells.
• The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.
• Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
• If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
• You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself.
• The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
• A man is already halfway in love with any woman who listens to him.
• A man in love is like a clipped coupon – it’s time to cash in.
• Coffee, chocolate, men.
• Men are like a deck of cards. You’ll find the occasional king, but most are jacks.
• When a man brings his wife flowers for no reason, there’s a reason.
• Why do men like intelligent women? Because opposites attract.
• America is a land where men govern, but women rule.
• Women give us solace, but if it were not for women we would never need solace.
• There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
• God made Adam first because he didn’t want any advice from Eve how to make Adam.
• When my wife says she’ll be ready in 5 minutes, I know I have just enough time to fly to space and write a poem on the moon before we go.
• The problem with life is, by the time you can read women like a book, your library card has expired.
• Feminine intuition is a fiction and a fraud. It is nonsensical, illogical, emotional, ridiculous, and practically foolproof.
• Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make men stupid.
• I don’t have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who’d be mad at me for saying that.
• A woman’s mind is cleaner that a man’s; She changes it more often.
• Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.
• The most terrifying thing any woman can say to me is Notice anything different?
• A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears.
• Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious; both are disappointed.
• Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
• Marry a man your own age; as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight.
• Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.
• My brother is gay and my parents don’t care, as long as he marries a doctor.
• I love being married. It’s so great to find one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
• Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.
• Marriage…it’s not a word, it’s a sentence.
• What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bees and he told me about the butcher and my wife.
• My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.
• If you can stay in love for more than two years, you’re on something.
• A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he’s finished.
• I never know what to say when people ask me what my hobbies are. I mean, I’m a mom.
• Toddler: Emotionally unstable pint-sized dictator with the uncanny ability to know exactly how far to push you towards utter insanity before reverting to a loveable creature.
• My nickname is ‘Mom’, but my full name is ‘Mom Mom Mom Mom Mom Mom’.
• Obviously, if I was serious about having a relationship with someone long-term, the last people I would introduce him to would be my family.
• When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.
• It just occurred to me that the majority of my diet is made up of the foods that my kid didn’t finish.
• I don’t know what’s more exhausting about parenting: the getting up early, or the acting like you know what you’re doing.
• Everyone should have kids. They are the greatest joy in the world. But they are also terrorists. You’ll realize this as soon as they are born and start using sleep deprivation to torture you.
• The quickest way for a parent to get a child’s attention is to sit down and look comfortable.
• Sometimes I’m so tired, I look down at what I’m wearing, and if it’s comfortable enough to sleep in, I don’t even make it into my pajamas. I’m looking down, and I’m like T-shirt and stretchy pants? Yup, that’s pajama-y. Good night.
• Don’t yell at your kids! Lean in real close and whisper, it’s much scarier.
• If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
• Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
• I’m sorry. I don’t take orders. I barely take suggestions.
• I know that the work cycle is not plan/start/finish, but is wait/plan/plan.
• Sorry for being late. I got caught up enjoying my last few minutes of not being here.
• The closest a person ever comes to perfection is when he fills out a job application form.
• If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
• Every time you feel yourself being pulled into other people’s drama, repeat these word: Not my circus, not my monkeys.
• The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.
• The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.
• Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
• Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
• Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.
• There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
• A boss on vacation is the most cost effective measure. Everybody in the office has a vacation at the cost of one.
• Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
• My career plans were much more exciting when I was 5.
• I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know.
• The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.
• School is learning things you don’t want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn’t know, while working toward a future you don’t know will ever come.
• Work hard, nap hard.
• No wonder the teacher knows so much; she has the book.
• It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
• Education can get you the only thing that really matters in today’s world – an assigned parking space.
• Finish last in your league and they call you idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor.
• In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.
• Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
• You can drag my body to school but my spirit refuses to go.
• The happier we get, the less we see.
• All right everyone, line up alphabetically according to your height.
• I spent 113 880 hours of my life for a paper and a handshake.
• If you’re hotter than me, then that means I’m cooler than you.
• It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
• Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty.
• There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.
• If you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.
• Friends are people who know you really well and like you anyway.
• I’m not arguing. I’m simply explaining why I’m right.
• If you ran like your mouth, you’d be in good shape.
• Please cancel my subscriptions to your issues.
• Some people are like clouds. When they disappear, it’s a beautiful day.
• As your best friend I’ll always pick you up when you fall, after I finish laughing.
• A best friend is like a four leaf clover, hard to find, lucky to have.
• Do you ever think if people heard our conversations they’d lock us up? All the time.
• It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.
• Love is blind; friendship tries not to notice.
• Maybe you should eat some makeup so you can be pretty on the inside too.
• Am I perfect? No. But am I striving to be a better person every day? Also no.
• I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.
• Do Lipton employees take coffee breaks?
• I walk around like everything is fine, but deep down, inside my shoe, my sock is sliding off.
• What a nice night for an evening.
• I drank some boiling water because I wanted to whistle.
• My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.
• You’re only as good as your last haircut.
• If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
• I found there was only one way to look thin: hang out with fat people.
• My doctor told me to watch my drinking. Now I drink in front of a mirror.
• I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous – everyone hasn’t met me yet.
• I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
• Food is like sex: When you abstain, even the worst stuff begins to look good.
• Men cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter.
• What was your key motivation for this piece? The due date.
• I just want my stomach to be as flat as my ass.
• I am not lazy. I am on energy saving mode.
• You’ll never be as lazy as whoever named the fireplace.
• If we’re not meant to have midnight snacks, why is there a light in the fridge.
• You’re welcome to come here, except my beds from Ikea so it’s more unstable than i am.
• In this horrible time, let us at least be bolstered by small miracles like finding out your ex moved to a different city.
• Fries or salad?x9d sums up every adult decision you have to make.
• I don’t weigh myself because most scales don’t know how heavy all the grudges im holding onto are.
• If you are lonely, dim all lights and put on a horror movie. After a while it won’t feel like you are alone anymore.
• Is ‘ugh’ an emotion? Because I fell it all the time.
• I’m not shy, I’m holding back my awesomeness so I don’t intimidate you.
• My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on.
• I don’t even believe myself when I say I’ll be ready in 5 minutes.
• My brain has too many tabs open.
• Sometimes I want to go back in time and punch myself in the face.
• Finally my winter fat is done. Now I have spring rolls.
• I was just viciously body shamed by my mirror.
• I went to a meeting for premature ejaculators. I left early.
• I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it’s like a circus in my head.
• Everything happens for a reason. But sometimes the reason is that you’re stupid and you make bad decisions.
• I’m actually not funny. I’m just really mean and people think I’m joking.
• My bed is a magical place where I suddenly remember everything I forgot to do.
• I don’t go crazy. I am crazy. I just go normal from time to time.
• My life feels like a test I didn’t study for.
• What do people do with all the extra time they save by writing ‘k’ instead of ‘ok’?
• Don’t judge me. I was born to be awesome, not perfect.
• If I had nine of my fingers missing I wouldn’t type any slower.
• What’s another word for Thesaurus?
• All generalizations are false, including this one.
• Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
• Puns are the highest form of literature.
• I’d like to live like a poor man – only with lots of money.
• I’m addicted to placebos.
• Sane is boring.
• Never miss a good chance to shut up.
• Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
• Reality continues to ruin my life.
• When nothing is going right, go left.
• The first time I see a jogger smiling, I’ll consider it.
• The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
• The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
• My esteem in this country has gone up substantially. It is very nice now that when people wave at me, they use all their fingers.
• The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
• If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.
• I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
• A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
• If you’re too open-minded; your brains will fall out.
• That’s why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
• I came from a real tough neighborhood. Once a guy pulled a knife on me. I knew he wasn’t a professional, the knife had butter on it.
• Everything is changing. People are taking the comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.
• It’s okay if you don’t like me. Not everyone has good taste.
• Accept who you are. Unless you’re a serial killer.
• When life gives you lemons, squirt someone in the eye.
• A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
• I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
• Never trust people who smile constantly. They’re either selling something or not very bright.
• Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.
• I live on a one-way street that’s also a dead end. I’m not sure how I got there.
• I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.
• I like Kit-Kat, unless I’m with four or more people.
• If a book about failures doesn’t sell, is it a success?
• I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.
• Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
• Knowledge is like underwear. It is useful to have it, but not necessary to show it off.
• This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
• Don’t be so humble – you are not that great.
• I have always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.
• A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I’m afraid of widths.
• I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.
• The best way to teach your kids about taxes is by eating 30 percent of their ice cream.
• I remixed a remix, it was back to normal.
• Rice is great when you’re hungry and you want 2000 of something.
• When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.
• Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.
• I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
• Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.
• I have a lot of growing up to do. I realized that the other day inside my fort.
• Zach, To Brad Pitt: Is it hard for you to maintain a suntan? Brad: Why? Zack: Because you live in your wife’s shadow .
• I would start a revolution, but I just bought a hammock.
• I wonder if in 2050 there will be a movie called, ‘Dude, Where’s My Spaceship.
• I like to read the Bible in public places so people are watching me read it. I like just to murmur out to myself, ‘Oh bullshit’.
• My girlfriend looks a little like Charlize Theron…and a lot like Patrick Ewing.
• When I was in high school I used to sit by myself in the cafeteria – not necessarily by choice – but I thought it was funny to talk to people that weren’t there.
• I failed kindergarten because I couldn’t spell my last name.
• I think those neighborhood signs that say ‘slow children playing’ are so very mean.
• The word abbreviation sure is long for what it means.
• Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.
• Men learn to love the woman they are attracted to. Women learn to become attracted to the man they fall in love with.
• Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.
• The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it.
• Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.
• I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.
• Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.
• I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
• I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government.
• If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.
• Sleep is so cute when it tries to compete with the internet.
• Facebook: What’s on your mind? Twitter: What’s happening? Myspace: Where did everybody go?
• Who was the greatest prostitute in history? Ms. Pacman, for 25 cents that b*tch swallowed balls till she died.
• Alcohol is like Photoshop for real life.
• Aren’t we all striving to be overpaid for what we do?
• Facebook is like jail, you sit around and waste time, you write on walls and you get poked by people you don’t know.
• Whenever someone calls me ugly I get super sad and hug them, because I know how tough life is for the visually impaired.
• Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet service to see who they really are.
• As the wise man once said, ‘So?’.
• It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live TV.
• Say yes. You’ll figure it out afterward.
• If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.
• I say if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.
• Nothing is creepier than a bunch of adults being very quiet.
• Be so good they can’t ignore you.
• A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
• First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.
• You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies – all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.
• Chaos in the midst of chaos isn’t funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.
• I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it because I was so happy all the time.
• Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.
• We’ve had some fun tonight…considering we’re all gonna die someday.
• I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.
• Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
• Not living in fear is a great gift, because certainly these days we do it so much. And do you know what I like about comedy? You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time”of anything. If you’re laughing, I defy you to be afraid.
• Cynics always say no. But saying ‘yes’ begins things. Saying ‘yes’ is how things grow. Saying ‘yes’ leads to knowledge. ‘Yes’ is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say ‘yes.’
• Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.
• Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise.
• I always recommend people get in trouble. Commit yourself to an open mike night or write something and say you’re going to read it in public, but get in trouble. You’re never going to learn until you fail. … You have to go out there and figure out what you can do and can’t do.
• Happiness can be really facile – To be with my wife and children, would be the deepest joy.
• I would say laughter is the best medicine. But it’s more than that. It’s an entire regime of antibiotics and steroids. Laughter brings the swelling down on our national psyche, and then applies an antibiotic cream. You gotta keep it away from your eyes… Obviously, it’s a challenge to make light of the darkness but, um, it’s better than crying about it.
• When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday – no matter what happened Tuesday.
• See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.
• Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves?
• I’m sorry, if you were right, I’d agree with you.
• Being on the edge isn’t as safe, but the view is better.
• If you spend your days doing what you love, it is impossible to fail.
• You found it offensive? I found it funny. That’s why I’m happier than you.
• Mondays are fine. It’s your life that sucks.
• Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is only painful for others. The same applies when you are stupid.
• I definitely look at my body and I go ‘yuck’.
• Don’t text or twitter during the show. Just live your life. Don’t keep telling people what you’re doing. Also it lights up your big dumb face.
• Fuck it.x9d That’s really the attitude that’s keeps a family together. It’s not We love each other!x9d It’s Fuck it.
• There are two types of people in the world: People who say they pee in the shower and dirty fucking liars.
• Boys fuck things up. Girls are fucked up.
• Your phone doesn’t suck. Your life sucks around the phone.
• All I can do is try to create my own brand and have people appreciate me for that.
• Laughter heals all wounds, and that’s one thing that everybody shares. No matter what you’re going through, it makes you forget about your problems. I think the world should keep laughing.
• But at times, life is random if not downright stupid.
• Some sarcasm is best told simply.
• If I still cannot hear what you have to say after you have repeated it three times, I will just laugh and hope it was not a question.
• First off, my kids know I’m a big deal.
• Marriage is a 24 hour job. You get married, you’re no longer an individual. You can’t do nothing by yourself when you get married. Everything is a team effort. ‘Us’, ‘we’, ‘let’s’, honey, come on partner. You can’t do nothing by yourself. Kevin: Baby I’m gonna be right back I’m going to the store. Wife: Well, wait, let me get my coat. Kevin: Bit__, it’s right there on the corner. I just wanna get some chips. I ain’t going to sleep with nobody.
• I hate when new parents ask who the baby looks like ! It was born 15 minutes ago it looks like a potato.
• These glasses are way 2 big for my damn face! I look like I got on a damn tinted construction mask.
• I think if you get kicked in the face you deserved it because that means that you watched the foot come to your face.
• If we amplify everything we hear nothing.
• Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.
• Religion is far more of a choice than homosexuality.
• If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not valuesx9d they’re hobbies.
• Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age.
• Insomnia is my greatest inspiration.
• It doesn’t make it a gotcha question just because it got ya.
• If ‘con’ is the opposite of pro, then isn’t Congress the opposite of progress? Or did we just f*cking blow your mind!?
• I’m not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.
• If America leads a blessed life, then why did God put all of our oil under people who hate us?
• I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.
• I have complete faith in the continued absurdity of whatever’s going on.
• ‘Have fun’ is my message. Be silly. You’re allowed to be silly. There’s nothing wrong with it.
• I just really don’t like being the center of attention that much. It’s kind of ironic.
• I don’t like to kick people when they’re down. I like to kick people when they’re up.
• I wanted to be a Priest at one point. I was pretty religious. I was an altar boy, and I was good at it. Then, I started meeting girls and I’m like ‘You know, maybe I shouldn’t be a Priest.
• You know the trouble with real life? There’s no danger music.
• Behing every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.
• Men want the same thing from their underwear that they want from women: a little bit of support, and a little bit of freedom.
• You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, ‘See if you can blow this out’.
• What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night? The only difference is that in not many job interviews is there a chance you’ll wind up naked.
• It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
• A two-year old is kind of like a blender, but you don’t have any top for it.