Quotes About Comedy

Everyone has fond memories of 'The Carol Burnett Show' and the characters we did.

From the earliest memories I have, I liked physical, funny things.

The great thing with comedy is that I don't memorize ahead of time like I did on 'Breaking Bad.' With 'Breaking Bad,' I wanted to know those words inside and out, really have my lines down so I could say them verbatim. But with comedy, you keep it a lot more loose.

I memorize stuff that I know works, and then 25 percent is just feeding off the audience and going where they want to go. Sometimes things flop. That's where the jokes come in.

Since there have been men and women, there have been funny women.

Men and women are like cats and dogs. I've learned more about myself from women. My comedy is based on this.

I've built a career on evenly entertaining men and women. And I'm kind of known for not making either side feel bad.

I would describe Fred Figglehorn to someone who hasn't heard of him as a really hyperactive, temper-throwing teenager who's stuck in the mentality of a 6-year-old.

I love doing a show that makes no mention of ethnicity.

People always mention that they'd love to see me in a comedy again. Maybe it's time - laughter being the best medicine.

Take my gay-hairdresser routine. You'll let your hairdresser say things to you that you wouldn't let your parents say. My hairdresser will say the funniest things, so I asked him if I could put him in my routine - you know, make fun of him in a good way. He said, 'Oh, mention my name, mention my name!'

A lot of my stand-up early on was stories from my childhood. And my childhood is over - there's not new childhood stories to come. They've all been mentioned.

I'm a funny guy. I want people to laugh. I laugh at myself, I make fun of myself. But at the end of the day everything that I say has a message in it.

There's always a message in my comedy.

I'm doin' something different. I mean, I talk a little bit about race and interracial dating, but it's not the heart of my act. I just try to do what I think is funny; there's no huge message or through line.

Quite often, intent on conveying how things can go wrong for a culture (science fiction) or an individual (horror) or all of magical creation (fantasy), works of fantastika often preclude comedy, because humor gets in the way of messages of doom or struggle.

Live stand-up is my thing. I love being on stage and just messing around.

I think showing people being messy and showing them being wrong and showing them in their humanity is something that we can do, but it becomes difficult because there's this weight put on comedy to be part of change and I'm like, 'I don't think it changes anything.'

I never think of a project as just being comedy or just being drama - even with 'Masters of Sex.' I like being sort of messy, like life is.

In the U.K. and Ireland, crowd-work is a big thing. It shows you how funny someone would be if you met them off-stage. Americans don't care if you're funny off-stage. They want to see the writing; they want to see the work you did.

My social circle, my best friends, are all people that I met at UCB.

Nora Ephron's 'When Harry Met Sally' is a classic.

I definitely talk about my love of metal to audiences, and I sort of realized it was always natural and never, 'Well, I'm going to be the heavy-metal comedian.'

I think if you're trying to be funny, sometimes you're bending a piece of metal in a direction it doesn't want to go. And sometimes comedy just needs to find itself.