“A eugoogoolizer…one who speaks at funerals…Or did you think I was too stupid to know what a eugoogooly was?”

When I was growing up, This is Spinal Tap [1984] was the ultimate comedy, and it was the kind of thing I wanted to do. But you get to a point with parody where you can’t go much further because ultimately it’s feeding off of somebody else’s creativity.

I have not been an easygoing guy. I think it’s called bipolar manic depression. I’ve got a rich history of that in my family.

Fashion is so over the top.

I was a bad student. I liked archaeology actually, I was interested in maybe becoming an archaeologist but I was such a bad student and had such bad grades that I wasn’t going to get into any really good college so I fell back on acting.

I’d love to travel more. I really look forward to traveling with my kids. I’m just waiting for them to want to travel with me.

It’s great to work with the people who make you laugh and who are funnier than I am.

I don’t think the public is dying to see me necessarily be funny all the time.

I actually started working on Madagascar before my daughter was born.

Sometimes I wondered whether I hadn’t let my career get confined to one direction, but lately I’ve decided to accept the fact that I have this opportunity to be successful doing comedies.

I don’t know what that weid fantasy is that makes people go, “Oh, you must have had a great childhood.”

God was showing off when he made you.

Nobody makes me bleed my own blood – nobody!

Paul is Starsky, and I met him before shooting. He was very kind and encouraged us to go with what we wanted to do. It was very sweet to see them back with the car after 25 years.

When I didn’t have a family, I was much more of a workaholic. I still like to work, but I also want to be home with them. As you get older, you realize you need balance. If it’s not fun, what’s the point?

I think the most serious genre is the thing you’re going to get the most out of. If you’re trying to satirise a comedy, it’s hard to do that – it doesn’t really work as well. But I love the war movie genre and I’m a fan of all those movies that are part of what this movie is.

I’m just not a naturally cheery person. I’m naturally moody. I know that from people who spend a lot of time with me. People who spend a lot of time with me may not wish to spend a lot more time with me.

A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put.

Many punishments sometimes, and in some cases, as much discredit a prince as many funerals a physician.

The Madiba song may have ended, but its melody lingers on.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

My mum passing away wasn’t funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.