A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

I’ll say things that are serious and put them in a joke form so people can enjoy them. We laugh to keep from crying.

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

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

The French complain of everything, and always.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

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

I must confess, I was born at a very early age.

Obama’s not Jesus. He can’t walk on water.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, ‚Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.‘

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.

When I’m being funny, I try not to offend. I don’t think much of what I’ve done has been in really ghastly taste. I don’t think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

If Everton were playing down the bottom of my garden, I’d draw the curtains.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It’s truly ridiculous.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

I’ve just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.

The only time my prayers are never answered is on the golf course.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.

You make ‚em, I amuse ‚em.

I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Jerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.

Like getting into a bleeding competition with a blood bank.

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

Do not laugh much or often or unrestrainedly.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, ‚See if you can blow this out.‘

I have no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eating crow, figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

It is really funny when people say you’d be obvious for a great villain.

There was a time when people said, ‚Jim, if you keep on making faces, your face will freeze like that.‘ Now they just say, ‚Pay him!‘

Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.

I do all my own stunts. I’m kidding.

It’s a funny old world.

Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

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

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I’m an Irish man.

That’s the one for my tombstone… Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

I won’t belong to any organization that would have me as a member.

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.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on on the outside!

People say I look so happy – and I say, ‚That’s the Botox.‘

Doing stand-up is like running across a frozen pond with the ice breaking behind you. I love it because it’s dangerous.

Honestly, I just go to restaurants to eat so I won’t die. If there was a pill I could take in January and then I wouldn’t have to eat again for the rest of the year, I would take it. Of course, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my chocolate cake and ice cream.

How do you catch a knuckleball? You wait until it stops rolling, then go pick it up.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

I was training to be an electrician. I suppose I got wired the wrong way round somewhere along the line.

Humor is reason gone mad.

The funny thing is people won’t let me pay for things. I’ll be in a restaurant and the manager will say, ‚Oh no, it’s on the house.‘