Bassem Youssef Quotes

When I get some budding young comic who'll come up to me and say, 'What was it like to do it in those days?' I try to be as gracious to him as Stan Laurel was to me.

Egyptian comedy has a very, very old tradition. Our theater and our movies are just, like, amazing. And Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.

I always find it actually funny that the analysis is that the characters I play in comedies are the manchild, the adolescent, characters that refuse to grow up. And yet, if you look back in the history of comedy all the way back to the Marx brothers, that's a big part of comedy.

I grew up on Jerry Lewis and Abbot and Costello, the Marx Brothers.

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.

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.

My family is pretty funny. My mother is British, so she's got a very dry sense of humor. That's where I got that from.

I like good movies, and I love theater, and things that I grew up loving, I still love.

I'm a Jewish son of Russian-Hungarian heritage parents. Humor was very important. My whole goal was to make my parents laugh. And my whole strategy as a young man was, if I could make them laugh, I could have enough time to figure out what to do next.

'All Def' is unlike any other comedy show or set because 'All Def' goes back to the essence of how urban comedy started. We give it a 'stoop appeal.' A stoop appeal is important for us because it's where pretty much all black comics started doing their standup: cracking jokes on the stoop, in the hood.

When I get a chance, I go to the movies.

I like movies! No, I like theater too. And paintings are great, and all of that! But to me, the great sort of artistic medium I think, of our time, is film. I really feel that. I mean to me, there's nothing else out there, where I can sort of suspend disbelief for two hours.

When I was a kid my father would read Neil Simon plays with me when I was going to bed, as bedtime stories. All of these old plays like The Odd Couple and Lost in Yonkers - funny but corny plays about Jewish New Yorkers in the mid-20th century.

From National Lampoon, you go directly to Saturday Night Live, because it's a lot of the same people.

One thing I've found that's really helpful in our relationship is that she's [Anna Faris] very normal. And I don't mean ordinary - I mean, she doesn't act like a big star or a comic icon or anything like that. She's really down-to-earth and sweet, and we do talk about comedy, about movies, about our careers and possible projects.

I got locked into a tradition [at Cambridge] of doing comedy.

Really, more than anything, The 2000 Year Old Man is a huge influence on all of our comedy, but specifically the live version of Oh, Hello.

With vampires, there is such a great tradition that you suddenly find yourself a part of. Each generation reinvents what that means to them.

I'm funny how, I mean funny like I'm a clown?

Tyson dropped the two warriors he was about to tie into a knot and jogged after us. He jumped on the centaur's back. 'Dude!' the centaur groaned, almost buckling under Tyson's weight. 'Do the words "low-carb diet" mean anything to you?

It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.

If you decide to do comedy that involves risk, risk means risk, and you can't complain of flesh wounds if you sit down at the table to play.

George Carlin is an influence on a generation. He made me want to do comedy.

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

I like doing all different types of comedy - stand-up, sketch, movies, TV. I like to try everything.