My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.
I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you.
When you wear so many hats in society, you never know who you are. That’s the beauty of it. Because once you find out who you are, you’re screwed.
I don’t do jokes. The characters are my jokes.
I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.
I know you can be funny without being filthy.
I have never pretended to be any kind of super-religious kind of man, but I feel very strongly that you can be funny without being dirty.
Now the freaks are on television, the freaks are in the movies. And it’s no longer the sideshow, it’s the whole show. The colorful circus and the clowns and the elephants, for all intents and purposes, are gone, and we’re dealing only with the freaks.
I’m from the Delbert Home for the Unusual.
I was talking to a businessman, and I said, Don’t you think most men are little boys? And he said, I’m no little boy! I make seventy-five thousand dollars a year. And I said, Well, the way I look at it – you just have bigger toys.
You’ve got to be an observer. And you’ve got to take time to listen to people, talk, to watch what they do.
Throughout my life, I’ve been gratified that I’ve been able to keep the child in me alive and inspire others.
My mother had a radio show – a Barbara Walters type of gal and was very successful for about 20-some years on a radio station.
I was always an observer, even as a child. I could be satisfied to sit in a car for 3 hours and just look at the street go by while my mother went shopping.
Discipline is tough for a guy who is a rebel.
I have a photographic memory; I just haven’t developed it yet.
I don’t paint every day. I’m not that motivated. I don’t do anything the same every day.
As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight.
I’ve done for the most part pretty much what I intended – I ended up doing comedy, writing and painting. I’ve had a ball. And as I get older, I just become an older kid.
You come into this world, not knowing who you are, and sometimes, if you live long enough, you go out not knowing who you are.