Comedians Quotations

Podcasts feature comedians being as funny as they can be in a non-censored situation. It's really akin to standup in a way. When you go see a comedian in standup, that is the most pure, unadulterated form of their art.

I need wrong to get laughs. I need a normal world so that I can be abnormal, and that's my problem. Comedians need prejudice.

There is a cliche that probably has some anecdotal evidence on the side that comedians are very depressed people, but that's because no one is ever going to seem as funny in a normal conversation as compared to when they're up there onstage in the spotlight making a huge audience keel over with laughter.

When I hit the scene, there was Billy Connolly and Max Boyce. It was all mother-in-law and Irish jokes, and we broke the mould. Now there are thousands of comedians out there, and I don't think I can be above it all.

Comedians take a neat situation and turn it into a mess. And in my books I do the same thing, but it's the other way around. I like to mess around with mess. A mess is only a mess because someone tells you it is.

I think sometimes comedians and entertainers and artists, sometimes they get onstage, and it's all for what they want to do. I think you still need to do stuff for the audience. They're the ones who are making it possible.

'Bunk' is a comedy game show where, each week, three of my favorite comedians compete in a series of bizarre and meaningless challenges all for my entertainment. Ethan T. Berlin and Eric Bryant created 'Bunk.'

Comedians talk to other comedians the way jazz musicians can talk to each other.

I think 'Lost in Space' certainly shifted from being an ensemble adventure series about a family facing the unknown alien environment to this trio of comedians - Dr. Smith, the Robot, and Will Robinson being the straight guy. It definitely changed its tone over the three seasons and 84 episodes we did.

As far as I can tell, comedians are pretty serious people, and that's why they make fun of things all of the time.

The first purpose of comedy is to make people laugh. Anything deeper is a bonus. Some comedians want to make people laugh and make them think about socially relevant issues, but comedy, by the very nature of the word, is to make people laugh. If people aren't laughing, it's not comedy. It's as simple as that.

Comedians are the monkeys of acting. When you go to the zoo, everybody loves the monkey exhibit.

There are a lot of famous comedians from Liverpool, then obviously the Beatles, and the football club. That's what people in Liverpool are passionate about.

I think the problems with comedians that are political, and there are some brilliant ones, are the ones that offer no solutions. Not that there's a moral obligation for a comic to fix things, but I like to see a comic that's upset about something and offer a solution. It can be a funny solution. I like to see the thought process.

Most young comedians would be lying to say that they weren't huge Weird Al fans when they were kids. Weird Al is probably the first person I ever realized had a career that was just making jokes.

Comedians like to see people smile. With acting, I love giving people a feeling, an emotion. I like to give people a feeling. When they come away from my scene, I want them to think.

When I became a standup comic, my hero, one of them, was Richard Pryor, and you know, I think that comedians, like, comedians talk about hacks, and what a hack is, is someone who does stuff that's not original.

When you see a comedian on stage, the best comedians make it feel like a conversation. But it's not. We have very little interest in what an audience has to say during a performance. Being a stand-up comedian, you're an egomaniac to some degree. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say, apparently. That's not how real relationships work.

Some comedians will tour and do these classic bits all the time. But now with YouTube and Comedy Central, people see your stuff, and they don't want to hear you do that again.

I'd like to be remembered as good person and as one of the best comedians of my generation.

Comedians second-guessing themselves is scary. Poor taste is not a crime and we can't forget that.

I was always funny, but I wasn't a great musician, and I wanted to be a musician way more than I wanted to be a comic. I just didn't think comedians were cool when I was a kid.

Where are the exhortations for children to reject the self-defeating stereotypes that reduce black people to violent, oversexed 'gangstas,' minstrel show comedians and mindless athletes?

When I started, I was doing all the good comedians I'd ever seen. Then I developed my own voice. My routines are my natural way of looking at the world.

Coming from the Midwest, I didn't know about stand-up as an art. I just thought stand-up comedians were old men in suits talking about their wives.

After the comedy boom of the '80s, there was a certain formula that comedians had to do and could do in order to be successful touring comedians, and those were mainly observational comedians who had a very strict structure of what made an act, and I think it was very performance oriented.

For some reason, comedians are still children. The social skills somehow never reach us, so we say exactly what we think without weighing the results.

It's up to comedians to shine the light on what's wrong in the world, and we don't want things swept under the rug.

At one point when I was very young, when I was first starting out, I thought, 'Well, one day I'll be able to put all the music away and become a real comedian.' But then I realized there are amazing musical comedians out there, that musical comedy is probably something I'll always want to pursue.

I'd say Jon Stewart has remained funny the entire time. Jon always makes it funny first. And he's just, he's talking about serious things, but in a funny way. Other comedians will talk about serious things in a serious way, and then you don't know what's going on.

You go to any Jay-Z concert, and he plays his hits. Comedians don't have hits. You have to have a whole brand-new hour. You have no hits to rely on. It's the hardest thing.

So I think all comedians are earning their wings into heaven. We're all going to heaven, but everybody's not going to get their wings. Some people are just going to be regular angels. Doing cleanup, janitor work. In heaven, I'm going to sit on the couch with Oprah.

Years ago, there was a variety theatre in every British town, and people paid to go down and see it. Comedy was the main part of the theatre, and comedians earned a living by being funny. Now you have comedy in television instead. Comedians now have to be funny within a play.

People want their actors to do comedy, too. They don't want any comedians next to the actor. They want one solo hero and want to see everything in him.

It's weird because standup can be like therapy. Comedians can't be satisfied with just having fun with our friends. We've got to figure out a way to do it on stage.

Comedians are innately programmed to pick up oddities like mispronounced words, upside-down books on a shelf, and generally undetectable mistakes in everyday life.

Everyone forgets comedians are actors. There's no question about it. A Robin Williams cannot say the same line every night for 40 weeks and make it sound fresh unless he's doing an acting job.

The young comedians always ask me, 'What's the secret for staying around?' I tell them, 'There is no secret - just stay around. Longevity is the most important thing.'

Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.

If writers, like comedians or singers, could only hear themselves bombing as they worked, it's likely that certain books would be cut short after the first few leaden sentences.

I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.

From the point of view of being in the public radar, comedians have less problems than other actors. Action movie stars like Stallone or Schwarzenegger usually attract the more aggressive fans.

Tons of comedians have said, 'I grew up learning from Bill Cosby. He's great.' But that respect doesn't mean much to the young people. They like their ginger ale with hot sauce.

It's famous that comedians have a very dark personal state of mind. I think, in my case, it's the same. The only way to get deep is to have a balance, or a counterbalance.

The Perrier is about helping to discover new talent. In years to come, this generation of young comedians who are stepping into the spotlight will be setting the heather alight.

The Perrier is about helping to discover new talent, ... In years to come, this generation of young comedians who are stepping into the spotlight will be setting the heather alight.

There are comedians who focus on everything that is external. They focus on politics and the news, what's going on in that city and that night.

When we go to see comedians or funny movies, they don't address the wall behind them; they face us. This is why a game's first job is to entertain through gameplay and secondarily through humor, drama, or other traditional entertainment devices. The humor has to be a gentleman. I mean, it needs to be squeezed in around the game.

We're going to look like we're guilty of something when it's just comedians and vaudeville dancing.

When I did 'Bremner, Bird and Fortune' I think it was accepted that comedians can contest the arguments just as well as journalists.

When I moved to New York, I was wide-eyed. I was nice to everyone, which comedians hate.

There are many different kinds of comedians ... the observational humorist, the impressionist, the character creator, the physical comedian, the self-deprecator, the dirty-joke teller. What made Richard so brilliant is he was able to incorporate all these styles at once.

Most of the world knows him as the dad on Full House , but I know him as this funny, sick comedian. He and Andrew Dice Clay were the two dirty, hilarious comedians when I was growing up.

Plus, the response from Sept. 11 was a lot different. You had (government officials) out there with a sense of control and authority, despite what we saw in 'Fahrenheit 9-11.' Here, the complete lack of authority immediately becomes the type of stuff that comedians are great at doing.

Only one that's lasted 34 years, six months and five days. A lot of comedians are really angry people, and they deal with rage through being acerbic, subversive, in a funny way. It's just a way to sublimate what could be a lot uglier.

Given the current state of publishing, I think it helps to have a brand name on the cover of your book. Comedians are proven commodities with built-in audiences. They may not have the writing chops of a Dave Eggers, but they're salacious and funny and self-reflective.

Had this been handled expeditiously, quickly, it might have been a story on the style page, or limited to the late night comedians and the cartoonists. There's simply no question they fumbled this one.

He looked better than he ever looked to me. But he's the one who decides whether he can look at himself in the daytime. The one thing you have to understand about comedians is, the more they make people smile, the more pain that they usually feel inside.

I was doing a show at the Comedy Store which Eddie Izzard saw, and we chatted for a bit afterwards. I didn't really know he was; we just hung out as comedians together, and when he heard my story, he said, 'Why don't you tell that on stage?' I didn't really want to burden people with all that, but he said that I could have fun with it.

I think there are different kinds of comedians, and I prefer the clowns who are going: 'I'm an idiot, aren't we all a bit like this, laugh at me.' Whereas, a lot of other comedians are saying: 'Aren't I clever? You want to be me, aren't I cool? Revere me.' Which is fine. But that's not my bag.

Stand-up comedians say that anyone in the audience can be funny, but people paid to see us because we're just a little bit funnier. In the same way, I think anybody can play music - in fact, I think everyone has music in them, but some of us can do it a little better.

I think comedians partially use it for shock value. They know it makes people uncomfortable, so they exploit it. Richard Pryor probably said the word 100 times a day, but I think there's a degree of disregard for what anyone has to think that's associated with someone who just throws the word around the way some comedians do.

I think comedians have a function in society, which is to make fun of our icons.

Most Scots might be able to identify six vegetables - but only two MSPs. There are parts of Scotland where you rarely get more than 40% turnout at the polls. There's a big disconnect there, and I think comedians bridge that gap.

That's what comedians do, comedians talk a lot. I laugh at it, too. He's never hung out with me. I don't even know him. So I can say anything about him, and he can say anything about me.

That's what comedians do. Comedians talk a lot.

Who knew Rob Lowe was funny? On 'Parks and Rec,' we've got some of the funniest comedy writers, some of the funniest comedians in the world working there. And if anything, we don't just effuse to one another and be like, 'Oh, Rob Lowe's really funny,' if he wasn't.

We mustn't complain too much of being comedians -- it's an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed -- that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.

We had always insisted on working with actors because they do what they're told. You can make actors play the character exactly as you want him, expressing opinions on politics, religion, all aspects of society. No comedian would do that for fear of alienating their following. Actors brush off criticism by attributing offending mannerisms or material to the role. Besides, comedians argue about the laughs.

Tim Conway is one of the best-loved comedians in the country. The combination of great comedy with an exciting sport for a worthy cause will be a guaranteed hit with our audience that night.

I spent seven years in clubs in England, Australia, etc. Not all comedians cross over to sell out in a theatre.

So much of good comedy is timing and being able to hear the music of a line and the rhythm of a joke. I think that's why a lot of the best comedians have some sort of musical instincts. That's one reason why Kelsey and I work so well together. He's also a musician.

The way that he feels about Johnny Carson is the way that all of us, the comedians of our era, feel about him.

They took a story that was going to be laugh lines for late-night comedians and turned it into a front-page story. There was something in their attitude there that I think is going to have a lingering effect, about how a certain arrogance seemed to have crept into the White House complex.

A lot of female comedians will go up there in a sweatshirt and Converses, trying to dress themselves down, because it is sort of a boy's club. I'll go up in my heels. I like that people don't think I'll be funny. I'll take that on. I don't do standup comedy - I do standup and I do comedy, but I don't go up there and do jokes.

A lot of comedians out there are aspiring actors, but Dave Attell is a comedian who loves doing comedy and loves to tour. It's great seeing people who love what they do.

All of my favorite actresses are comedians at heart: Shirley MacLaine and Madeline Kahn, Diane Keaton and Debra Winger. And they are all amazing dramatic actresses, but everything they do is funny.

As I was watching Dave talking about Johnny Carson, the way he feels about Carson is the way we, the comedians of our generation, feel about him,

It's still amazing to me to walk down the halls of 'SNL.' You see pictures of the greatest comedians we grew up worshiping, basically. It's crazy to be able to still work there.

The biggest threat to any politician is an artist. Comedians unleashed can do a great deal of damage. David Letterman can do more damage than any Republican assault by Newt Gingrich.

There's this misconception that comedy and music go together. They don't. Comedians can't compete with rock stars; they're just not on the same level. Rock stars will always be cooler. They will always get more girls.

So comedians truly are physicians of the soul ... that's what you can call me, Dr. Dreesen.

I'm a comedian, and the other comedians are played by comedians, the same way that in 'Once' there are the musicians that hang out together.

I'm not a confrontational person or comedian. I think we can explore more things if one of us is not fighting with the other. I take it easy. But I do like comedians who are very different from myself: I love dry comics with deadpan one-liners. I look on and think, 'That's amazing; why didn't I think of that?'

I like seeing comedians do stuff that I could never do.

I'm no way one of those comedians who want to do drama. I really do love comedies. I hope to go back to it.

I remember 9/11; we had 'Comics Come Home' about a month after those events. That night, even the comedians were concerned. Would the audience be ready to laugh? It was a release for everyone.

I have seen and heard comedians who had really funny 'stuff' but yet could not make the people laugh; then, again - I have seen others whose stuff was anything but humorous, and the audience would howl with laughter.

If comedians were truly free of repression, there would not be an inherent need to perform for the love of a roomful of total strangers.

I feel I'm as qualified for office as any of the other comedians who are running.

I feel like a lot of comedians do have that deep, dark thing. I have my stuff, but I don't go to that dark place. Things are just way too good.

Comedy industry people, like club owners, comedians, managers, bookers and the like, all know it's harder to get laughs clean than dirty. So comedians who can get belly laughs working clean get props from those in the know.

For one year, Davis continued to have discussions directly with actors and comedians regarding signing with Davis to produce and perform his screenplay, ... offered funding through an investor to produce the screenplay for video distribution.

The idea of taking this very modern 21st century story of tender love between two cowboys and putting it into the time period of an old Western opens up the floodgates for telling jokes. Comedians can't resist because we all know what a cowboy movie is and this challenges it.

The film, as crazy as it is, is a love letter to comedians and comedy and all the different ways they improv around something,

The film also speaks to a worldview: comedians have a bond like no other. The thing that makes an individual feel odd and outcast in the real world is what makes them special and important among comedians. If the rest of the world championed and encouraged individuality we'd all stop being so self-loathing and fearful of each other, and all get along a hell of a lot better. And I bet we'd all laugh more, too.

Comedians haven't improved. Nothing has improved but taxes.