Dick Cavett Quotes

I like physical comedy. And I like the old comedies.

I've always been a fan of physical comedy. It kind of hits you in a different way; it bypasses the intellect and hits you in the gut.

Physical comedy is my favorite thing in the world to do.

Mr. Bean is at his best when he is not using words, but I am equally at home in both verbal and nonverbal expression.

I feel like Jim Carrey is probably the closest thing to a true physical comedian that we have working today.

Now a 'funnyman' can get a laugh before opening his mouth - looking funny. Lou Costello was one of your great funnymen. Harry Langdon, Larry Semon; they were all funnymen - they looked funny. W.C. Fields was never a comedian. Slim Summerville was a comedian, yet looked funny. Now if you have both attributes, you are in good shape.

The thing with physical comedy is that you have to actually try to do the thing you're trying to do - you can't fake it.

I grew up a huge fan of The Three Stooges and Monty Python, so somebody getting slapped in the face with a fish, or falling out of a chair, or running into a door, or tripping over their own feet and eating it, is all stuff I find really, really funny.

That's where humour lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that's what I like. I've always felt that's what I would like to do.

Let's not call physical comedy falling down and pratfalls. All humor is physical, no matter how you dish it out. It's timing, like a dancer or an athlete would have.

I never really thought of myself as a physical comedian. But when I was a kid, I used to, you know, pretend to trip over things to make girls laugh in school and stuff like that. So I kind of learned how to fall without hurting yourself.

I'm a physical comedian, and I don't get to show it off very often.

In a costume, you need very exaggerated body language - as you say, sort of mime-type skills.

I enjoy doing physical comedy.

When I was a kid, I loved all the silent comedians - Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin. And I used to imitate them. I'd go to see a Buster Keaton movie and come home and try things out I'd seen. I learned to do pratfalls when I was very young.

Historically, Hollywood comedy has arrived in skinny envelopes. From fence post Buster Keaton to herky-jerky Jerry Lewis to wiry nerve-bundle Woody Allen to hung-loose Richard Pryor to whippy contortionist Jim Carrey, its comics and clowns have tended to be sliced thin and bendable.

Sight gags had to be planned; they required timing and mechanics. Occasionally, spontaneity would arise in the shooting of the scenes.

I learned physical comedy to a degree that most child actors never will. I really just became a student of it - became obsessed with it, to be quite honest.

Our comedy is just falling over, funny faces, arguments, all the comedy basics, really.

I can be a bit movement-orientated and flamboyant because, essentially, I'm a physical comedian.

Let me make something clear: I can't do anything in particular to make others laugh. I do what is necessary for a character. The body language of the character may make others laugh.

My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

A comedian's body is funny as well as his mind being funny, his whole personage is funny.

Whatever happened to a good pie-in-the-face joke?

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.