Wendi McLendon-Covey Quotes

To me, if you are in the same building with Peter Sellers or John Cleese, or any of those guys and holding your own making other people laugh, that's a compliment.

I always was trying to make people laugh as a kid. I was a big fan of Carol Burnett and Gilda Radner. I watched them and I remember feeling as a child, when I heard the laughter they got, a little jealous that they made someone laugh like that.

I grew up on Don Knotts and Jerry Lewis and all the guys from Second City.

When I was a kid, I was a fan of comedy. I always loved Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Dave Letterman - not an actor, obviously, but I'm still impressed by his wit. I wanted to emulate them because they made me laugh.

I think the job of a comedian is to make people laugh, but also challenge them to laugh at things they didn't know they could until now.

I was always sort of a ham as a kid, just always wanting to entertain and to get people to laugh.

I gravitated toward being a funny guy. I liked the radio comedians. I lived in the Golden Age of radio, and the Golden Age of television came along when I was still in my early teens.

I knew I wanted to be in show business so I took the path of least resistance. I loved comedy. But you never know you are funny until people laugh. It's just what I was interested in. I could make people laugh, I guess, but doing it at school and doing it onstage are very different things.

Nobody sets out to offend or shock for the sake of shocking. You set out to get laughs.

I was raised with 'Laurel and Hardy' and 'I Love Lucy' and Jerry Lewis, and I just loved it. And I had a friend in high school and we would just laugh all day and put on skits. You know, it's the Andy Kaufman thing or the Marty Short thing where you're performing in your bedroom for yourself.

I was always the class clown; I made my family laugh, and that was when I was always happiest. I grew up listening to stand-up comedians' albums and watching them on TV, on 'The Tonight Show' and Letterman.

I remember listening to Eddie Murphy's Delirious on cassette tape - you might have to explain what that is to your younger demographic - with my father. I wanted to make people laugh that hard.

Performing comedy, you develop a rhythm of ideas and laughs. I live for it.

I'm in awe of comedians that do things that I can't do, whether it be a one-liner comic like Anthony Jeselnik, whether it be social issues commentary, whether it be - hell, Carrot Top. I can't be Carrot Top. I can't.

The girls that I grew up with, and my friends and I, we just never had interests in common. I loved comedy. I loved Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner, Lucille Ball, and Goldie Hawn movies. I just wanted to laugh. I liked women in comedy, and I liked male comics as I got a little older. My interests just never matched up with other girls'.

Good comedy makes you laugh, and bad comedy makes people you hate laugh.

I could never be Charlie Chaplin. But the films that were made by people like him, or Gene Wilder, or John Candy, the people that inspired me so much were the people that were able to combine humor with heartbreak so beautifully and fluidly. Those films I think were what inspired me to want to come to L.A. and audition for movies.

I feel things can always be funny, but that's probably because I have some kind of leftover childhood need to make people laugh. For somebody like me, that's the thing you excel at.

A poet or a comedian can say what's on the mind of people. They should be funny. They should make you laugh. It may be so truthful that it hurts, but it makes you laugh.

I always knew I wanted to do comedy. I like making people laugh. I started out young just making my family laugh and trying to make kids laugh in school and getting into plays. I think it's the only thing I know how to do so hopefully it works out.

I like to think of myself as the middleman between Fred Allen and Henny Youngman.

Comedy is a noble art. And every comedian who does anything is serving a noble purpose.

Making my family laugh when I was little - it became an addiction. It was a kind of survival.

If you don't laugh, you're going to cry and people are crying. That's why I guess you have lots of people like comedians to keep us laughing.

Comedy is a universal language. I grew up watching Nagesh, Surilirajan, Thenga Srinivasan and S.V. Shekhar's comedies. And, of course, Charlie Chaplin! These artists are so blessed: they can make other people happy.