Gad Elmaleh Quotes

Taste in comedy, like fashion, changes all the time.

There's so many ways to do stand up, and I think, for awhile, people weren't really maximizing the freedom of it. We were all kind of doing a similar kind of stand up, and I started to see some original voices come out of Boston.

British comedy - which has been a big inspiration to me for many years - is very different to Australian comedy and different again to American comedy.

I feel American comedy is a little too light. World cinema, and Latin cinema, is much more comfortable with darker emotions.

It's funny how comedy is, you look at people like French and Saunders, when they started out they were very alternative. A lot of those alternative comedians have ended up being mainstream, they know that longevity is about being mainstream.

When you bring multiple cultures together, there's a degree of push and pull.

When I started comedy, I was a big Eddie Murphy fan. I thought if you did stand-up, you were supposed to know how to act, write, and host. I thought it was all one thing. That's why it doesn't feel like I'm transitioning to acting: because in my stand-up, I do characters all the time.

In reality, as a comedian, you're successful because you're funny, and you should be able to be funny about anything.

I grew up surrounded by both Haitian and Japanese culture.

I was born and raised in China, Mandarin is my first language, and I definitely know America. I think that will be my strength, to try and bring the two worlds together.

I grew up in a unique environment where I was immersed in both Japanese and American cultures equally.

Sometimes styles don't translate. Rey Mysterio was a master of doing that. No matter where he went, Rey could make his style adapt. But not everyone is Rey Mysterio.

I still feel Ghanaian, but my mentality is more European.

I know for myself, every now and again on HBO, they'll show some of the young comedian specials from the '80s and early '90s, and it's just fascinating to watch those comedians - some of whom are people that are world-famous, like Chris Rock or Judd Apatow - to see the jokes that people had, but also, the way everything looked.

When my father came out on stage wearing a big cowboy hat and a shirt lettered 'Bar Mitzvah Ranch' to sing 'Home on the Range' in Yiddish, it was his way of saying, 'I want to be an American.'

When I first started watching stand-up, I fell in love with American comedy before British comedy.

I think traditions change and modify with each generation. With new members joining the family, their customs and traditions have to be respected and combined with the exiting traditions. And the children that follow are part of that new evolving tradition and, as they grow, will have input that will, in turn, continue to evolve that tradition.

The writer, Ruth Jhabvala, livedin India but was German. My partner Ismail Merchant was from Bombay but was educated in England and he had a different view on the world. Probably they had to contend with some sort of Oregonian-ness in me that they didn't understand and didn't know where it was coming from.

I've never left China. My family's been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I'm a western architect.

You can tell a lot about a person by what comedians they like.

I mean, London has shaped me as a person. My parents are Nigerian so I've had the luxury of blending different cultures together just through my everyday life.

I'd love to write more observational comedy but the stuff people seem to respond to is the most personal so it's snowballed from there.

Spanglish is a creative way also of saying, 'I am an American, and I have my own style, my own taste, my own tongue.'

I grew up very American but also fully Asian.

'Entropy' will be a kaleidoscope of thought processes and my identity as an Indian who grew up in California.