Will Ferrell Quotes

I've always loved pure, silly slapstick comedy. It always makes me laugh.

I've got to say, I've probably seen a lot more of the Three Stooges than of the Marx Brothers.

The history of the relationship between comedy and swimming is short indeed. Of course it is always funny when someone falls into water, but that's about it.

The Marx Brothers isn't subtle, and that's hilarious.

Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.

I was a precocious only child, and then I went through a fat, awkward stage for several years, so I learned to fall back on my humor and personality when I was growing up. It's how you survive, so I think it was more of a natural progression for me, developing into comedy.

If you look at it, the history of comedy has always been strongest among the nations who have been persecuted the most.

I learned a great lesson early on, even before I was really an actor, from that movie 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles' that John Hughes made: that you could make a movie that's really, really, really, really funny, and sometimes you can still achieve... making the audience feel very deep emotions as well.

'Superbad' was such a personal movie.

Remember the phrase - 'Act your age, not your shoe size?' That didn't apply to me, as they were the same until the age of 12 when my feet stopped growing.

When I left school I was full of angst, like any teenager, and I channeled it all into comedy.

The dueling maturity levels in high school is such a source of comedy to me. I was always such a late developer. I was last to walk. I was last to ride a bike. I was last to have sex. That's why it's fun to portray one side of your childhood onscreen.

A lot of people who start work at a very young age never grow up because they never got that opportunity to be a child, so they hold on to that and still do a lot of childish, silly things.

You have to give people permission to laugh. That's why they would always cut to the banana peel in the Laurel and Hardy movies.

Growing up, I loved drama and fantasies. I hated the Marx Brothers. I took all that confusion seriously.

I was a thirteen-year-old boy for thirty years.

The key is just to ignore the pain, because physical comedy only works if you see someone get hurt and they aren't actually hurt. If someone gets hit in the face with a bat, falls down, and gets back up, it's funny. If they stay down and their jaw is wired shut in the next scene, it's really tragic and weird. You have to pretend it doesn't hurt.

I think one of the funniest things about '30 Rock' is that Liz Lemon is sort of like Buster Keaton - she's always the fool, the joke is always on her.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

I feel, as an adult, I'm very similar to how I was as a pre-teen. Maybe it's a case of arrested development, but I feel like it's easy to slip back into those shoes, and I feel like if we were all magically transported back to our middle school years, we'd all act like we did in middle school.

I'm not really big on slapstick humor. I like gentle humor.

I think on 'Third Watch' that I was the comic relief on a lot of that. I mean, I definitely had dark moments, but people tended to think he was funny even if the character himself wasn't having a fun time.

When I was young, I was working with people my own age, so it was kind of a lot of goofing around.

I do love situational comedy, clowning, and slapstick; I approach that with a lot of respect. The goofier you are, it doesn't mean you're going to be funnier.

What's interesting about Laurel and Hardy is that in most comedy teams, there's a straight man, and then there's the funny guy. And with Laurel and Hardy, they're both the funny guy.