Quotes About Comedy

For comedy reasons, any place we can have really big egos and very high stakes is a great thing to go for.

I love action movies, and I love comedy, and I love writing comedy, but the genre of action-comedy - or, at least, as it currently usually is - is just not something that I feel that compelled by, generally, because I find the action to be silly, or it's too slapstick, or the stakes feel low because people are joking in the middle of it.

I love comedy, but more than that, I love comedy that has a message and that has some stakes.

I'm all about showing people that I'm a little messed up, I have a lot of the same problems you have. By exposing myself and putting myself out there, people can relate to me and my act won't grow stale. I mean, nobody wants to hear a comedian say, 'Life is great.'

With comedy, the jokes will come out, and people will see them coming. Changes in daily life or current events can change the consciousness of audiences and can make the show less funny or feel more stale.

Stuff starts to feel stale comedically when you're just rehashing things, so putting together a writers' room where the majority is made up of people who have not been the focus of the story, it flips everything around.

I've been told to speed up my delivery when I perform. But if I lose the stammer, I'm just another slightly amusing accountant.

While other kids were into New Kids on the Block, I was into Harold Lloyd and Stan Laurel.

When I get some budding young comic who'll come up to me and say, 'What was it like to do it in those days?' I try to be as gracious to him as Stan Laurel was to me.

Scarily, I was only about 11 or 12 when my mum pointed out my resemblance to Stan Laurel. I know he's the ultimate loser, but I was happy to hear it.

I guess my feeling is is that if you're going to make a joke, that's fine, but you should also sort of stand behind it, you know? A joke should be more than a joke, it should be a point that you're trying to make.

I hate being mean. I watch those roasts on Comedy Central and they make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

I feel blessed to be able to do my stand up comedy all over the world, because some people never even leave New York.

I used to do stand-up, actually. I had a ten-minute routine I did for a thing called 'Stand Up for Labour' where we'd go around different seats and use comedy to raise money. I stopped doing this routine when I started running for mayor.

When I came to America, it was Dave Chappelle and a lot of comedians on ComicView. That was my first exposure to stand up comedy, actually.

I didn't want to perform comedy. I always loved humor. Loved making people laugh. I was a big stand up fan, but it wasn't until I was managing a restaurant that had a comedy night and one of the producers asked me to go on stage that I wanted to do it.

Doing stand up helps - thinking on your feet definitely comes in handy when it's a live show.

Having two kids, I don't get out to see stand up much anymore.

I do stand up sometimes out of anger. Sometimes the greatest stuff comes from a dark place.

I quit law school in 1990 and started doing stand up in Boston.

The best part about being a stand-up is the connection with the audience. There's nothing more gratifying then when you can make 300 people applaud and stand up - because that's all you.

And of course I didn't make any money from stand up for years, so I had temp jobs. That was the way I made money.

As a stand up, and often in acting, there is no place for the most intense feelings. Rage, genuine sorrow, naked hope... These things don't fit on a comedy stage and if you act you'll get to express them once in a while. Music is a place for the intensely personal.

Stand up is really fun because if I think of a joke or a funny idea, then I can just go and tell some people and if they laugh, they laugh right away.