When I first started doing these roasts in the mid '90s, they were a lost art, like jousting or calligraphy. But I feel like roasts help tame the room and let off steam... It's like it's all being handled by professionals.
There are days where I can go into a room full of people, talk to every single person, and feel completely at ease, and feel like making every single person laugh, and feel like everyone's having a great time. There are other times where I go into a room of people, and I literally want to run and hide.
My favourite room in my house is easily the top room, which is a bedroom but also a bathroom, with a big, wooden carved bath, two huge fireplaces and a raised bit in the corner for performances. I've had some really lovely parties and poetry readings up there.
I was born in Swindon... a place that always looked west. I found that wherever I go I love to have a room with a view of the western sky. My late brother and I, when we were small, had a room at the back of the house that overlooked the sunset; and both for he and I it was kind of magical.
Commerce is abusive. It's very hobbling to always be saying, 'Please let me put this out, this thing I've worked on for years.' It's like a nasty parent saying, 'No! Now go to your room.' As publishing companies got bigger, you felt even less significant.
I tried to get people at 'South Park' into 'Downton Abbey,' and it didn't work. I think they were like, 'Downton Abbey?' What?' And I kinda made a big plea in the writer's room, like, 'Guys, you should really watch it. It's good. It's addicting. My wife and I are obsessed with it.'
When you work on something in an edit room with just a couple of other people, you never know how it is going to be received.
During the downtime on tour, I simply walk from room to room, staring into my computer.
There are times to be casual and times to be correct. It's all right to wear a sweater and slacks on a picnic, but they don't belong in the theater or the drawing room.
The environment in a writer's room, I've really come to feel, should be some form of democracy.
There's something very particular about the kind of rage you feel when you're alone in a practice room by yourself, unable to master a simple thing like a rudiment.
If you film a scene in a wide shot, especially a disturbing, distressing moment, I do feel like that helps you feel as though you're the room with these people, instead of cutting it up and getting close - which you wouldn't be doing if you were actually in a room with these people.
It's true, most of my days are spent alone in a dark room! I don't really want anyone to see me trying and failing to nail the 40th take of a simple piano cue.
When you're in the living room every week for nine years as one character, it's hard for some people to see you as someone else.
There's plenty of room for all sorts of movies and all sorts of comedies, so I never saw that as a competitive thing. I think there's room in the marketplace for everything.
I have always been interested in how you can walk into a room and there will be 40 people there and you are immediately drawn to one.
Joe Lansdale is one of the few writers able to write in whatever genre or mode he wants on any particular day. How? He doesn't ask permission. He just steps in, out-writes everybody in the room.
I know we can fix our problems. When there are people in the room who care more about doing the job they were elected to do than they worry about winning reelection, it is possible to work together, achieve principal compromise, and get results for the people who give us these jobs in the first place.
Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.
Here's a more controversial idea: In general, Democrats and progressives ought to allow Trump considerable room to choose his own employees - far more room than Republicans allowed during the Obama administration. Tit-for-tat is a dangerous game.
I'm a secret interior decorator. There's a mural on my dining room wall of the railroad tracks at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I love having my hometown with me out here in California.
I think is important to give a child room to make mistakes in order to learn. Mistakes build wings so later in life they can fly and go on their own. Let them fall once in awhile... Be their friend and parent as well. When they're in trouble, they will come to you first. Don't try to change their opinion.
Lesson one, introduce yourself to everyone when you walk into a room. Don't act like you're too bougie to say, 'Hello.'
I don't drink much anymore, but when I traveled with Frank Sinatra, God rest his soul, I used to drink like I could do it. He made it a test. In Vegas, the Rat Pack, which I was a little part of, drank all night and slept most of the day. Then, about 5 o'clock, we'd meet in the hotel steam room, lock the door, and steam our brains out.
If you look at any normal organization, the CEO is the person with the highest E.Q. The person with the highest IQ is often in the back room running the financials or the operations. That's topsy turvy.
I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, found a room in a shared house in North London, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency.
For people like me, who have blocked out a chunk of their past, you wonder - if you open that door, if you walk into that room of your memories, what will happen? Will it destroy you or will it make you stronger?
I get verbal diarrhea in the writers' room. I just tell everyone a million anecdotes and stories and craziness, and we all double up on the floor laughing.
I recall us selling out L.A.'s 5,000-capacity Gibson Amphitheatre and flying straight to Germany to play a 300-capacity room where we'd only sold 120 tickets. This was when 'City Of Evil' was really taking off in the U.S., but it seemed like Europe was less interested.
I think I've owned all the models of iPods so far. And these days between my iPod, iPhone and my personal laptop computer, I'm someone who is very, very grateful for all the ways to listen to music and completely switch off from people around me and listen to the music in detail, which is very hard to do if you're in a room with other people.
If I had all the filmmakers that traumatized me when I was a little kid in this room, all I would say is, 'Thank you,' because they've made me who I am. As much as I say 'trauma,' it all comes from a place of love. The fact that I am feeling emotions at all based on a work is a wonderful thing, so I'm happy to be a part of that discussion.
Airports and 'leg room' on planes are a form of medieval torture.
People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We're not like Ricky Gervais's hyper-real cringe comedy. We're at the other end of the scale, but there's room for the sillier stuff, too.
On a film set, for me, there's so much more time to process what's going on than there is on a television set. There's more wiggle room to try things and fail and try again and get to the heart of what's going on in the scene, which is really fun for me. It's what I like to do.
So I've tried to be this very eccentric character, and that works very well if you want to be a painter which I did once upon a time, if you want to be a musician which I did once upon a time. But if you want to make movies and you want to make challenging movies, you've got to be the sanest person in the room.
Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.
