Quotes About Comedy

I love doing sketches, but I don't relish being by myself. That's not something I'm used to doing.

As far as my sketches, I've always loved 'What's Up With That.' It's just a whole lot of fun, and I love 'Black Jeopardy,' too. Any kind of host capacity, I'm usually pretty good at.

My first improv was Second City in Chicago. Before that, I worked at - with a partner, doing comedy sketches.

On 'Saturday Night Live,' I never really wrote. You know, I would just - I would let the writers cast me into the show. So my strength - and I put all my energies into performance. I just couldn't deal with the rejection, you know, getting your sketches cut, and it was hard for me.

I think the Mama people remember is from 'Mama's Family.' She really turned into a pretty cool character. The sketches from the 'Burnett' show, if people are old enough to remember, were written by writers who all hated their mothers.

I was inspired by comedy channels. I loved that they got to do sketches and could be funny and crude and make people laugh. But most of those channels, if not all of them, were done by guys.

Science was always a passion, but I also loved 'Monty Python' and 'The Young Ones,' and I discovered the Footlights comedy club at university, where a lot of those people got their start. I had a go and loved it immediately. After that, I just couldn't stop writing sketches, and it all took off from there.

No other show was as absurd as 'Crackerjack'. It had Stu Francis, who was the first person I saw on TV telling jokes for kids, and then there were the Krankies, who were a comedy duo with a middle-aged woman dressed as a schoolboy doing sketches.

It's way more fun to tell jokes for an hour than it is to sit in a room and bash your head against the wall trying to think of sketches.

When you spend your day writing comedy, particularly with others, the discussion of jokes and how far to push things with a group of unoffendable colleagues means that your grasp of what is acceptable in normal conversation is often skewed.

I would describe my comedy as my skewed comic perception of life.

Even in comedy, I'm always the straight guy, which is okay because that's a skill. But it would be nice to get out of that box.

You have to show up at 7 in the morning and be on like it's 9 at night. It's a skill. Some comics run from it, and they hate doing it, but the comics that are pros understand how important it is, and they get good at it.

Comedy is like music, and the way to make the best music is to have skilled musicians in your band.

Kenneth Branagh is one of the funniest directors on the set. You laugh a lot. He's very skillful.

I'd like a bit of a crack at some kind of anarchic comedy, but whether or not I'm skillful enough at it all, we'll see.

A fellow who has a funny bone can learn to hone his skills, but I don't think you can develop a funny bone - you either have it or you don't. And by the way - when you get it, we don't know it.

I think you just have to be comfortable in your own skin, and when I do stand-up or the show I'm in a really good mood.

My act is sort of improvisational. I have a skeleton in my head, but no fat or skin on it.

Also, as I've gotten older and more mature, I've become much more comfortable in my own skin. After 25 years of doing stand-up, that's reflected onstage.

I'm one of the larger mammals. Everyone in my family was large, mom and dad, my two older sisters. If you meet a skinny person in my family, you say, 'And you are married to who?'

So many comics, skinny and fat, make fat jokes.

I love it when dogs yawn. Especially when it's in the middle of another dog's speech.

Most people love animals, and most people love to laugh. Combining the two makes both resonate deeper.