As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.
If we’re all God’s children, what’s so special about Jesus?
After a gig I always head back to the hotel, remembering granny’s words of wisdom. I cancel the late-night pizza and watch the Jonathan Ross show instead.
I’m obsessed with TV. How wrong our parents were when they said we should only watch an hour a day. Stop wasting your time reading books.
I saw a charity appeal in the Guardian the other day, and it read “Little Zuki has to walk 13 miles a day just to fetch water”. And I couldn’t help thinking, she should move.
Eighteen years since the Chernobyl disaster. Is it just me surprized? Still no superheroes!
Let’s face it, the gene pool needs a little chlorine.
I think that comedians, more than any other type of celebrity, have to keep their humour and keep their feet on the ground. If they start taking themselves too seriously, they’re heading for a fall.
I love those people who do story-telling and who ramble on, but I don’t do that, I tell jokes – the sort of jokes that anyone really could tell in the pub.
But what’s true about comedians is that we’ve all got a huge hole in our personality. In a room of 3,000 people, we’re the one person facing in the opposite direction – yet we have this overwhelming desire to be liked.
If I’m at home for the weekend – and that is almost never – I tend to get twitchy at about eight o’clock in the evening because my body clock is timed to go on stage. I don’t know what to do with myself.
I’m not worried about the Third World War. That’s the Third World’s Problem.
I worry about my nan. If she’s alone and falls, does she make a noise? I’m joking, she’s dead.
To say that ‘life’s a joke’ is not so much to belittle life as to correctly identify the elusive nature of the joke. Jokes have the measure of us. They change in the telling, defy capture, slip through our fingers like water. And they outlast us all. They are trifles, fragments, nothings that turn out to be all that’s left: the aptest metaphor for our pathetic species’ struggle to survive.
People say, “Now you’ve given up booze at least you can remember what you did last night.” I say, “Yeah, nothing.” – Frank Skinner.
Actually, seriousness is not incompatible with joking. It’s a common mistake to confuse ‘serious’ with ‘solemn’, and to assume that seriousness of purpose can only be conveyed by solemnity of tone.
Common sense and a sense of humour, are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour, is just common sense, dancing.
Be nice because it’s the right thing to do, it’s the best way to act in the world and it is what good human beings do. Being difficult and diva-ish or petulant just makes you hard to deal with, it doesn’t make you more authentic or creative or real.
Here’s the truth of it: no one wants you to follow your dream. Best-case scenario, they’ll want you to follow their dream for you.
You want the key to happiness? I’ll give it to you. Happiness is expectations exceeded. Happiness is the gap between what we thought might happen and what actually happened.
Fear is nothing to be afraid of. Fear is a performance-enhancing drug.