“Those who have never worked nude outdoors just can’t imagine how much better a breeze feels on their skin than an item of sweaty clothing.”

There are practical things which contribute to a joke’s funniness. People will find a joke funnier if they are sitting closer together, if it’s cold, if they’ve paid and if they are told it’s funny beforehand.

It is hard to keep a straight face during comedy scenes. It’s considered really bad form to laugh at someone else because you can ruin their best take. But sometimes it’s very hard not to.

Steroids are] not healthy, … There’s a real health issue with steroid abuse. At any level, but particularly a young age level. There are many adverse health effects so I think it’s a concern we have to take as a college-level group.

I don’t defend what a comedian might say but I defend to the death his right to say it.

Whatever happens in life can happen on the stage, but as a comedian you should always be clear what your target is. It’s fine to be gratuitously tasteless if that’s what you are intending to do. It’s that old line:

My theory about comedians is that their greatest fear is other people laughing at them. So comedy is an attempt to control and manipulate the thing they find most frightening.

It is not something I earned or acquired or bought (the ability to pitch). It is a gift. It is something that was given to me – just like the color of my skin.

My engineer dad is where my technical acumen comes from. I remember him taking me to the factories to see how what works.

I want to be Lon Chaney. I want to be Karloff. I want to help people escape the mundane world. I want to make their skins crawl. And I want them to love it every bit as much as I do.

Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.

You deal with failure – strike, strike, strike – all the time. Acting is like that. You have to have a very thick skin in a way – your hair is too dark, you’re too ugly for the part, your audition wasn’t good.

It’s a sin problem, not a skin problem.

After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.

At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.