Steve Allen Quotes

Laughter is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one place.

Laughing and crying are really similar - what happens to your body. It's a very similar process in your diaphragm. Like a musician, you have to do your scales once in a while and warm up your voice.

Obviously, the difference between a game and actual training is you're using your whole body, so in that sense, maybe not, although maybe something to do with reaction, the speed of reaction, maybe that was of use during the training.

I - at the table reads, I break constantly. If something is up there that I'm not expecting, I tend to - I can't help myself; I'll start laughing.

Laughter is binary: It either happens or it doesn't. As each joke arrives in the course of a film, the cavernous space of the theater is either filled with joy and laughter or with the quiet of cringing embarrassment. Every time you step to the plate to make a joke, you're going to experience one or the other.

I don't laugh out loud at comics a lot.

Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It's unsuccessful if they don't laugh.

But with comedy it's a simple premise. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't.

In point of fact, I'm not sure there are too many comedies with laugh tracks anymore. Most of what you hear is live studio audience laughing as a show is filmed. If this prompts you to wonder who those actual human beings are who are laughing at some of this stuff, that is a mystification I share.

He need not get so angry because the House laughs at him: he ought to be pleased when they only laugh at him.

I think that laughter and death are closely related: comedy is the quintessential human reaction to the fear of death. It's probably linked with the fact that we are the only animals who know we must die.

Sometimes it takes you two or three seconds to get your head round a joke and laugh at it. With a snot-bubble laugh, it comes instinctively - almost in spite of yourself. It's caused by something silly - like when a little kid says something unexpectedly bizarre.

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.

I hear music and my feet just start moving.

Shock is shock. Your body goes into shock, regardless of it being real blood or fake blood. The mind sends powerful messages to all the various glands and secretions in the body. It's impossible trying to act it; it just happens. It's a very important question: no acting.

When I hear music, my body just starts to move. It has nothing to do with training or anything. That's just me. That's just my body. And I was like that as a child, too.

The one [The Beverly Hillbillies] flaw in this is that you can't hear the people laughing.

At the very instant that you think, "I am happy," a chemical messenger translates your emotion, which has no solid existence whatever in the material world, into a bit of matter so perfectly attuned to your desire that literally every cell in your body learns of your happiness and joins in.

When we laugh we temporarily give ourselves over to the person who makes us laugh.

Laughter brightens the eye, increases the perspiration, expands the chest, forces the poisoned air from the least-used cells, and tends to restore that exquisite poise or balance which we call health.

Some women blush when they are kissed, some call for the police, some swear, some bite. But the worst are those who laugh.

What the mind dwells upon, the body acts upon.

Your mind knows your pretending, but, in terms of the adrenaline and the fact that you are actually crying, and that you are that upset, and you are screaming, and you are simulating terror, your body does not know that it is not real. Your body feels really wrecked afterwards.

Whenever I feel nervous, I feel like I have to poop.

It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it . . . so I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.