Quotes About Comedy

Muerte (Una comedia) KLEINMAN: ¡Oh, no, no pienso quedarme aquí solo! ¡Estás de broma! ¡Hay un loco suelto por ahí! ¡Yo no me entiendo bien con los locos! Soy un individuo muy lógico. AL: El plan no permite que estemos juntos. KLEINMAN: Mira, no hagamos de esto un idilio. No tenemos que estar juntos nosotros. Con doce hombres fuertes cualesquiera me conformo.

Dios (Una comedia) DORIS: Fidipides. ¿Cómo puedes negarte? DIABETES: Cuando se es un cobarde, ciertas cosas resultan muy fáciles.

Drama is like meat and three veg. Whereas comedy is like the merangue at the end.

Dios (Una comedia) DORIS (filosóficamente: Las personas creen tantas veces comprender la realidad cuando no hacen otra cosa realmente que corresponder a su <>

Dios (Una comedia) DIABETES: Creí que volvíais a Nueva York. WENDY: Ya sabes cómo es el destino.

Justo castigo Un maleficio, eso es. Cuando dos personas se aman y tienen que separarse por culpa de una aberración casi cómica, ¿qué otra cosa puede ser?

For the written record in this personal document, let me simply say to me, Groucho Marx, W. C. Fields, and Elaine May are indisputably funny, with S.J. Perelman the funniest human of my time on earth.

What people who don't write don't understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don't. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it's the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don't think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I've said. And I laugh at it, because I'm hearing it for the first time myself.

To say that I was blown away by Mort Sahl—it would be like when I first tasted spare ribs.

There are millions of comedians around or certainly there were when I started. They play nightclubs, or on TV, or at private functions, and they all need material: jokes, bits, routines, something to say. Most of them were not very good as evidenced by the fact that they needed other people to put words in their mouth, funny words. If left on their own, they couldn't coax a chuckle from a manic fat man on laughing gas.

You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.

The only criticisms I have are that, one, many are gratuitously dirty. Remember, I'm saying gratuitously. I don't mind dirty when it contributes to the funny routine, but since language was liberated in the sixties, it's embarrassing to hear acts punctuate their material with the old so-called dirty words. Apparently, the

Love and Death had been a broad comedy. Eisenstein and Tolstoy in cartoon.

Where did all these thirsty comics come from? I never knew a monologist to keel over from dehydration. Actors play hours of Shakespeare without Hamlet or Lear sneaking behind a drape for a belt of Poland Spring water.

I wrote one single joke for Don Adams. Jonathan Winters needed nothing from anyone; he was simply a genius.

I think I can safely say I'm the only American stand-up comic who played the Eiffel Tower.

Roth was a much deeper, more serious man than me in addition to being very funny. Sometimes we'd show up together in some article on Judaism or Jewish humor, but he approached issues from a thoughtful, engaging point of view. I was only interested as far as they gave me good comedy material. He was a thinker, a genuine intellectual.

I was obsessed with gangsters, baseball players, jazz musicians, and Bob Hope movies, but young women have been a tiny fraction of the women I dated over the decades. I have used the May-December ploy as a comic and romantic theme a few times, just as I have used psychoanalysis or murder or Jewish jokes, but only as good material for plots and laughs.

Caesar and The Honeymooners—two very different great comedians, Sid and Jackie Gleason.

Dianne Wiest, Julie Kavner so terrific

Sid had a cerebral band of writers, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Mike Stuart, Shelly Keller, Neil Simon, not to mention contributors like Carl Reiner, Howie Morris, and Sid himself.

If Woody Allen can lose those Mort Sahl mannerisms, he could be a very funny comedian." I wanted to do what he did, I wanted to be like him, I wanted to be him. And that's the problem. You have to be him to get that effect. It wasn't the brilliant jokes, which

Are you alone? - Of course. - I thought I heard voices. - I was praying. - I heard two voices. - Oh, well, I do both parts. --Love and Death screenplay

I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.