Quotes About Humor

The real reason for comedy is to hide the pain.

Gallows humor is part of our coping mechanism. It's part of our grief process. If we don't know what else to do, we laugh. That's a very real thing.

I feel like some of the delivery that people find funny is literally me trying to remember the exact line in real time.

The average British person would hear me doing my joke about Rebecca Adlington and realise there's no malice in it. It was an off-the-cuff ad lib.

Initially, it took me time to realise that I am sharing screen space with Irrfan Khan. But when I started working with him, a lot of times I would end up laughing in a scene.

I had a donkey called Sally that I used to call my BMX bike. As a child, I wasn't a very good horse rider: I thought falling off was normal, and I would just get back on again. I didn't realise you weren't meant to fall off.

Working gives you this new perspective. You don't take everything too seriously, and you realise that if you don't do too well on a history test, it's not the end of the world.

I do think, with people in comedy, you can have your time, as it were, and then you don't realise that it might have gone. I hope it hasn't for me. I think what I do is, I just... I just try to plough my own furrow, in a way.

It's a strange old thing, but I think an awful lot of 'Inbetweeners' fans still don't realise I'm a stand-up.

I was trying to do one-liners and it took me years to realise I just had to be myself. My fear was if I was myself and no one found it funny, I'd have nowhere left to go.

I realised that if you get yourself labeled as the funny one, people don't look any further. I've used that as I've got older. It's controlling: I decide what part of my personality you're seeing. I don't want you to look at me, I really don't. I don't want you to comment on my clothes, my hair or the way I look.

I definitely am a huge lover of comedy, and it's only through doing so many comedies that I've realised how much of an influence they've been on me.

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.

After my first play, I realised that comedy was my forte - rather than being a dukhi heroine, I would rather do comedy.

I accidentally make innuendos all the time without even realising. I'm middle-aged, in that sense.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

I just feel like you're being realistic if you can laugh at yourself.

'Roseanne' was massive for me. I adored that show. I mean, the show was this couple who weren't cookie-cutter, and they were sexy, and we know that they like to have sex with each other, and they flirted, and then they ragged on their kids, and their kids ragged on them, and it was such a realistic depiction.

In my mind, if you write a comedy where human beings experience pain, you're just being realistic.

If I'm watching a heavy drama and there's no moment of people laughing, I always think that's not realistic.

All people are sad clowns. That's the key to comedy - and it's a buffer against reality.

For making a good comedy film, you need a good writer whose craft can be understood through the time that he takes to write his script.

For the life of me, I could not make a good-looking ice-cream cone.

I certainly wish I were as good-looking as Aaron Eckhart.