Funny Quotes

I look at old performance videos now, and it’s really funny – I thought I was such a gangster!

Actually, the funny thing is, after all these years, I’ve got all these new songs to learn for the show we’re doing at Joe’s Pub, so it’s kind of fun to get down and rehearse new things, and also rethink some of the older songs, how we’re going to do them.

I love Charlie, Billy Burke’s character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he’s so funny and wry and every scene he’s in he just takes. There’s a scene in ‘Eclipse’ where Bella tells him she’s a virgin, and it’s the funniest, most awkward scene I’ve ever seen on film.

Maybe people don’t see me as believable playing a person of today. I guess I’m just more realistic in a corset and funny hairstyles.

It’s funny, because I was trained as a dramatic actor at New York’s Colonnades Theater Lab in the ’70s, along with Jeff Goldblum, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. People I worked with there saw a comedian in me. I’m still most at home in comedy.

Whatever I did, I always gravitated toward trying to be funny. If I was with friends, we were joking around. If I wrote for the newspaper, it would be a humor column. If I acted, I wanted to do comedy.

I didn’t understand key signatures or anything, you know. I’d say silly things at the top of a trumpet part like, ‘Note, when you play B naturals, make the B naturals a half step lower because they sound funny if they’re B naturals.’ And some guy said: ‘Idiot, just put a flat on the third line and it’s a key signature, you know?’

I really loved what I was doing being creative and being funny as a stand-up comedian.

When I create a story, I can make it however funny, sad, or happy I want it to be. And when I read, I feel like I’m in the story, and I get to experience it. It feels like I’m watching someone else do something, but I’m doing the thing that the character is doing as well.

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively – I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

I’ve always said that instead of watching a guy juggle seven things amazingly I would rather see a really bad juggler who’s really funny.

I have only been funny about seventy four per cent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four per cent of the time.