Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I got picked on a lot. I was a complete geek in school. I had braces. I didn't have the hot girlfriend. I wasn't ever sought after. I was a stocky, awkward kid who got laughed off the tennis court when I tried that.
We all laughed. It was more like that whole thing that I was talking about earlier. You go to training camp and after the season is over, you might not see the guys for six months until you go back to training camp.
Every lesson I learned as a kid was at the dinner table. Being Greek, Sicilian and Ruthenian - we are an emotional bunch. It is where we laughed, cried and yelled - but most importantly, where we bonded and connected.
I always had dreams that I could be on television. I used to watch 'The Late Show' with my dad, and I'd make him pause the VHS whenever the audience laughed to explain jokes to me. But it's hard to just 'get into TV.'
You will find this hard to believe, but I've never laughed as much as I did when I was a corporate lawyer. When you're working 16 hours a day for months at a time, you get punchy. Everything and everyone seems hilarious.
'The Cosby Show' - no one thought there's doctors and lawyers who are married and live in brownstones! Back then no one would have thought we would have an African-American president. They would have laughed in your face.
Schedules on TV are so tight, and it feels like they get tighter and tighter with every passing year. The idea of asking where your character's come from or where they grew up - you would just get a little bit laughed at.
I said something really stupid once. I told a friend that my mother was so beautiful, but my dad was ugly. My dad heard it and just laughed it off, but I felt guilty. It haunted me for years. I should never have said that.
Playing Frida was hard and wonderful. I found such a force in her, bigger than me. I tried to make it just a woman who had to do what she did. A woman who lived, ate, and laughed. I tried to avoid the 'icon' of Frida Khalo.
You know the phrase 'Jesus laughed' isn't ever used in the Gospels. So, most people walk away with the idea that Jesus is a pretty serious guy, pretty sour faced most of the time, pretty upset at what's going on around Him.
Shortly after he became the first Muslim to attend cabinet, I urged Sadiq Khan to be prepared. The Islamophobes, the new McCarthyites, would at some stage come after him. He laughed it off. Yet it was only a matter of time.
One day, a musician asked me what I did. When I told him I was to be a businessman, he laughed and said, 'You are not a businessman.' Sometimes all it takes is one person to put an important thought in your head, and he did.
I had a Spider-man costume when I was about three, and I lost the mask. So I went to the underwear drawer and put a pair of red pants on my head. My dad came home and just laughed, and I ran into my room and burst into tears.
I remember, the first few times I modelled, other girls laughed at my big behind. I felt like a fat pig, even though I really wasn't. When you are 15 and other girls nick-name you a 'little piggy' and 'fatty,' you believe them.
In China, they treated me really well, they like me a lot. The first few times they laughed when I took my shirt off, but when they saw me throw my punches and saw my opponent on the floor, they came over to my side and clapped.
If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.
I hate when people say, 'Oh, they laughed all the way to the bank.' That's nonsense because the most cynical, unhappy people are Hollywood screenwriters. They earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for work that's never made.
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
I remember being in fights and being tremendously outnumbered and it escalating into something much worse. That's why I laughed when people asked if I was scared of going to Russia. If only they knew about some of the things I've seen.
When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?
My husband was an Air Force pilot man years ago and recently an Air Force wife thanked me for my service! I laughed and said, 'No, I wasn't in the Air Force, my husband was!' And she smiled and said, 'If he served, you served. And thank you.'
The music played most around St. Louis was country-western and swing. Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of the country stuff on our predominantly black audience. After they laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff.
You know, in 1975 I couldn't get a job in New York City because I was American. The kitchens were predominantly run by French, Swiss, German, and basically I got laughed at. I had education, I had experience, but got laughed at because I was American.
When I was about forty-three years of age, I had a private secretary with a beautiful baritone voice. I told him I would give anything in the world if I could only carry a tune. He laughed and said, 'Anybody who has a voice and perseverance can sing.'
The basic function of a comic is stand-up because it's so straightforward and simple. If the audience don't laugh, you didn't do your job. I've had some audiences where I didn't care if they laughed or not because they were either too drunk or stupid.
I've been approached after shows from people who said, 'I don't agree with anything you said, but I laughed the whole way through.' That's still a little strange to me. Like, nothing, really? But at the same time, that's what happens in a conversation.
The hardest I've ever laughed in a cinema was at 'Silent Movie' by Mel Brooks. I was 12-ish and I actually fell out of my seat. I saw it 10 years later hoping for the same hilarity but it didn't happen. I'm not sure if that's because of me or the film.
There came to port last Sunday night the queerest little craft, without an inch of rigging on; I looked and looked - and laughed. It seemed so curious that she should cross the unknown water, and moor herself within my room - my daughter! O my daughter!
When we came out from the Elysee palace, there was a gigantic limousine waiting for us and four police on motorcycles. It is probably one of the few times I have experienced my fame. I thought it was so fantastic that I laughed to the point of shouting.
I was so amazingly witty when I had the No. 1 movie, you have no idea. People laughed at every single one of my jokes. Then when I hadn't had a hit for three or four years, some of these same people pretended they didn't see me when I walked in the room.
I think my books are lighter and funnier than some of the big series out there. You may not walk away from my books having learned a life-altering lesson, but you will feel better for having laughed for a few hours. It's just a different style of writing.
There was a period of time during the 'Jagged Little Pill' era where I don't think I laughed for about two years. It was a survival mode, you know. It was an intense, constant, chronic over-stimulation and invasion of energetic and physical literal space.
We live in a multi-cultural society far more open to international ideas. If you'd told me 20 years ago I'd drive through Bury and see someone sitting outside a cafe drinking a latte, I'd have laughed. In fact, I wouldn't have even known what a latte was.
I had always sung in choirs. Even when it was something to be laughed at or made fun of, you know, in school. And I was always the kid who was picked at the Christmas concert to sing the solo, you know, while the other kids snickered in the front few rows.
The biggest lesson from Africa was that life's joys come mostly from relationships and friendships, not from material things. I saw time and again how much fun Africans had with their families and friends and on the sports fields; they laughed all the time.
I think the players, I put in the book for example that we should go back to wood rackets, probably they laughed at me, I'm a dinosaur, but I think that you see these great players, have even more variety and you see more strategy, there'd be more subtlety.
In the eighties, there was a huge shift in the humor of Japanese television. Up until then, the humor was garnered by people who said humorous things, but in the '80s, it was garnered by people who were being laughed at while the audience watches and watches.
I'm a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap.
I've laughed hysterically, just trying to hold it in, at every funeral I've been to, because everyone's so serious. And there are a lot of people speaking publicly, which makes you understand why it's people's number one fear - because everyone shouldn't do it.
We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.
Her friends say she is very funny. At a family dinner, she stood to go, and the footman very properly pulled her chair away. At that moment I asked her a question and she sat down again, except there was no chair. Everyone, including the Queen, laughed and laughed.
Kids will pick up on weakness, and I was very shy growing up. I was skinny and flat-chested; I didn't have the latest clothes. For me, it was about being left out and not having any friends and being laughed at. I was very lonely, but that happens to so many people.
In my first few years as an actor, I took one terrible TV job after another. But even as I laughed off my awful roles and made fun of myself to friends, my work made me cringe - I dreaded anyone's seeing it. I was crushed that I wasn't doing anything I was proud of.
I remember someone telling me that when he saw the back of a woman's head, he knew that was the woman he was going marry. I laughed that away as silly talk. But I guess when a relationship has to happen, it happens seamlessly. Your partner just walks into your life.
As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.
I went to University of Illinois team camp. And that was a big deal for me. I got MVP of the camp, but they offered another kid from the camp, which was fine. I laughed with the couple coaches I know who were there at the time, who were part of recruiting the other guy.
I had been laughed at my whole life through school, and I never really thought of it as a vocation. I mean, I started off as a soldier, and then I went into the university thinking I was going to be a journalist, but comedy kind of fell on my head and demanded I pursue it.
I have lived so long among people who do not understand me, been so long accustomed to refrain and disguise myself for fear of being laughed at, that I have grown as difficult to come at as a snail in a shell; and what is worse, I cannot come out of my shell when I wish it.
I wasn't close to my father, but I wanted to be all my life. He had a funny sense of humor, and he laughed all the time - good and loud, like I do. He was a gay Irish gentleman and very good-looking. And he wanted to be close to me, too, but we never had much time together.
'Full House' was the first time I had ever been in front of a live audience. I said a line I had rehearsed with my mom, and they laughed. It was wild. To have that energy of the live audience was like, Whaaat? Feeding off that live audience was, to a 4 or 5 year old, a high.