I like to think of myself as the middleman between Fred Allen and Henny Youngman.
Ronnie Barker will forever be remembered as one of the great comic actors.
He's a very funny and very nice man. When you read the script, you want to stick with it. But when you're with Eddie Murphy you've got to improvise. He's always making jokes and making me crack up when the camera's on.
If comedy duos don't like each other, it just won't work.
It was always the most fun thing in the world to think of a joke area and talk about it with someone like Jim Carrey, and then he would get on stage fearlessly and tear the house down. That's something I always enjoyed. It also allowed me to not be terrified.
We gave each other a hug, [Richard Pryor] said how much he admired me, I said how much I admired him, and we started working the next morning, and we hit it off really well, and he taught me how to improvise on camera.
I think both of us [ with Steve Oram], once we decided to do comedy, knew that we would have to come to London to do that.
We all [Ed Simmons,Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis] started together, so there were no rules - anything we wrote became television.
I think in most cases, if you're with good people, comedy creation happens faster in collaboration. That's how I can tell if it's a good collaboration: If it's faster than me by myself, then it works. If it's slower than me by myself, then I get out of the room.
You know, when you're part of a comedic duo, you can take breaks. It's kind of like having a partner that is good with a kid.
I've known Harvey for over 40 years and I worked with him on the Burnett show for 11 years. I guess you could say we're about as close as you can get to being a comedy team.
We had not had time to establish ourselves as a double act before Ernie joined the Merchant Navy. I teamed up with the brother of the late Dave Morris.
Comedy teams are a real hard thing to do. That's why you don't see any of them.
Well, anybody can be a straight man if he hears well. You just have to wait for laughs. A straight man just repeats the questions and the comedian gets the laughs and you just wait for them and don't let them die completely at the tail end of the laugh.
I started by writing, with my partner Ed Simmons, a monologue for Danny Thomas, that he performed at Ciro's nightclub in Los Angeles.
