#Comedy Quotes

“QUINCE Francis Flute, the bellows-mender. FLUTE Here, Peter Quince. QUINCE Flute, you must take Thisby on you. FLUTE What is Thisby? a wandering knight? QUINCE It is the lady that Pyramus must love. FLUTE Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming.”

“A comedian can only last till he either takes himself serious or his audience takes him serious.”

“The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.”

“There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.”

“There is no credit to being a comedian, when you have the whole Government working for you. All you have to do is report the facts. I dont even have to exaggerate.”

“Comedy is merely tragedy happening to someone else.”

“The funniest thing a comedian can do is not do it.”

“No one likes the fellow who is all rogue, but we'll forgive him almost anything if there is warmth of human sympathy underneath his rogueries. The immortal types of comedy are just such men.”

“It is funnier to bend things than to break them.”

“Thou shalt not steal-only from other comedians.”

“The funniest thing about comedy is that you never know why people laugh. I know what makes them laugh but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water.”

“The work I'm doing on the screen differs from that of anyone else. My comedy is of a peculiar nature...no writers have been developed along the lines of my type of comedy and this is why I sometimes have differences with writers, supervisors and directors alike.”

“The first thing any comedian does on getting an unscheduled laugh is to verify the state of his .”

“Comedy is a serious business. A serious business with only one purpose--to make people laugh.”

“A comic should suffer as much over a single line as a man with a hernia would in picking up a heavy barbell.”

“I'm not someone who gets to play The O2 and places like that, but that's the kind of rock and roll venue. The popularity of stand-up means that some people are getting to play rock star venues.”

“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.”

“People may think I'm trying something new by telling stories, but they're just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That's what I do.”

“I laugh all the time - at things, people, stuff, whatever. But, I don't laugh onstage because then it's serious business.”

“It's very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that's not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It's a gut feeling.”

“Only one in four jokes ever works, and I still can't predict what people will laugh at.”

“To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It's commenting or observing or twisting life.”

“We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour.”

“To the audience, it's like I'm changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show's almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.”

“I've been doing comedy longer than I haven't been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on 'The Tonight Show.' There's truly nothing like it; it's intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.”

“I don't feel that I'm explaining the world or teaching people anything. And I'm not trying to be a mirror, showing them what's really going on the world. All I'm trying to do is think of stuff that's funny, just like when I'm kidding around with my friends.”

“I feel lucky that I can have people laugh solidly for a whole hour by just saying what I think and getting paid for it.”

“What I like about the jokes, to me it's a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won't be funny.”

“Like other kids wanted to become firemen or astronauts, I wanted to make people laugh.”

“I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the 'Boston Phoenix,' and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that's where I first saw 'deadpan.'”

“If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.”

“I was once on a German talk show, and this woman said to me, 'Mr. Williams, why do you think there is not so much comedy in Germany?' And I said, 'Did you ever think you killed all the funny people?'”

“Comedy pays the bills if I can't find a film.”

“Anything that is not funny at a certain point will be funny.”

“On stage you're free. You can say and do things that if you said and did any place else, you'd be arrested.”

“Comedy keeps the heart sweet.”

“Stand-up is the place where you can do things that you could never do in public.”

“You can start any 'Monty Python' routine and people finish it for you. Everyone knows it like shorthand.”

“Jamie Kilstein is amazing and I will be spreading the word. He has the spark that energized my conscience. We need more comedians kicking it hard the way he does every night”

“The bad thing about being a famous comedian is that every now and then someone approaches me to tell an old joke. Don't tell me jokes - I have that. People also say the weirdest things, sometimes sarcastic things, and even evil things. They like to provoke to get a reaction.”

“When in doubt, go for the dick joke.”

“For me, comedy starts as a spew, a kind of explosion, and then you sculpt it from there, if at all. It comes out of a deeper, darker side. Maybe it comes from anger, because I'm outraged by cruel absurdities, the hypocrisy that exists everywhere, even within yourself, where it's hardest to see.”

“Comedy is a camouflage for depression.”

“When I got back into show business in 1961, I felt - for obvious reasons - that nothing in my life went right, and I realized that millions of people felt the same way. So when I first cameback my catch phrase was "nothing goes right." Early on, that was my setup for a lot of jokes.”

“I started doing comedy because that was the only stage that I could find. It was the pure idea of being on stage. That was the only thing that interested me, along with learning the craft and working, and just being in productions with people.”

“Sometimes with a comedy it's just having the instinct of how real you play it and what level you want it.”

“Comedy is there to basically show us we fart, we laugh, to make us realize we still are part animal.”

“The dramas for me allow me to explore more behavioral, deeper psychological things. But the comedies obviously allow me to explore the idea of really working off other people. I'm having more fun doing that.”

“People would say I never censor. As Billy Crystal says, 'I don't have that button.'”

“In the process of looking for comedy, you have to be deeply honest. And in doing that, you'll find out here's the other side. You'll be looking under the rock occasionally for the laughter.”