Alan Bleasdale Quotes

I've got a quote for you, a good quote to describe Television...In madness there is order.

You know the old joke, I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out.

I'm in a Road Runner cartoon, Sinclair. And I'm the coyote.

It's Charley's Aunt and The Odd Couple rolled into one.

The thing about stand-ups is you can't really get good unless you're failing in front of a large number of people. That makes stand-up comedy unique: you need a tremendous amount of reserve within you to take the rejection from the audience, and without it, you can't do anything.

Man's greatest fear is chaos.

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

I failed to get into drama school, and my best friend told me I should do stand-up instead. I was always doing gags and voices, so he booked a gig for me without telling me. I only had four days to write it. I did a seven-minute set; the first four minutes were terrible, but the last two were amazing.

I think frankly when it comes to chaos you ain't seen nothing yet.

Some of them … are tripping one another up, while others are twisting each other and groveling together in the mud, wallowing like swine … Others standing upright, … are attacking each other with blows and kicks … one looks as if he were going to spew out his teeth, unlucky man, his mouth full of blood and sand …. Nobody can easily convince me that men who do these things are not out of their minds.

I'd love to try comedy, which I've never actually done. I could fail miserably at it, but I'd have fun working it out.

The thing that stand-up does for you is that it toughens you up a bit as far as the business goes. It's hard. If a joke doesn't get a laugh, that's instant rejection. And that's mostly what this business is most of the time: a lot of rejection.

The world is so crazy.

I thought that I was going to be a stand-up comedian or an actress. Turns out, I can't act my way out of a paper bag and stand-up comedy is a lot harder than it appears.

The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.

I've spent the last few years just really actively pursuing comedy and that's something I always wanted to know how to do.

Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine, and stumbled into the path of a religious procession - celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet, 'Hari, Hari! Hari Potter!'

Helter skelter in a summer swelter.

When you do see me, you'll get the idea from when you see me that it's all off the top of my head. A lot of it is a beginning, middle and the end. But it's different every night. I have a lot of jokes in my back pocket I've said over the years.

Your only guidepost is your own instinct and judicious editing. In my stand-up act I learned that in the first 10 minutes I could say anything and it would get a laugh. Then I'd better deliver. In the movie it's the same thing. You get a lot of laughs when people first sit down and then the story better kick in. Many years in front of an audience, I would hope, give me a sense of what works.

In my view this is not democracy, but a zoo.... It was exactly what we expected, but not on that scale nor in that form. In a word, it was nothing but a zoo, you can't put it better

When I started doing my act, I wasn't married and didn't have kids. I was probably 29 years old. Some people say that's not a kid, but when you're 50, and you look back to when you were 30, you were a kid. You look back on your 30s and think, "I was an idiot!" But I would just do things then I thought were funny. I couldn't have cared less who thought anything about it.

The first time I got on stage I was 10 years old and I did impressions. I did cartoon characters and I really got the bug for this life when I saw that people were laughing and saw the attention I was getting.

I think the best thing about being dumb is that it makes magic a lot better. Where the hell did that rat come from? I dunno, but I'm calling the cops because he just cut that lady in half.