I don't get a chance to be funny with the thrillers. I like to be funny, and I think I am really funny. So with 'Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life', it was fun to let loose.
I remember when we were doing the love scene in Some Kind Of Hero, we got in bed nervously. Then he looked up, and it was very genuine, and he went, " Richard Pryor's in bed with Lois Lane!" And it was so cute!
My parents passed away when I was a teenager, so I had to learn different survival techniques, I think, in comedy. You know, using comedy as a pressure release, as a release valve in life really kept my sanity.
A clown is like aspirin, only he works twice as fast.
In Buddhism, they say attachment to anything only leads to suffering. So when we laugh, it's our way of saying, 'I'm unattached to that.' You're tickled by it, it makes your lobes do something on their own. So humor is very important to me. I always take that to the stage first.
I personally have dealt with any adversity in my life with humor. That's why I told America to 'Read my hips!' on 'Dancing With the Stars' or was happy to play along with Jason Alexander and Jerry Seinfeld in the great restaurant scene on 'Seinfeld.'
I remember 9/11; we had 'Comics Come Home' about a month after those events. That night, even the comedians were concerned. Would the audience be ready to laugh? It was a release for everyone.
I'm very much of the "make it dark, make it grim, make it tough", but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.
After every single take, I laugh. It's my own awkwardness and discomfort about being an actor.
I keep doing stand-up because the world needs laughter - there's always something happening in the country and in the world. That's why I wanted to become an entertainer: to help people forget about their problems for a little while.
While watching him work on the set of the film based on my life - Patch Adams - I saw that whenever there was a stressful moment, Robin would tap into his improvisation style to lighten the mood of cast and crew.
I wouldn't call myself successful, just obsessively exhausted. The music makes me smile, the movies make me feel humbled, and the comedy saves my life every day.
Freud's theory was that when a joke opens a window and all those bats and bogeymen fly out, you get a marvellous feeling of relief and elation. The trouble with Freud is that he never had to play the old Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost.
When you're watching 'Armageddon,' and the Aerosmith song starts... Super funny.
I'm looking for something to laugh over. After long enough, your body just needs to keep the hydration. You can't keep crying it out.
I've kept evolving the character. At first, you hated Goldust with a passion, then you laughed with him.
Comedy is important! When you're having a stressful day, and you come home, you want to watch something that makes you laugh.
It's the way that I think about the world, and the way that I like to tell stories - I don't think you should get too heavy. There's enough out there, in the world, with violence. I think that comedy lightens the heaviness [of the world].
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.
The only award I've been nominated for is a Scottish BAFTA. A Scottish BAFTA, it's like hearing that the animals have their own Olympics. You hear all this stuff about TV being faked. Of course it's faked. It's all faked. That documentary a couple of weeks ago about tribal warfare among monkeys, that was all filmed in a Yates wine lodge in Dundee. Comic Relief is faked. Everybody in Africa is fine.
Everyone goes through all kinds of relationship situations. I'm lucky that I get to be on two comedy shows [during divorce].
I think if you have a comic perspective, almost anything that happens you tend to put through a comic filter. It's a way of coping in the short term, but has no long term effect and requires constant, endless renewal. Hence people talk of comics who are "always on." It's like constantly drugging your sensibility so you can get by with less pain.
When you finish a drama, you go, 'I can't wait to do a comedy.' When you finish a comedy, you go, 'I want to do a dramedy, dark humor.'
Parodies came about because Mr. Ford was actually one of the better athletes of our presidents... but he continually had physical accidents... he was an easy target for me. The main idea was to get people laughing.
With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery.
