Even if it's a white crowd, I tell my jokes for the four black people in the room, not the 100 whites.
You can't just yell jokes at people.
I was so amazingly witty when I had the No. 1 movie, you have no idea. People laughed at every single one of my jokes. Then when I hadn't had a hit for three or four years, some of these same people pretended they didn't see me when I walked in the room.
All the truly great stand-ups say, 'I go onstage, and I work on jokes. The inspiration will happen while I'm doing my work.' To me, in the end, the surest thing is work.
Anybody can make jokes. But unless they come from conviction, and there's truth in them, you haven't nailed it. They aren't as funny as they could be, and they don't make a point.
The trouble with the jokes is that once they're written, I know how they're supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I'm more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.
They have what you call a black night where they have black people come in for just one night only to watch comedy, and you get all your local drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes, all of them come in, sit down, and listen to you tell jokes. They the hardest people to make laugh.
I think in my case, I had no choice but to have a good sense of humor. I grew up with my dad, Danny Thomas, and George Burns and Bob Hope and Milton Berle and Sid Caesar and all those guys were at our house all the time and telling jokes and making each other laugh.
We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have given up on the Pentagon's corrupt use of our tax dollars.
I enjoy jokes, smiling, and making people smile. I may be a little different, but that's OK, who wants to be normal anyway?
For starters, let's dispense with the cheap jokes about cannibalism. That means cracks about giving an arm and a leg - sorry - for a good book on the subject, or similar tasteless - sorry, again - attempts to make the subject more palatable - last one.
I see my daft surname as a positive thing. It first dawned on me that I had a comical name when someone called me 'Fishface' on my first day at school. I've heard all the fish jokes since then, many times over.
I'm not good at narrative; I'm really a gag writer, and that comes from being in the newspaper comic strip world for a while in college. What I do is I just write tons of jokes, then I sort them out in terms of quality and then pick the best of the jokes and then try to form them into a plot. If I get a good theme going, I feel lucky.
Vegas has the Whitman's Sampler of audiences. They come from all different places, so you have to do some crowd psychology. You have to find the heartbeat of the room. It doesn't shift my jokes, but it shifts my timing and my attention.
I think all art - even one as lowly as making jokes about celebrities - is there to make a connection.
My goal is to be exactly how I am offstage - although I realize I'm supposed to punctuate it with jokes.
I didn't really know how to write jokes, so I just told weird, long stories about being tall and beautiful and wealthy in New York. I'd tell them very seriously, but I kind of looked like a drag queen at the time with big wigs and crazy 12-inch platform heels.
I'm a Macintosh nut. I got my PowerBook, so if I'm not writing jokes, I'm working on that.
People want to see comedies where characters aren't sacrificed for the jokes.
'Guyism' wanted a daily video series. They told me they were planning on hiring a girl and then hiring someone to write all her jokes. Then they figured it would be easier just to get me, so they offered me $750 a month to do it, which turned into an offer to move to New York and do it full-time for $30,000 a year.
Standing as a witness in all things means all things - big things, little things, in all conversations, in jokes, in games played and books read and music listened to, in causes supported, in service rendered, in clothes worn, in friends made.
I don't like any one race or look or type of guy. My tastes as far as looks go are very diverse. I like guys with scruffy beards and leather jackets, but I also like a clean-cut 'GQ'-type guy, so my tastes are very ranged among somebody who laughs at my dumb jokes, too. I have plenty of them.
I tell jokes, chat with people, and make stuff.
I don't know if I necessarily fit in the action-thriller genre, but I'd love to do something where I could actually kick some butt and then tell a few jokes. That would be awesome! That would be my dream job.
I always say to people that Zimbabweans are the funniest people in Africa; we even laugh at funerals. And it's true. I mean, there are so many jokes about funerals. There are so many jokes about AIDS. We find ways of coping with pain by laughing at it and by laughing at ourselves.
I just do jokes about real situations, pure observation.
I'm always trying to make myself laugh. I'm the most enthusiastic audience I'm likely to find, so if it doesn't make me smile then it probably won't work on you. The jokes that only make me shrug get cut.
My job as the host of a rock awards show is not to be as divisive as possible, but certainly you want to be able to interject your jokes and how you feel about stuff.
I like Jacques Derrida; I think he's funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he's not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?
My hair was long with a fringe, and people would make jokes, calling me Britney and Lady Gaga.
While 'The Middle' is still funny for adults to watch, there aren't sex jokes. And I'm fine with that. I like the idea that my nieces and nephews can watch it without their parents.
I have a file of four million jokes... I have them cross-indexed. Whatever subject you want, I have a joke on it.
With my boyfriend, we can make sexist jokes to each other because we know it's absolutely not true. If I get home from a long day and he says: 'Go on, get in the kitchen,' it's funny because we know it's not our lives.
Jokes for jokes' sake are kind of meaningless to me. I understand the value of them, but it doesn't speak to me as much. You can lace your argument with jokes, but tell me why you're presenting this argument. What does it mean?
The jokes I was always attracted to, and that I would tell for the longest, were jokes where I cared about the subject. Whenever I wrote a joke where I didn't care, even if it was really funny, the third time I told it, it would lose steam.
People work so hard, and I want to keep that energy up, and you can spread that if you're the actor. But I'm also not able to turn it on and off like a faucet. A lot of what I'm called upon to play is violent or angry. When I'm messing around with the crew and making jokes, I remember, 'Oh, this is the guy I normally am.'
