Tom Stoppard Quotes

I'm retarded - I mean I'm retired.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

Sometimes people get passionate about the obscure jokes.

A good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.

I was given a stethoscope in a child's 'doctor's bag' at about age six and I loved it! One could hear the heart beating through that plastic toy.

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.

Always say 'no pun intended' to draw attention to the intended pun.

I'm very competitive about puns.

There is no kind of false wit which has been so recommended by the practice of all ages, as that which consists in a jingle of words, and is comprehended under the general name of punning.

Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.

One of the greatest punsters of all time, Peter Serafinowicz, is a good friend of mine, and I've been in situations more than once where people have been exhausted hanging around with him.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

Twitter is a good medium to lean how to write jokes. It pushes you to write a better joke in that, on Twitter, the first joke about something has already happened. You need to think of the second joke and the third joke.

I saw 'A Night at the Opera,' this Marx Brothers film, when I was, like, six years old. I just became obsessed, you know?

I definitely have friends who gave me a tag for a joke I already had. Like, 'Here's another line.' A tag is, 'Oooooh, it's an industry term.' It's like, there's the punchline, and a tag is like a secondary punchline.

People doing rhymes that are nonsense - nothing can make me laugh like that.

In Hebrew, the name Susan means 'graceful lily' - in Khmer, it means 'girl with the bad puns,' and in ancient Aztec, it translates as 'she with the cockerel hair and dirty glasses.'

I guess my sense of humour leans more towards irony and tongue-in-cheek performance.

We've always had a philosophy that we would always go wherever the joke is.

I like really bad puns - proper, red-top, nasty puns - I find them funny.

If the social evolution leads to jokes, I use them.

For me, a great joke is an idea expressed in extremely concentrated form.

When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called 'the writing game' with our father. My brother and I would play it - where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.

Artistically, I find jokes really satisfying aesthetically, because there's something great about getting an idea down to a sentence or two.