Quotes About Comedy

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

Anytime you see a bit where some stranger does something to me, it's me.

Many of the stranger but most frequently quoted scenes in 'Billy Madison' were unplanned.

Comedy and politics have a lot in common. Both are great ways to pick up chicks - just look at Governor Spitzer. Or Ellen Degeneres. Both require spending time on the road meeting strangers who often have the desire to throw things at you. Both are difficult, if not impossible, to do all alone. And both rely heavily on personality.

Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it's my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.

Trying to make strangers laugh is crazy and more than a little narcissistic.

I like the anonymity, the fact that you're a stranger making strangers laugh. You aren't forcing them to laugh - it's involuntary, and that's when they give the most honest response.

A couple of weeks ago, I did karaoke and got nervous in a way I hadn't gotten nervous in 25 years. I'm so used to getting on stage in front of strangers to tell jokes, but singing is a whole different animal.

I watch a lot of TV - 'Perfect Strangers,' 'Family Matters,' 'Who's the Boss?' - then I go over my notes in the script, lock it into my head and go to bed.

Anything you can do to get more people to come to your live shows is good, because that's where you can really do what you do. Everyone's on the same page, and you don't have to win strangers over as much.

I started standup at age nineteen. I decided that the only way I was going to try show business as a career was if I could make total strangers laugh.

Like everybody, I started out doing 'bringer' shows - the kind where if you show up with a certain number of people, you get to perform. Sometimes I would actually pay strangers off the street to come in and see my set.

When you're talking about a really horrible personal thing that happened to you... and it doesn't get laughs... I feel really exposed and like I've overshared with some strangers.

People often tell me that they have no idea how I can do standup. The idea of trying to make a large group of strangers laugh is, for many, absolutely petrifying - and it is - but there are ways of gradually developing the material that can ease the fear.

I could always make people around me laugh. It was more of a defense mechanism more than anything else, because I was a pretty shy guy.

Sometimes laughing isn't the best judge of what's funny, 'cause I think there's a lot of things that are really funny that don't make you laugh, that don't make you physically, audibly make a noise, but is something that is much more powerful than that.

I think the great sketch shows, like 'Python' and 'Mr. Show ' they didn't stick around for very long. There's something kind of cool about that.

I'm always in situations where you can't be funny, and yet I want to do it anyway.

Most of my ideas just come out funny.

Puns are the E. coli of humor,

I was reading a book... 'the history of glue' - I couldn't put it down.

So I got home, and the phone was ringing. I picked it up, and said 'Who's speaking please?' And a voice said 'You are.'

People ask 'do you make a conscious effort not to swear?' - if you're doing silly stuff you're not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood, who were funny without swearing, were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway.

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life.