Quotes About Comedy

Comedy is just an unspoken language. Everybody understands it. Funny is funny. When it's not funny, they'll let you know.

It's amazing how these little guys can say things that a mortal human could never get away with. There's some sort of unspoken license... when outlandish things come out of an inanimate object, somehow it equals humor.

Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame.

I never did standup before. It just looked like it was really hard, looked like there was like up days and down days - and I'm too emotionally unstable for that. I need to always be funny and always be loved.

So many stars who have shows are intimidated by having people around them be funnier than them. It's always the unsuccessful ones. Look at Seinfeld - he's great because he let everyone be hilarious.

Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It's unsuccessful if they don't laugh.

But sometimes it's good to dare yourself to do the unthinkable. And rather than stand in front of an audience with no clothes on, I decided to have a go at stand-up comedy.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

I will do comedy until the day I die: inappropriate comedy, funny comedy, gender-bending, twisting comedy, whatever comedy is out there.

There was a story saying I didn't like contemporary comedians, but it's completely untrue - a lot of them are very dear friends of mine.

While it is entirely untrue that Canadians lack a sense of humour, the funniest ones tend to head south: Dan Aykroyd, Jim Carrey, Michael J. Fox.

Comedy is unusual people in real situations; farce is real people in unusual situations.

If you like quick put-downs and aggressive interactions with the audience, you will probably not enjoy the rambles of an unusual character act making jokes about cats for an hour.

If you have one good series, you know, it's a blessing. Two good series is unusual. Three is a phenomenon, but right now, I'm working with these wonderful women on 'Hot in Cleveland,' and Valerie Bertinelli, and Wendy Malick and Jane Leeves are like, it's like the buddy-ship we had on 'Golden Girls' and 'Mary Tyler Moore.'

You know, 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young, and it was a show about old people, and it was a very traditional show, but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.

When you do something unusual, the audience doesn't 100 percent know what you're up to in the beginning. And if you're doing a character comedy, they haven't learned the characters yet.

On 'Scrubs,' I played a very unusual character who pretty much was defined by saying and doing strange things, so it was easy to improvise around that.

A comedy scene can't really have two weirdoes in it. It doesn't make any sense that way, so you need someone to ground it and call out what's unusual about this person and this scene. Early on, I got pretty good at doing that, and I felt pretty comfortable doing that.

Every funny story has at least one unusual thing in it.

I feel like most standup comedians do it the way I did it, where you just go to open mics and cut your teeth. Sketch and improv - they take a lot of classes. It's not unusual, the way I did it. It's just that, with standup, no one knows how to start because there's no book for it; there's no place you can really go.

It's very rare and unusual to see a female comic perform pregnant.

It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn't stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.

Part of my act is meant to shake you up. It looks like I'm being funny, but I'm reminding you of other things. Life is tough, darling. Life is hard. And we better laugh at everything; otherwise, we're going down the tube.

So I went to the Chinese restaurant and this duck came up to me with a red.