British Comedian Quotations

I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.

We suddenly saw how people reacted in the event of massive social upheaval, and the way that the little problems in your life don't go away. You don't stop being frightened of spiders just because the world's blown up.

And erm, perhaps looking like this it was perhaps the only thing I could do.

So he said 'I'm going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library.' I thought 'That's a turn-up for the books.'

So I turned these sort of deficiencies into a, a workable thing if you understand what I mean.

I can't talk to a man who bears an undeserved animosity towards ferrets.

I don't know about doing a sequel. I think you can retroactively damage a product by adding to it.

You don't look at each other on the subway.

If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but garbage. But this garbage, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and none dare criticize it.

You look at shows like The Simpsons or Larry Sanders or Curb Your Enthusiasm or Seinfeld, they're really sophisticated shows that we all love back home.

Dressing up as decrepit old ladies, and even decrepit young ladies, was one of our staples.

You know, Python should have won a Grammy for our musical work on the show.

In England, we don't have any guns whatsoever.

You always worry about films when you hear about them making decisions after announcements are made.

Both me and Edgar are firm believers in never underestimating or talking down to an audience, and giving an audience something to do, to give them something which is entirely up to them to enter into the film and find these hidden things and whatever.

Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it?

That's what we wanted to get across in that moment, particularly when Shaun goes to the shop when he's all hung over. He doesn't notice any of the zombies around him just because he never had before, so why should he at that point?

I loved playing Shaun, he's not that different from me.

Every age sort of has its own history. History is really the stories that we retell to ourselves to make them relevant to every age. So we put our own values and our own spin on it.

The only spoof I think is the title, which was just we thought of very early on and it kind of stuck.

There are a lot of visual marks that have to be hit, and lines that need to be said in a right way - so there wasn't really any improvisation on the set when it came to the bulk of the script.

I think you learn a lot about a country from its art. To me, it's part of the drama of life. It teaches you that there are places, moments and incidents in other cultures that genuinely have a life of their own.

Turn up your radio. Watch lots of telly and eat loads of choc. Feel guilty. Stay up all night. Learn everything in six hours that has taken you two years to compile. That's how I did it.

We have to do a film parody for Comic Relief. We can't decide which film to parody at the moment. Any ideas welcome, but not Spiderman owing to costume being too tight.

Maybe... there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for unlawfully detaining 120 people. Maybe they just got carried away with last year's idea of pre-emptive strikes and thought, 'Let's not wait for an actual crime to occur. Let's get the innocent.

I don't get very involved in the L.A. scene. When you do get invited out, you are expected to be on all the time. It's just wearying.

Because once the word got out that we were making Shaun of the Dead, we didn't want people to think we were backtracking or changing our minds.

He was a very gentle soul and, I think, a very good doctor. And I'm probably being paid more to become a fake version of my own father.

I always loved horror and that's sort of the reason we decided to make the film. We were nourished on those sorts of films, so it was a labor of love.

I think men going bald is certainly off limits, coming from a family as I do, where it's in our gene pool and it could one day happen to me.

I'm supposed to be the director of a television company, but I've only ever seen that company as a vehicle for making the kind of programmes we wanted to make, getting our ideas on the screen.

Most of my work isn't directly autobiographical. It tends to be an amalgam of things I've seen and heard and thought and conversations I've had.

Men would find it much harder because men have such odd personal relationships with each other. They don't really emotionally connect, whereas women do. I think women become very close.

Were British protesters, armed with little more than a frisbee and a bag of plastic toy soldiers, really in danger of being shot by the US military in Gloucestershire?

We are rather in the position that used to exist at the BBC, where you feel that you can pick up the phone to people who are experts in their field and they will be very favourably disposed to you and share their knowledge.

We were watching the first series recently, and it has a charm, a kind of amateur charm. At that point we didn't involve ourselves technically at all - we just messed about and told our jokes - and it looks a bit like that.

When I was growing up, there were just the three channels, so as a nation we all sat down to the same meal at the end of the day. Now there's been this explosion.

We work with every one of them to see if their character wouldn't say a certain thing or if something is worded awkwardly - we work with them to rectify that.

We wanted the humor to happen as a result of the zombies, you know? Like the humor being a result of their presence, rather than them being funny.

The whole world is out of step, apart from me.

I've always been a bit of a Billy Connolly fan I have to say, because he is the supreme protagonist stand-up if you like. He's a perfect stand-up.

Other people build sketches after taking too many sleeping pills, but I never preferred that method, since I would keep dropping my pencil.

Or the Department of Education and another ministry were worried about duplication of effort, so what did they do? They set up two committees to look into duplication and neither knew what the other was up to. It really is a world beyond parody.

Your instinct, rather than precision stabbing, is more about just random bludgeoning.

This autocue was obviously written for someone else and I've been brought in at the last minute.

They have become part of us in that if we get dressed up as them, we don't actually have to have a script. You can just become them. You just become nervy.

There were a lot of areas we didn't cover that I'm hoping to cover if we do some specials. One is to see more of Patsy's home and her home life, which is just the saddest thing.

It ran wild all right. Mind you, although we blushed every time we read the critics' columns, many viewers wrote to say they liked the shows.

It's the very British thing of reserve and keeping everything shut in, that's what people do with their emotions, shut the curtains on them.

There's this idea that it has to be made in London. But we've got everything up here, and if you've got comics who are gifted because of where they're from, you shouldn't drag them away from that natural resource.

I get all kinds of ages, it really does range from silly drunk old men to silly drunk young lads. And the same goes for the females.

But I think our humour is exactly the same today. Only, we've made rules now. We've said we are not going to do prosthetic make-up scenes, because when they take it off half your face comes off.

But I think there's plenty of British comedy that Americans have never seen that they would like but sometimes things just get through.

Before the end of 1960 we were asked to do a series. We did not want to rush things, so we waited until we felt fairly sure of the scripts.

If I see somebody visually challenged, I won't purposefully focus in on them unless they call me names, and then I'll call them back.

I am playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.

The fun is being able to have a show that you can do but then always being able to look out for that opportunity to do something different.

The last time I played a bad guy was in Black Books and it is always fun to play a bad guy, particularly if they are really smilingly nasty.