Quotes About Comedy

If I am comfortable, I say what I want to. But yes, while doing a comedy show, I am slightly reserved as a person. Since it's scripted, it's not a problem. I can manage.

I was playing a lot of bigger, sort-of-comedic characters in slightly heightened realities, and it had been so fun and fulfilling for a long time. But it got to a point where I just felt like I didn't have that in me anymore.

People say the comedy is so shocking, but if you read newspapers or look around generally - I mean, obviously I'm not writing about all the lovely things that there are, which I do see as well - but there is a lot of outrageousness around, slightly covered up. And obviously, it's fun to take that a little bit further.

I used to watch everybody's stuff, but I found I would get slightly influenced by the other comics. I try to avoid it now.

I'm a huge fan of French comedy. The French play comedy in a slightly different way than we do: they play it with a sort of realism that we don't necessarily often do ourselves.

I've never seen 'Light Lunch' - only clips. But I do remember from those clips that there was a lot of bounding about and energy and I think that's probably slightly lessened over the years.

The Dutch do have a slightly odd sense of humour.

A lot of people have got into it because of money, but true comedians do it because they can't help it, and feel slightly removed doing anything else. That were case with me.

Morvern Callar's' a really weird film, in a sense, where I was trying to experiment with taking things in a different direction, and it kind of half works and it half doesn't. And I kind of felt with that film that perhaps I should have pushed it more into the realms of black comedy slightly.

I'm starting to play lots more naturalistic, realistic people than when I first started. Maybe because I was doing character comedy shows, and I was doing slightly weird, oddball characters with weird accents, those were the characters that I got cast to play - which made perfect sense.

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.

People... need a time to laugh. It's up to us to bonk ourselves on the head and slip on a banana peel so the average guy can say, 'I may be bad, honey, but I'm not as much of an idiot as that guy on the screen.'

My main point is to be funny; if I can slip a message in there, fine.

I want to sit down, and I want to laugh. Nothing works better for me than watching somebody slip on a banana peel.

There's like a shift in the paradigm about every 15 years in movies because one would slip through the cracks. I think if they were more inexpensive you would see many more eclectic comedies being made.

If I go to the store, I'm not trying to slip in the middle of the aisle so I can talk about it onstage. I'm at the store because I need food or medicine.

I try not to apologize, especially publicly. That's a slippery slope, because I'm a comedian. If you take anything I'm saying too seriously, then you shouldn't be paying attention in the first place. If you find me offensive, don't follow me.

I don't mind a crowd's not laughing; it's the groans that slow down the show.

I do the same gig. I might change it a little; I might slow it down if I'm in the South. I talk fast, and they're not used to people talking that fast.

FX does a great thing with its comedies where they give them a slow push out there.

I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you. I don't paint every day. I'm not that motivated.

I have a difficult time doing an Irish accent; even now, it kind of fades slowly into Scottish.

I did so many open mics. I would write jokes on Twitter constantly, and then slowly, over time, open mics turned into shows. If you can get a joke to work at an open mic, it's a good joke.

There's different kinds of improv. There's Second City improv where you try to slowly build a nice sketch. There's stuff you do in college coffee houses where you just go joke, joke, joke. Bring another funny character with a funny hat on his head. Christopher Guest is more the line of trying to get a story out.