Dax Shepard Quotes

I was one of the people that always got chosen last, and I think I bulked up my comedy bone to make up for my lack of friends.

I was not funny growing up.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

I was the fat kid, so as a defense mechanism, I was the jokester.

I made sure that instead of people making fun of me, like every comedian probably says, I made fun of myself first so they would get distracted and just laugh. I was pretty brutally picked on for a while growing up. It was always the really pretty girls, the hot girls and then there was me. So I had to do something to get any sort of attention.

I think I knew I was funny in Elementary School. I think most funny people realize it when they're young. It tends to come out of stress or trauma - something that makes you want to be funny.

I remember, growing up, if something big - God forbid - happened, the first jokes you heard on the subject came out of Jersey.

The only way I could get comfortable around people was to make them laugh. I was an obedient girl, and humor was my one form of rebellion. I used comedy to deflect. Like, 'Hey, check out my zit!' - you know, making fun of yourself before someone else has a chance to.

When you're small, you either are funny, or you get beat up a lot.

I never got beaten up, because I was a wisecracking jokester. I could make a bully laugh before he delivered a punch.

I've always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother's friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny.

My sense of humor has saved me more than a couple of times in my life.

My only agenda is trying to make you laugh and say something smart.

I was very shy and had low self-esteem; the only way to stop yourself getting beaten up was to turn your hand to being an idiot. At the beginning, it was survival, and after that, it became second nature.

You can find humor in most things, and even terrible things.

You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.

Jewish introspection and Jewish humor is a way of surviving . . . if you're not handsome and you're not athletic and you're not rich, there's still one last hope with girls, which is being funny.

The way I survived growing up in Jersey City was by being funny. It wasn't by being tough. Nobody thought of me as a tough kid, except for the kids I beat up.

My sense of humor was a tool for me getting past my mother and father separating, my older brother having cerebral palsy, and the bullies in the schoolyard. I had to make them laugh to keep them off my ass. I brought that to my professional career.

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.

I used humor to avoid being picked on as a kid. Or I would try and make my parents laugh, so I wouldn't get in trouble. But as a kid, I would watch Flip Wilson and I would memorize his whole routine, listen to Bill Cosby's records constantly, Steve Martin, Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball. I just drank that stuff up and loved it.

Tis no extravagant arithmetic to say, that for every ten jokes, thou hast got an hundred enemies; and till thou hast gone on, and raised a swarm of wasps about thine ears, and art half stung to death by them, thou wilt never be convinced it is so.

My coping mechanism with my dyslexia is to use wit and humor.

I grew up as a very sarcastic person. I was always the class clown, and to date girls I had to be really funny. I was really skinny growing up.

Being witty was the only side effect of being depressed that was working for me.