If you laugh, we just do another take. Laughter is too rare nowadays. If you can bust a gut, let it go, and we'll just go back to one.
I really hate sitcoms on television with canned laughter and stuff. What really makes me laugh is the real-life stuff. I've got a dry sense of humor.
If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.
In reality, I laugh a lot. In fact, if someone cries in front of me, I cant help myself and I often start laughing.
Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s, I was often capricious and temperamental, quick to laugh, even quicker to feel despair, prone to flailing my arms, pouting and crying when things didn't go my way, or I thought something was unfair, or I was bullied by my sisters.
I love the stuff that makes you laugh and cry. It kind of sucker-punches you a little bit. That's the thing that most interests me as a performer, in addition to telling the most captivating story.
Even the most brilliant accomplishments on the Internet are essentially cold. Google has changed the world, but you don't snuggle up to it. YouTube is a giant carnival, filled with freaks and mountebanks, a place to gawk and laugh and get bored. Certainly not a place to feel anything.
I always was trying to make people laugh as a kid. I was a big fan of Carol Burnett and Gilda Radner. I watched them and I remember feeling as a child, when I heard the laughter they got, a little jealous that they made someone laugh like that.
There was a lot about the military that I thought was pretty silly, but these cartoons weren't meant to take a poke at anybody or anything. They were meant to make people laugh.
It took me a while to figure out the U.S. sense of humor, a lot of trial and error. I would write down jokes to casually tell my American friend over Skype to see which ones he'd laugh at.
Catch-22's first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured.
In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves.
All this flying around got on my nerves. But then I gave the script to Cathy to get her opinion. When she started to laugh, it was like 'That's it!'. I went to LA and I got the part.
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.
I wanted to entertain and make people laugh. I think it really hit in third grade, but once I was in high school, I joined chamber choir. I wanted to do musical theater, too, but they had rehearsals at the same time. That was a bit of 'Sophie's Choice.'
People try to put ownership on things: 'That's mine, that's my joke.' No such thing. Like if you tripped or stumbled and people go, 'Oh, that's Charlie Chaplin.' You know what I mean? You can't own a joke. You can be the guy that tells it the best, but you can't own a joke. Nowhere can you own a laugh.
Who made me laugh when I was growing was Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, and then moving on, there were so many that I was a writer for for many years: I was a writer for the Smothers Brothers, Lily Tomlin, then I started on 'Saturday Night Live' as the head writer the first year we started it.
You know what, I'm very attracted to someone who makes me laugh and is that charming. Really, I could be charmed by anyone. I'm just a sucker for somebody that is charming.
I made so many jokes about poor Russell Crowe, he once knocked on my dressing room door, and told me he wanted to go out on this chat show we were on to laugh with me. Now he's ruined it. I can't make another joke about him.