I was depressed as a child. I found it hard to make friends. My favourite thing was locking myself in the bathroom and practising comedy routines.
Only recently - about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy - have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that 'as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.'
It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
I started in the club route. I did the alternative scene later on. When I lived in New York, I did the Luna Lounge and stuff, where Janeane Garofalo and David Cross and all those guys worked out of, but I came from a comedy club background. I'm proud of that background. I'm one of the people that really crossed over and did both.
Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.
Working with Lucille Ball was just a master class in how to do comedy.
I think the worst thing you could ever do is label comedy. I'm a fan of the broadness of Lucille Ball, the subtlety of Peter Sellers and the oddballness of Fred Armisen and the wittiness of Marty Short. I'm a fan of all of it, and I want to do all of it.
How to do half-hour comedy innovatively is something I do pride myself on. We invented it with 'I Love Lucy.'
At times we were criticized for doing too much slapstick. I don't believe in mild comedy, and neither does Lucy.
Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable.
We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.
I just wanted to be in show business. I didn't care if I was going to be an actor or a magician or what. Comedy was a point of the least resistance, really. And on the simplest level, I loved comedy.
Nobody who is a Penn & Teller fan thinks of us first and foremost as magicians, but as a comedy team.
Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.
Stand-up comedy is a lot about amplifying emotions and situations; movie acting has a lot to do with mellowing things down and making them subtle. The transition was almost terrifying because of the magnitude of change.
I studied theater in college, and I really wanted to be an actress and play a lot of different roles. Then I made landing on a television comedy my main focus.
It's that I wasn't suited to do the kind of comedy that these people were coming to hear - mainstream comedy.
It is easy to misunderstand what a comedy song is, or what its potential is. I’m used to musical comedy being maligned as an easy artform.
No Bengali comedy show is complete without mocking my mannerisms.
We were the only ones interested in comedy. Everybody else wanted to be Martin Scorsese.
