Silent Comedy Quotes

I saw 'The Artist.' It's really beautiful and it's all done to the letter with all the silent film techniques. The costumes were amazing and the dog is so good.

There was a film class in my high school in Northfield, Minnesota, which was very unusual. I saw my first Buster Keaton film there, aged about 15. It made a gigantic impression on me.

You have to give people permission to laugh. That's why they would always cut to the banana peel in the Laurel and Hardy movies.

I used to watch the 'Jackie Gleason Show' and Phil Silvers, those early TV things. And a lot of them were patterned on the silent comedies of the '20s.

Comedy isn't necessarily all dialogue. Think of Buster Keaton: the poker face and all this chaos going on all around him. Sometimes it's a question of timing, of the proper rhythm.

I grew up watching Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.

Harold Lloyd was not a comedian. But he was the finest actor to play a comedian that I ever saw.

I think physical comedy is an amazing asset because it tells a story that's more universal than just language and dialogue. I grew up watching Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. They're very powerful figures in my life.

Going as far back as 'Dexter's Lab,' we've always had these sequences with no dialogue. The interesting thing is those sequences got the biggest reactions.

Whatever happened to a good pie-in-the-face joke?

A fantasy of mine is to do a podcast that's Marcel Marceau and I, and you only hear me laughing at him and trying to figure out what he's doing.

I feel like you could watch 'Grand Budapest' without sound, and it would still be funny.

Chaplin was my idol. I remember watching those movies at this little theater in Woodstock, N.Y., when I was probably 6 and laughing so hard at the surprises, like Keaton suddenly being dragged by a streetcar.

When you don't have a laugh track, you can make the clothes funny. We can make a sign funny. We can make the way somebody walks funny. The makeup can be 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.

Buster Keaton's 'The General,' from 1927, I think is still one of the great films of all time.

I just devoured all of his [Buster Keaton’s] films because his sense of comic timing was amazing. He’s the closest a human being has ever come to a cartoon character. And I was just amazed at his sense of character and timing, the humor. It's all just so…sophisticated, even when you watch it today.

I was a big fan of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

I have done 'Gutar-Gu,' which was a silent comedy show.

I feel as though the camera is almost a kind of voyeur in Mr. Bean's life, and you just watch this bizarre man going about his life in the way that he wants to.

I've always loved silent movies. I recently saw 'Tilly's Punctured Romance' at the Academy, which is the first comedy made with Charlie Chaplin in 1914, and I sat there, and I couldn't believe that the entire audience of 2,000 people were laughing that hard from a movie made in 1914 - and there were no words; it was all faces.

Mr. Bean is at his best when he is not using words, but I am equally at home in both verbal and nonverbal expression.

Now, what does an actor who can't talk do? Wait for silent pictures to come back?

I took a couple of classes in clowning, but that was more like Lucille Ball kind of slapstick, not Ringling Brothers. But we had to do things silently, and the teacher would do this running commentary. 'Does this make Clown sad? Oh, Clown doesn't like that, does Clown?' Always 'Clown.' Never a name.