Quotes About Comedy

When you snatch little pieces of other people's lives and try to palm them off as your own, that's more disgusting than anything. Robin Williams is a huge thief. Denis Leary is a huge thief. His whole stand-up career is based on Bill Hicks, a brilliant guy who died years ago.

My real name is Joseph Herbert. My dad is white; my mom's Asian, Filipino. And when I started stand-up 22 years ago, I used to go up as Joseph Herbert, and I would just have to defend my name. Every time I went onstage, it was so annoying. People would heckle.

Eleven years ago, my wife and I had had a baby, so I didn't go to Edinburgh Fringe for the first time in years. Tim Key won the comedy award and I was sat at home with the baby feeling very jealous, genuinely.

Baddiel is a slightly quizzical name - it comes from Latvia but people thought it sounded vaguely Hindustani or something. I thought it might be a good idea to write a body swap movie, like 'Trading Places' or 'Freaky Friday,' about somebody who believes they are one thing but suddenly become another.

Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.

'Jackass: The Movie' is great. I think it's in the tradition of physical comedy, which I'm really interested in. Its relationship to gravity, and how gravity acts on the body.

Shows like 'All in the Family' and now 'Mom' - there's a tradition of tackling real issues.

The Goons were always one of our favourites; we always felt we were in that tradition - Goons, Monty Python, Peter Cook, Vic and Bob, Spike Milligan. We felt we were part of that lineage, but in England, it wasn't happening like that. There was a brand of comedy like 'The Office,' which was very real.

People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We're not like Ricky Gervais's hyper-real cringe comedy. We're at the other end of the scale, but there's room for the sillier stuff, too.

Comedy is my favorite genre. I think it often doesn't get the respect it deserves, and I think one of the reasons is there was a tradition in the past of comedy looking kind of brightly lit and like a sitcom.

I think there's a fine, healthy tradition of, you know, the people on the fringes satirizing the process of Hollywood.

Egyptian comedy has a very, very old tradition. Our theater and our movies are just, like, amazing. And Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.

Every time I've done comedy in, like, traditional comedy clubs, there's always these comedians that do really well with audiences but that the other comedians hate because they're just, you know, doing kind of cheap stuff like dancing around or doing, like, very kind of base sex humor a lot, and stuff like that.

I grew up with 'Roseanne'; I kind of adore her and stuff like' Home Improvement', really traditional American stuff.

A lot of the traditional sitcom stuff I did - I think I could have gone that route when I was younger as a staff writer, and I just didn't want to.

In the best traditions of American comedy, from its beginnings through the crash-bang comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, Leslie Nielsen skewered the otherwise proper, did it with mischievous delight and convulsed audiences mercilessly.

I have been a funny kid growing up but every one thought I was a serious person. I think it has to do with the choice of my films such as 'Zakhm,' 'Kalyug' and 'Traffic Signal.'

I came from a blue-collar family where we busted each other's chops and found the funny in tragedies.

I've done two Shakespeare tragedies, so I'd desperately like to do comedy. It would be nice not to die.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.

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.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.