I grew up in a time when women didn’t really do comedy. You had to be homely, overweight, an old maid, all that. You had to play a stereotype, because very attractive women were not supposed to be funny – because it’s powerful; it’s a threat.
There’s something outrageously funny about the bold-faced lying that’s going on, in a general way. Just the blatant denial of facts, whether it’s climate change or crowd sizes. Every day, there’s another blatant lie. I think there’s comedy in there somewhere.
Comedians’ first ten minutes usually stay with them the first several years of their career. It’s their mission statement. Their disclaimer that lets people know who they are. Or were. It’s also a good time to make fun of your name if you have a funny or strange one.
There’s a funny thing about fame. The truth is you run as fast as you can towards it because it’s everything you want. Not just the fame but what it represents, meaning work, meaning opportunity. And then you get there, and it’s shocking how immediately you become enveloped in this world that is incredibly restricting.
Once an actor told me he went to the Shakespeare School of Acting, and I said, ‘I went to the Shakespeare of Acting, too’ and he said, ‘Oh really?’ And I said, ‘I went to Shakespeare Elementary School in Chicago.’ He didn’t take the joke well, he didn’t laugh and didn’t think it was funny – I thought it was funny. It’s all the same to me.
I’m actually a big fan of Kathy Griffin because I think she’s really funny. I think she’s really self-deprecating, which is something I like to see in a comedian. I think those are really the best comedians: people who can make fun of themselves.
The less lines, the better. I am the silent film actor, but not in a slapstick sort of way. Film is an image-based medium, so whatever you can say without the words is far more provocative and punctuating. If the lines are not funny or if they don’t advance the story, sometimes it’s hard. I hate talk in movies.
The fact that ‘A Dirty Job’ has comedy and supernatural horror in it, that both are woven in and out of it with a whimsical tone, despite the fact that it’s about death, makes it hard to characterize with standard genre labels – but I have no problem with that. I’d call it a funny story about death, and leave it at that.
Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.
For me, ‘Jaws’ is much more of an adventure movie, but when it’s scary, it’s terrifying. When it’s funny, it’s hilarious. When there’s drama, it’s the most sincere stuff on screen. When there’s adventure, there’s swashbuckle. It’s all those things.
I’ve seen many female comics that a lot of people haven’t heard of who are so funny, and I saw them come up, and they were working so hard, and then all of a sudden they had a baby, and they just got tied up in motherhood, and eventually, they kind of just stopped doing stand-up, and I thought it was such a shame.
Patrick is vey modest about using the Sir thing and I just inherited it by marriage, so more than anything it’s just kind of a funny little thing that we call one another from time to time. He calls me ‘His Ladyship’, which is just hilarious.
There are people who think the film ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ is simply a very funny ‘mockumentary.’ Well, with Yes, we lived it. Take the hilarious scene in the film in which the bass player is trapped in a giant pod – that actually happened to Alan one night.
I love some of the most hateful tweets. I think they’re very funny. In the negative attacks on me, there are frequently some real displays of humor. I want to reply, but I won’t, because there are all sorts of other people making serious points that I care about, and I don’t want them to be discouraged.
Eyebrows are really important because they structure the face. In school it was funny because I was always the one walking around with tweezers plucking my girlfriends’ eyebrows. I was really good; eyebrow tweezing runs in my family – my mother used to do mine, and I picked it up.
It was funny being at high school and also grocery shopping and having a job. Other kids were going home to their parents, who were doing their laundry, and I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ I was super isolated. I was 16, alone in New York, and modelling.
It’s just my natural way – to be funny. I don’t know why that is. But as I’ve said, humor is a quick cover for shock, horror, confusion. The critics hate funny writers for the most part. They think funny is not serious, but I think that funny can be even more serious than nonfunny. And it can be more affecting, too.
It’s so funny because if you tweet your lyrics and then you hear it in a song next week, you’re like, ‘Hey I had that same idea.’ I’m very secretive with my music. We have to send emails password protected. Because once that song gets out, you aren’t selling that thing.
I’d love to become like Bill Murray, who was so funny on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and has gone on to do some of the landmark comedies people like. And then to add this whole other phase to his career with ‘Lost in Translation’ and ‘Rushmore.’ I always felt to be able to have something similar to that would be great.
I don’t want to sound hoity-toity, but people told me I should watch ‘Cheers’ because it’s very funny. So I watched it, and I just went, ‘This is the great show of the universe?’ To me, acting is making characters believable, not just doing jokes.
I was the female lead in a romantic comedy. It’s a little indie film that we shot in China called ‘America Town,’ starring Daniel Henney and Bill Paxton. I actually had to speak Chinese in the film. It was funny because I found out I was doing the film and then a week later, I was in Shanghai.
I don’t feel that I’m explaining the world or teaching people anything. And I’m not trying to be a mirror, showing them what’s really going on the world. All I’m trying to do is think of stuff that’s funny, just like when I’m kidding around with my friends.
I’d done drag since I was 14, for special occasions, and in 2010 a friend of mine with her own burlesque group was looking for a host. During a party I was just fooling around, taking the microphone, saying stupid, funny things, and she asked me afterward if I wanted to host her burlesque show every Saturday.
I was lucky. My family is wonderful. And it’s funny, because most of my best friends come from very large families. So it always felt as if I had lots of siblings, though in the end I had to leave them and go home. I kind of got the best of both worlds as a kid.
I detest jokes – when somebody tells me one, I feel my IQ dropping; the brain cells start to disappear. But something is funny when the person delivering the line doesn’t know it’s funny or doesn’t treat it as a joke. Maybe it comes from a place of truth, or it’s a sort of rage against society.
