Comedians Quotes

I started when I was a teenager, at high school I started doing stand-up. And that’s what I thought I was gonna do. And then I met Kevin McDonald in a Second City workshop, and we started doing improv.

The worst thing about sketches is that they are the most labor intensive form of comedy you can do. Because you have to put almost as many resources and almost as much writing and story has to go into a sketch as goes into a half hour or hour. But a sketch only lasts about […]

I’m a comedian, and I definitely see the humor in a lot of things. I am also sad a lot. I cry often and easily. I think you’re supposed to feel all kinds of things.

You know, if you’re going to be honest with yourself, you have to admit that you go into show business wanting people to talk about you and wanting everyone to know who you are. But that also means there are going to be a whole bunch of people who don’t like you. No matter who […]

Comedy’s all about comparisons and contrasts and congruities and incongruities and heightenings and understatement and exaggeration.

People have often asked me, ‘If you weren’t in show business, what would you be doing?’ The truth is I don’t think there’s anything else I could be doing, so the answer would have to be, nothing . . . I guess you could say I’m in the only business I could be in.

George Carlin’s album, Class Clown, came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can’t get rid of.

People, particularly comedians, always say it’s all in the timing. But in written humor, the reader has to do his own timing—you have to build in the timing for the reader, which is difficult.

I don’t think that I can act at all, to be honest. I just can be who I am. I pretend to be this person, whoever it is. I don’t call it acting.