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.

Laughter is America’s most important export.

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.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

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.

Most of the stuff I do on the show comes out of me just trying to make my friends laugh.

There are a lot of conservative people, a lot of moderate people, Republicans, Democrats, in Hollywood. It is just that the conservative people by the nature of the word itself play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot dogging it.

Stand-up is hard.

I came to Hollywood and within a decade I was one of the biggest action stars of all time.

Streaming is a really big market for me. We’ve been doing great in the streaming market, so it’s not something I want to alienate at all. Streaming counts now. They’re treating artists the way we deserve to be treated.

I don’t think comedy will ever die.

When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I’d get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

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

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

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

If I close my eyes and think of Hollywood, all I see is one big varicose vein.

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.

The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.

I absolutely want to have a career where you make’em laugh and make’em cry. It’s all theater.

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

When I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‚There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.‘ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.

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

I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese, and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken.

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.

Take my wife… Please!

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.

Wit is the lowest form of humor.

Comedy isn’t necessarily all dialogue. Think of Buster Keaton: the poker face and all this chaos going on all around him. Sometimes it’s a question of timing, of the proper rhythm.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

I’ve always had to conquer fear when I’m on stage. Basically, I was and still am a very shy person. It’s absolutely in conflict with what I do. But once I deliver the first joke I’m okay. It’s like I’m out there all by myself just delivering my lines to nobody in particular without ever trying to notice the audience in front of me.

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

In Hollywood, a lot of times when something is in development, it just takes a lot of time.

I’m always amazed by the people who work on stage who sing night after night, day after day, week in week out.

Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

I’ve taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.

I wanna thank MTV and the VMAs for choosing me to be a part of the show because, on this show, if you not an icon or upcomin‘ icon, you’re not on the show, you know?

Almost anything can be funny if said the right way – but it has to be said the right way.

But I did ‚Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.‘ They made a cereal out of it, so once you’ve had a cereal, it doesn’t get much more surreal than that. Surreal cereal.

In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me. Every night I had a live audience of 25,000 people to win over. My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

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

I know that a large part of my fan base is gay. They’ve shown me love from the start. I mean in this industry, everyone from my glam people to my dancers are gay. You can’t be homophobic in this line of work – I’m a pop star!

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.

The Canteen Boy, the reason you feel bad for him and you can laugh is because he, and I guess a lot of my characters, they don’t notice they’re getting made fun of. So they’ll say something back that’s not that great a quip, but in their mind they won the argument.

The same thing I did in 2013 is what I’m trying to do in 2014, which is continue to improve, continue to shock people. You know, I have several projects coming up between 2014 and 2015, and hopefully by 2015, I’ll have another hour of stand-up material where I’ll be able to go on the road and tour again.

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

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.

Too much TV hurts movies.

If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.

What I like about the jokes, to me it’s a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won’t be funny.

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.

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.

I did stand-up for my grandparents every day when I was, like, eight.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.

There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.

Having other comedians complimenting my work is the biggest accolade that I can get.

You’ve gotta understand that with branding and the way things are promoted, in our day and age, your older movie stars are not reachable or accessible because they’re not a part of the whole social media world.

I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.