Don Cheadle Quotes

I've always thought those guys are really funny. And I love Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and Mary.

I wanted to be in Jim Carrey comedy movies before I met him. I wanted to be a comedian on Stage 19, yukking it up.

I love Jerry Lewis. I loved Jim Carrey when I was younger, and Mike Myers and Phil Hartman, all the 'Saturday Night Live' people in the late '80s.

I was mostly into comedies, growing up. That still will always be my favorite thing.

I love comedy. I suppose comedy is my first love, in a way. I did a lot of acting, funnily enough, unprofessionally, as a kid. From when I was 10 years old until I was about 19, I was always doing little sketches with my friends, and doing different accents and voices. Probably about 3/4 of those were comedic, in some way, and the other 1/4 was more serious stuff or more action or more dramatic little pieces that I would make. But, I tend to lean towards comedy.

It was always the most fun thing in the world to think of a joke area and talk about it with someone like Jim Carrey, and then he would get on stage fearlessly and tear the house down. That's something I always enjoyed. It also allowed me to not be terrified.

What do you call a kid with no arms and an eyepatch? Names.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

I moved around a lot as a kid, and when you're always entering new places at that age, you kind of have to learn how to adapt yourself, and I felt a really powerful way to do that was to make people laugh.

I always wanted to be a comedian, even when I was a little kid. I had a funny father who was in the news business, by the way. He was a radio news guy. So the news was always in my house, and funny was always in my house. It was sort of just baked into the DNA that I would do this for a living, but I can remember being less than 10 years old and dreaming about being a comedian.

As a kid, I was always the jokester. I was telling stories at dinner and trying to make people laugh. I guess I've always just been naturally inclined to tell stories.

I've always loved The Simpsons, just because it was really, really funny. As a kid, you love the characters. You know that the dad is dumb and frustrated, and you know that the boy is smarter than everyone else around him and is constantly getting into mischief.

Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.

I think it's always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare. When I was at school, I was in Hamlet. I played Claudius, who's supposed to be a 60-year-old man, and I was like 18. It's inherently ridiculous seeing 18-year-old boys with gray beards. That's always funny.

I actually love Scorsese comedies. He's an underrated comedy director. I think his comedies are some of the best comedies ever made.

None of us grew up feeling like winners. So thank you to the bullies, to the popular kids, to the gym teachers who taunted us, who rejected us and who made fun of the way we ran. Without you we never would have gone into comedy.

Once you realize you can make people laugh, it's a superpower. When you're really young, you don't know how to use that power, so I would just say the meanest things I could to get a laugh. I was so awful. I would make fun of kids who didn't deserve to get made fun of. I was just mean, when I was really young. You don't realize that you don't have to be mean to be funny. But, it was something that I was just able to grow into.

I don't get any anxiety. I don't because of two reasons. Number one, just breaking through it as a kid and finally getting past it was like okay, nothing's ever going to feel that scary again as that deafening silence of a joke not working. Any joke not working is not as bad as not being able to even try and get on stage.

I don't want to go back to sitcoms - I'm a middle-aged, white guy - the high school principal who's a buffoon. It's hard enough raising kids now a days, and I don't want to be a part of a show that I'll be embarrassed watching shows like that with my kids and my mother. A lot of shows feel they need to get that for humor. You've have to have had a life experience; otherwise, it's toilet humor. If you've had a job before or experienced something, you get it. Some of these people haven't and they look for the cheap laugh.

That catharsis is really the core of the incredibly personal comedy of Louis C.K. or Marc Maron or whatever. And look - I find it fascinating that I'm sitting here talking about some of these things, and not to low tones, and my kids are in the other room. I have to trust that if they hear what I'm saying and they have questions about it, I'll be able to answer it, and that's fine. But that's part of the scariness of it - the reality of opening up my own life and my own feelings.

People have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.

People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.

I always knew I wanted to do comedy. I like making people laugh. I started out young just making my family laugh and trying to make kids laugh in school and getting into plays. I think it's the only thing I know how to do so hopefully it works out.

I keep doing specials because I think there are a lot of people who make movies and TV who are fans of comedy - if they start to like you, they'll get a project going and call you in.

George Burns, what a man. He read in the paper that it takes ten dollars a year to support a kid in India. So he sent his kids there.