William Maclay Quotes

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

I don't believe that anybody has come to a conclusion on why something is funny. It's funny because it's ridiculous and it's ridiculous for different reasons at different times.

I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing.

Naked dudes are inherently funny.

In comedy, you have to be unafraid to hang from the tree branch naked in the high wind and you have to be absolutely unafraid to look ridiculous and silly.

For me, nothing brings out my 'born yesterday' idiotic qualities quite like having my photograph taken.

I felt self-conscious going out in the street prior to ever even being in a movie. That's just me.

He seems like an American at a carnival ball. He doesn't know the tune. He doesn't understand the lyrics, he doesn't have rhythm, he doesn't know how to dance, and he came without a costume.

I think nudity is funny, especially when it's inappropriate.

It's daunting doing something you haven't done before - you feel silly; you feel like a bit of an idiot.

Sometimes the stuff I come up with is so silly I feel like I need to apologize at the end of every one of them.

I like to think of myself as the corniest, most awful thing you could possibly imagine.

A farce is that in poetry which grotesque (caricature) is in painting. The persons and actions of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsistent with the characters of mankind; and grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this.

And anyway, who wears a tiara on a jungle gym?

It's a dirty job being ridiculous, but I'll do it

Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory.

I think ultimately, when you believe somebody is going through a situation and it's either awkward or ridiculous, but you believe it, that can be funny.

The thing that's weird is that we thought it was funny. We expected people to get the joke - that we [with Andrew Ridgeley] were two guys really making asses of ourselves.

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.

I come home from work early one day, and I see a guy jogging down the street in his underwear. I ask him, "Why are you jogging in your underwear?" He says, "You came home from work early".

He has so many muscles he has to make an appointment to move his fingers.

I've got a black woolen hat and it's got Pervert written across the front of it. It's the name of the clothing label. And I was with my wife and my baby at the supermarket and I didn't think. I just put my hat on Clara's head, because it was cold. And the looks. I couldn't figure out why I was getting death looks. And then I realized my 10-month old baby's wearing a hat with the word Pervert written on it and these people were like, 'There's Satan! There's Satan out with his kid!' And then I made a point of her wearing it every time we went there.

You'll wrest a burning sword from an angel, but you're afraid of bats?" "I'm not afraid of them. I just don't like them. They're...furry. Flying things shouldn't be furry. It's not right. And if I ever meet the Creator, I'm taking that one up with him." "That I'd like to see. Your one and possible only chance to get the answer to every question in the universe, and you ask, 'Why are bats furry?'" "I will. You just wait.

There is no such thing as an appropriate joke. That's why it's a joke.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.