I think I have to laugh about the fact that I grew up in public. All these weird stages in my teenage years are documented. Why did no one tell me how terrible some of those outfits were?
I'm direct, I'm unpretentious and I'm pretty dogged, and I hope I've got a capacity to laugh at myself and not take myself too seriously.
Prophets of doom have always taken risks in terms of ridicule and humiliation. If you stand on a street corner holding up a sign that reads 'The End Is Near,' passersby will laugh and heckle. People will say you're like Chicken Little, running around telling people the sky is falling.
I had a Neighborhood Crime Watch sign in my dorm wall in college. People would come in and laugh at it. 'Where did you get it?' 'I took it. How good is their Neighborhood Crime Watch if they can't even watch their sign?'
Leading sinners to salvation en masse - or one by one - it is all the same. I eat it. I sleep it. I dream it. I speak it. I write it. I pray it. I weep it. I laugh it.
No matter what, I always make it home for Christmas. I love to go to my Tennessee Mountain Home and invite all of my nieces and nephews and their spouses and kids and do what we all like to do - eat, laugh, trade presents and just enjoy each other... and sometimes I even dress up like Santa Claus!
An audience is so important. I would never have had the guts to dub in that big a laugh.
Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on 'Laugh In' in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.
The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
It's funny. You succeed, but now where are you gonna go from there? I've got to keep proving that I can laugh or cry more real each time.
My earliest memories as a kid was I would always try to make my mom and my stepdad laugh at dinner. Or make my friends laugh in class. And, I don't know, it's something I just really enjoy doing.
My work is still very much light-hearted, positive outlook, laugh at yourself. But it isn't going to be the laugh-a-minute kind of thing that my early work was.
For me, it's a purity thing about the joke itself. It's a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that's a legitimate item you have there. For me, it's nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It's just not what I'm in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.
We should all laugh more at our elected officials - it's good for us and good for them.
Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.
While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair, which holds promise of dangers.
Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
I often laugh and say I should go down to the Department of the Interior and register as an endangered species. I'm a gay man over 60 and I'm alive.
What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way. My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen.
Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the 'Zhuangzi' is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It's a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.
