Bobby Lee Quotes

When I hit the scene, there was Billy Connolly and Max Boyce. It was all mother-in-law and Irish jokes, and we broke the mould. Now there are thousands of comedians out there, and I don't think I can be above it all.

I now have two different audiences. There's the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.

Yeah, there were a few years in the early nineties where I really began to hate what was valued as funny and just sort of what was valued in stand-up, period.

People have very specific opinions of comedy. Slapstick was an art form in the '20s and the lowest form of show business in the '50s. Who's right, who's wrong? Who's an idiot, who's not?

The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.

The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

Those who still believe the Brahmins should take a serious note of the changing times and start leading an awakened life.

I just love that part of comedy, where you see somebody's jokes develop. They try something new to see what works, and I just love that part.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.

Ours is the first society in history in which parents expect to learn from their children, rather than the other way around. Such a topsy-turvy situation has come about at least in part because, unlike the rest of the world, we are an immigrant society, and for immigrants the only hope is in the kids.

Tradition, if not constantly recreated, can be as much a millstone as a mill-wheel.

As I get older, I don't think the world is becoming that funny. Comedy is changing a bit.

I never thought I was funny. I don't THINK funny.

I started doing comedy just as myself, because I thought, "This is what's expected, you're meant to tell stories and do observations." And then I started to realize that I wanted to mix it up a bit, so I started to doing songs, and I had a little keyboard onstage and would bring in little props. Then I thought about the idea of talking about a character and becoming the character onstage. So, it sort of morphed into being stand-up that was more character based, and I found that's the stuff I got the better reaction from and was more exciting for me.

There hasn't been an original voice in stand-up since Sam Kinison.

When I first started doing comedy, there was no such thing as a room that had black people and white people in it. That didn't exist.

I feel like we [americans] are a unique nation in this world, in that we are able to implement great change in our society over a relatively short period of time. What takes centuries in Europe, we accomplish in a generation.

It's interesting, in the U.K., I'm known for doing comedy things, which often doesn't translate to the U.S.

I don't find the same things funny that many other people seem to find funny. I don't really respond to sex jokes and things like that, and some of my friends look at me and go, "Come on, Nic, that was my best joke. Why aren't you laughing?" I go, "I really don't know why I'm not laughing. I'm sort of out of sync with it." So I'd have to find something that was really about weird human behavior for me to laugh.

I just think women are funnier than men.

Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.

Now women in comedy is a trendy topic, and people are hungering for women's voices in a way that they haven't before.

Maybe in 10 years,I'll only be doing "classical" comedy. Or crashing my car into trees.