Judd Apatow Quotes

Bette Midler can say four-letter words and make you love it.

Woody Allen - nobody has been a better joke teller than him - and even in his great films, it's always coming out of the character. If you don't have that, jokes are just empty and I think that people rely too much on jokes.

I knew Steve Carell because of Little Miss Sunshine, so I felt very comfortable with him. Maybe he always does it to guest stars, but I felt as though he was being particularly funny with me, and particularly stretching the boundaries of improvisation. He's such a comic genius. I hate to use that word, because everyone throws it around, but Steve Carell is channeling something.

Adam Sandler is a really funny guy in real life. Separate from all of the movies, that is a funny man.

Chris [Farley] - I would consider him a comic animal. With the emphasis on "animal."

Nick Offerman is my hero. He just cracks me up. He's so funny, but he's a true actor, too - he's bringing so much when he's onscreen.

NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.

Sometimes, as a comedian, a line will come to you, that is so beautiful, so perfect, that you think: I did not create this line. This line belongs to all of us. Surely this is a line of God.

I do notice a lot of people who want to shock to get laughs. It's such a tricky thing; you don't want to make rules about it. There's nobody more hilarious than Dave Attell, and he'd break every rule you set up. But he's funny.

The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don't know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time.

I personally find it difficult to accept that there could be anyone on earth insensitive to the comic abilities of Laurel and Hardy, Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, or Martin Short. But no matter who the comic entertainer is, there is always at least a minority prepared to say, 'What's all the excitement about? He doesn't seem funny to me.'

There's only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.

I'm topical as hell. That's not going to change if I lose weight. There are a lot of comics that do 'fat jokes' better than I do - Louie Anderson, John Pinette, Gabriel Iglesias. These guys are phenomenal.

There are certain types of stand-up, who are very successful, who do one type of joke, and never stray out of that. The audience knows that he's the depressive comedian, he's the up-beat, crazy comic. He's the one that talks about real life.

There's no great secret or plan, I just think I'm funny and I want to make people laugh.

I have an incredibly dry sense of humor.

When I did comedy I made fun of myself. If there was a buffoon, I played the buffoon. And people looked at me and said, "Gee, that's like Uncle David", or "That's like a friend of mine.". And they related through that. I didn't make fun of them. I made fun of me.

I make people laugh hard; I'm a comic, that's just the way it is. And I make them laugh because I'm funny, not because I'm filthy. The subject matter is dirty, but the pictures I paint are really funny. A lot of comics don't understand that that's what it's about. It's just, "I'll be dirty and they'll laugh." Nobody's becoming a superstar that way.

Comedy is actually very hard. It's hard to choose those moments and know when you can really push it, and know when you should be bringing it back and making it more subtle, and knowing as time goes on, as you do take after take and the crowd around you stops laughing. Whenever you do comedy, you realize you're up against - you're performing next to people who you would think are so unbelievably good at it, that that's a bit of a pressure. But at the same time, it's just fun. It's fun to be able to let out that side of you.

I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.

My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done.

I've never been able to tell jokes. In the beginning of my career I did impressions and jokes like any other comedian, but I was never very successful because I did it poorly. So I started to talk to the audience and started talking about the atmosphere around me and started to become angry, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a fun way - and my attitude developed from there.

Bill Murray I always liked. I'm not as good as him, but there's a quality in him that I like. And then there's DeNiro, I'll never be that.

As far as standup, everybody has a vehicle they are driving. If what you do works, it's like playing golf. If you can master that one swing over and over again, you will be successful. That's what standup is. You have to have a central move and it has to be yours. You have to own your comedy, own what you do.

My persona is most importantly just to communicate the material in a way that is most funny and meaningful in the moment. It's more like a character that's sculpted for whatever joke needs communicating at the moment.