Dick Van Dyke 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.

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.

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

I've always loved the Marx brothers and Charlie Chaplin.

Young stand-ups, we ought to do comedy in George Carlin's spirit, in Richard Pryor's spirit, in Jackie Gleason's spirit, in Lucille Ball's spirit, because they did it with the spirit.

I am glad that actors like Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan are doing justice to comedy. But in our days, nobody could beat Sunil Dutt and Amitabh Bachchan.

I was the King of Twinkie-Vision one day, the King of Jiggle TV the next, thanks to Farrah Fawcett and 'Three's Company.'

If you listen to Howard Stern, go back and listen to Lenny Bruce, so you can hear what real talent is.

I saw 'A Night at the Opera,' this Marx Brothers film, when I was, like, six years old. I just became obsessed, you know?

It always makes me laugh to think that I get to sit around and chat with people like Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi and get paid for it.

I had fun doing both types of roles. Both are good. One day you laugh, and the next day you cry. That's how it is.

One day I'd love to release a coffee table book of all the crazy notes I got from Disney Channel's S&P and legal department.

If I can make you laugh and learn, I want to be like George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Sam Kinison and Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle. I want to be of that ilk, I don't want to just make you laugh, I want to make you think.

I've never sat down with the intent of trying to shock or anything like that; it just so happens that the sense of humour I enjoyed watching as a kid is the type of humour I try to emulate as an adult. It's not a decision. It might sound a bit wanky, but it's the truth.

The film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky - his films are hard to watch - they're so dense and rich - but they're probably the best things ever made. And Spike Milligan, who was light years ahead of the rest - I played some of his stuff to Jack Black once. He'd never heard of him, so watching him listen to Spike for the first time was just hilarious.

I know for myself, every now and again on HBO, they'll show some of the young comedian specials from the '80s and early '90s, and it's just fascinating to watch those comedians - some of whom are people that are world-famous, like Chris Rock or Judd Apatow - to see the jokes that people had, but also, the way everything looked.

Back when Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin were doing roasts, they were all friends. They knew each other's children, each other's wives, each other's families. It wasn't about being disrespectful. It was about being funny.

If you're watching comedy movies, go back and check out the Marx Brothers in 'Duck Soup,' or Buster Keaton in 'The General,' or Laurel and Hardy or W.C. Fields or whatever - and see what pure talent really was, so that you can see where it came from, and then you can sort of gauge it from there.

I've studied Charlie Chaplin for years. I've studied Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, all of them. I don't play around. This is not a game.

Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, Julia Louis-Dreyfus - I put Issa Rae in that category of comic genius.

Growing up, I was always enthralled by Ronnie Barker. He made my dad howl with laughter, which always intrigued me, and he had the rare gift of being as good a performer as he was a writer.

L.A. gets a bad rap, but that's not the case. Everybody's like a real family out here. I think a lot of that comes from UCB Theatre, Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, Matt Besser, and Ian Roberts. They're really funny, but they're also upstanding people.

I came to work one day, and Ricky was playing music on his guitar, just snickering. He played me the riff that turned out to be 'Rock Lobster,' and it was hilarious. He was just trying to be funny. His guitar style made it moodier, and it really is a driving song, but it does have that funny humor to it.

I saw 'Seinfeld' on TV and told my mum that would be something cool to try one day, and she was like, OK, 'Here is a five-year-old telling me what they want to when they grow up' sort of thing, and what would they know, right!

Kelsey Grammer and Martin Lawrence are such legends.