Quotes on Joke

What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

Oh, I love critics. Because they love me. It's not a joke. They care.

That's what's great about standup comedy: the instant feedback. You get up on stage, you tell a joke, if it doesn't work, come back the next day with a better version of it.

The world was not supportive. They look at me as a joke for 13 to 14 years until I could prove feasibility; then I had competitors. Those that laughed at me became my competitors.

I didn't know if I could be funny on stage or write a joke. But I saw that there are no rules. If you're funny offstage, you can figure out a way to be funny onstage.

Just like a comedian has a certain joke or a jazz musician has a riff that they know will get the crowd, a tap dancer always has a step.

Most people, when they hear the disease name, it's all they know about it. It sounds so mild. When I first was sick, for the first 10 years or so, I was dismissed. I was ridiculed and told I was lazy. It was a joke.

The bad thing about being a famous comedian is that every now and then someone approaches me to tell an old joke. Don't tell me jokes - I have that. People also say the weirdest things, sometimes sarcastic things, and even evil things. They like to provoke to get a reaction.

Comedy needs to happen naturally and be in touch with the character. When you see that guy in your office that everybody laughs at, he doesn't think he's funny. He's just being him, and that's the joke.

If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.

I don't worry about the last shot or the next shot. I concentrate. Every shot gets a clean slate. And when a shot is over, I wipe it out absolutely. Tell a joke or something. If you worry about how you looked, how well you did, you'll go insane.

I don't know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me... anecdotes. But never a joke.

For someone to say that marriage is only about procreation is a joke. I didn't marry my husband to have children. I married my husband because I love my husband.

My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly through the 10,000 nights I spent alone.

Slavery is nothing to joke about. The history of this nation's involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.

Any comic is a very good actor. Look at Don Rickles. He is saying the same joke every night for 20 years and making it look like he just thought of it.

The U.S. - the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that's hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.

When someone pitches a joke for a character that is just perfect, and you can imagine that actor reading that line at your table read or on the set, it's like the sound of a snap snapping into place.

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.