All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn’t really bother me.

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

I know some of the best Dolly Parton jokes. I made ‚em up myself.

SNL is a home. You’ve got all of your brothers and sisters there, and it’s a great time.

I like George Carlin’s jokes. I like his humor. He’s one of my heroes, and I like what he did with talking about everyday things.

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

My mother is from another time – the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that’s what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I know if I wasn’t her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.

Brad will tell you. He puts a movie on, I’m asleep in 10 minutes. I have no patience. But the kids love action movies with comedy, Jackie Chan and all that.

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

Wit is the lowest form of humor.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

I don’t know who I touch and who I don’t. I work hard trying to make people laugh. I try to do the kind of stuff that made me laugh growing up. I don’t have any secrets. I don’t know the reasons I’ve been so well received.

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‚Boston Phoenix,‘ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‚deadpan.‘

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

Stand-up is hard.

Since childhood, I’ve been a clown. I’ve always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It’s my original self.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Death is the king of this world: ‚Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It’s commenting or observing or twisting life.

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

I laugh all the time – at things, people, stuff, whatever. But, I don’t laugh onstage because then it’s serious business.

The secret to humor is surprise.

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

I look just like the girls next door… if you happen to live next door to an amusement park.

I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde.

I started in action, and then I went to comedy school.

Well, all comedy starts with anger. You get angry, and its never for a good reason, right? You know its not a good reason. And then you try and work it from there.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

I think being funny is not anyone’s first choice.

It’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you.

When I got into this, I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me, I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor, and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

In the end, everything is a gag.

I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.

I now have two different audiences. There’s the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.

I try to be funny and not ignorant.

I don’t get up, get dressed, go out, and think, ‚Okay, I gotta find eight jokes.‘

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

I learned from the guys before me – Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, just to name a few. These are guys that let it all hang out. What they lived is what they took to the stage.

I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating – is this the exact right mix? I think that’s – to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

I had a great time being a salesman because of the pitches that I gave when I was selling shoes. However, I don’t think I’m as well versed in shoes as I am in comedy. Being a salesman was all about being a people person, and I enjoy being around people. I also love talking to people – which is why I think I did so well.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

I’m standing behind a wall of jokes. You don’t know about my personal life, my girlfriends, or what I do when I’m not on the road. There’s this guy, this comedian, and this is how he thinks, but people really don’t know anything about me.

Comedy’s about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you’re saying.

Doing Saturday Night Live definitely affects my relationship with my girlfriend and with my family, because you feel so much pressure to do well that night. But I think everyone’s grown to accept that and so they give me my space at the show.

I love Steve Carell.

Comedy Central was a great network, but ‚Chappelle’s Show‘ took it to a completely different level. Other shows got bigger because so many viewers were watching the ‚Chappelle‘ reruns. For BET, the ‚Real Husbands of Hollywood‘ has that same potential.

You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.

At the end of the day, I want to be part of the same conversation as Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappelle, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.

In comedy, my strengths are improvisation.

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

Take my wife… Please!

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It’s literary suicide.