Comedy Legacy Quotes

My mother is from another time - the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that's what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn't know what I'm talking about. I know if I wasn't her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.

I've always felt that there's a Catskills comic who lives in my head and is constantly trying to get out. There's all these jokes that have been passed down from Jewish generation to Jewish generation, which I love but which I've always made fun of.

Who do I like? I am a big fan of French and Saunders - not that that they are particularly stand-up I have to say, but I think they have been great for women and they are of themselves just incredibly funny whether they are male or female.

I think of Mike Myers as the Buster Keaton of today. I think he's brought us something so special.

My body has been making women laugh for the last 20 years and I'm happy to continue to oblige.

Thanks to Bart Simpson, I have a pretty good life.

Comedy is in my blood. Too bad it's not in my act.

If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.

I do enjoy them. I get to meet the next generation of comics and help them out. Big comics doing small shows was something that used to happen a lot more back in the day. I wish there was more of that.

Everybody remembers 'Just Shoot Me,' and I'm very proud of that. It's still on TV, and people still catch it and laugh about it, and I personally have wonderful, wonderful memories working with those people.

Fred Silverman, the head of ABC, he offered me a lot of comedy series but I told him I'd already been the best comedy series around, "The Odd Couple," and so when he saw that I did Quincy he called my agent and said, Jack turns me down? All my good series and he ends up playing an undertaker." And this was the HEAD of ABC series.

When I used to watch comedians with my dad, he laid it all out for me. He wanted to be a comedian himself, and he was so funny. We'd watch stand-up on TV, and he'd tell me the subtext of what they were saying.

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.

That's what I grew up loving. Whether it's 30 Rock or The Office or Parks And Rec... I don't know if those still work on network today or not, but The Grinder did not. But the great news is that it lives on on Netflix.

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.

I think we carry around the idea of being a Kid in the Hall as part of our identity. It's a big part of how we see ourselves now.

There's only going be one Richard Pryor. You know how many came out after Richard Pryor and died trying to be compared to him? Or Bernie Mac? You got to be like you.

Katey Sagal, you are an incredible actress. You worked on ‘Married with Children,’ the show that changed comedy, ‘Sons of Anarchy,’ the show that took comedy to a whole new level and ‘8 Simple Rules,’ the show that killed John Ritter.

The king of comedy is dead. Richard Pryor was the king of comedy. The rest of them are the king of copycats.

Freddie Prinze was my idol, and he died, and there is not much of his stuff to look at. But now, your comedy can live on forever.

Harold Ramis and I together did the ‘National Lampoon Show’ off Broadway, ‘Meatballs,’ ‘Stripes,’ ‘Caddyshack,’ ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Groundhog Day.’ He earned his keep on this planet. God bless him.

[Wayne's World and Tommy Boy] was all from hosting Saturday Night Live the first time [in 1990]. I just had such a great time, and I had such a simpatico relationship with Mike Myers. And Lorne [Michaels]. I'll always be grateful for Lorne, who saw me as funny.

I was scared to death because for the comics of my generation, HBO specials are like the pinnacle. I'm thinking of all these unbelievable comedians I've seen on HBO: Chris Rock, George Carlin, Damon Wayans, Richard Pryor and Billy Crystal. I started having a panic attack seeing my name in that list of people. It was pretty overwhelming.

I mean, 'Kids In The Hall' is the reason I have any career at all.

Poor Darrell Hammond. What's he going to do when I leave office?