Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Musicals are just funny to me.
'Galaxy Quest' is a fantastic film.
I'm not very funny at all in real life.
The acting life can be quite scary, really.
I have trouble keeping a lid on the self-hatred.
I miss quite major cultural signposts quite often.
I've got a lot of friends with whom I discuss jazz.
My life is divided up into before I had kids and after.
I write tragedies and things when I'm alone. Chekhovian dramas.
Comedians are not well people. Well people are not drawn to creating.
We're so insecure, comedians. 'Did you laugh? Do you think I was funny?'
I like the countryside. I like chopping wood. I'd like to be a carpenter.
We used to have to convince people we were funny, and it didn't always work.
When you're really laughing, you feel like a little kid, and nothing matters.
Most stand-up is incredibly boring. It's time for people to do something else.
My dad listened to a load of jazz - Mahavishnu, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock.
Most comedians are borderline psychotic. It's what makes their work interesting.
Pain - that is what life is about, isn't it? Suffering with moments of reprieve.
I find the pressure to be funny when you're being interviewed live - quite intense.
I love 'Airplane,' and I love 'Naked Gun' and all those films, where you're parodying.
Adapting a book doesn't mean the book stops just because you've made a film out of it.
Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.
When things start running a bit too well on the tracks, I tend to derail them if I can.
I want to create a world where all the rules are different. It should be magical to enter.
I was in a band called Groove Solution. Because there was a groove crisis, and we solved it.
Performers often can be quite socially inept, you know? And even great comedians are like that.
I don't like talking about myself; I'm not good at analysing myself. I don't want to analyse myself.
With something that's not based just in comedy, you can be a bit weirder in a slightly realistic way.
Laughter's good, but it's not love. It's one aspect. One emotion you're eliciting from your audience.
The secret of comedy is don't grow up. That's why some comedians are a nightmare, because they never grow up.
If the 'Boosh' was a bit more of a specific thing, or less multi-limbed, we would probably have done it and moved on.
We have a need to make people laugh at things they'd never thought about, make them laugh at things that aren't logical.
Not really a good idea to eat things fans have made because you don't know what state of mind they were in when they made them.
I've been a horror fan pretty much in the sense that my sense of horror and my sense of humor were both equally kindled by films as a kid.
I did try and do some spooky stand up once, and some of my stand-up had - I tried to do some horror stand-up, but it didn't really work very well.
I always dreamt of being in 'Kerrang.' That was my ambition. I read that religiously when I was into heavy metal. Then the jazz magazines took over.
Writing can make you feel a bit psychotic. You create a world, and you're sitting inside it all day long, talking to people who are not really there.
For me, there's no dichotomy between being shy or a performer, because I think it's more a way of slightly presenting a version of things to the world.
I want to do things or write things that make people feel a bit more beautiful or tragic or something because there are so many other things than just funny.
With the 'Boosh,' we were trying to do this strange, weird thing that had its own language and visual style, and it wasn't really what the powers that be wanted.
We should send a load of bad celebrities to colonise Mars. They would have to mate in space, and then their children would be sent back to Earth in 50 years' time.
You don't need a high concept to make a great film, of course. 'Withnail & I' is not - it's probably not much on paper, but it's one of the funniest films ever made.
Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps, and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance.
I thought I could see how standup worked. I never thought of being an actor - or anything else, really - but I thought, 'I can see how you get on stage and tell jokes.'
I've done interviews in the past where, apparently, I didn't give the journalist any eye contact. I'm a bit shy, yes. I've thought about refusing to do any press at all.
This business is ephemeral, and you have to maintain a healthy cynicism about it. There's a 'flavour of the month' aspect to it, so you have to keep moving on and mutating.
I was going to be a jazz-fusion guitarist. I came to London at one point with my mate, and we were going to make it. We spent three days there and went back home to our mummies.
The profession is rife with fear about your age, about your validly, longevity, appearance. It's vanity, and it's hard to sort of avoid all those things; they come at you as an actor.
In comedy terms, usually when the weather's bad, it goes much better. When it's sunny, people don't come to see comedy gigs because they're all really happy and don't need cheering up.
If you come away from a show thinking of an image, that's as good as remembering a joke. A lot of those shows, like 'The Office,' they are brilliant, but they're not visually interesting.