Benny Hill Quotes

When we first sold the Wallace and Gromit shorts to America, people suggested we get rid of the strange British accents and put clear American voices on them, and we held out.

A lot of British comedy feels foreign rather than feeling universal.

We're in a long line of English people pretending to be Americans and not being as good as Americans.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

I have no idea what a British sensibility or a British sense of humor is. I have no concept of what that is. I have no concept of what American sensibility is. I was born in Great Britain, but I was only there for six months, and we moved to Belgium, where I grew up. I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.

It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.

'Authentic' is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?

I had a 'Monty Python' CD, and I would listen to it in the car on the way to school. It also refined my British accent. I can do a killer British accent because I'm just imitating 'Monty Python.'

I was actually born and raised in Puerto Rico. I moved to the States when I was 19. I was very impressed early on by being around people who spoke my language and ate the same food and listened to the same music, dressed the same. But then you look around and, you know, you're not in Puerto Rico.

When anybody goes to L.A. from London, there's always this slight sense of, 'What are you doing? Who do you think you are? It's never gonna happen.' It's the classic, good-natured British cynicism.

We're like quirky Brits!

Definitely that was a big part of my childhood: wanting to fit. As an immigrant, you talk funny, you look funny, you smell funny. I wanted to do nothing but fit in and talk English and sit with everybody else.

To be a foreigner may be an advantage but disadvantage as well. It was advantage for me for sure.

I went back to Hong Kong for the first time in 17 years and I was culture shocked in Hong Kong.

I'm good at winding up British people, but Americans are slightly different. A lot of them are more stoical. They're harder to get a reaction out of more of the time.

If somebody has no sense of humor, I think that's a great place to start for British comedy in terms of your character.

In England, we've spent a bit of time being lost as to what our modern identity is.

I was 12 years old when I first moved to New York, and at that age, you're trying to find yourself. It was hard being so different from everyone I was around, and I felt that nobody could really understand me because everyone was American, and I was this little English girl with an accent.

The beautiful thing about comedy in the U.K. is that it has a clever twist to it, and when you really break it down, the joke isn't filthy at all: it's clever.

Most of my friends, growing up, were upper-middle-class white kids, so it was a different reality at home both culturally and linguistically. It created a lot of insecurities for me, but it also did a lot of amazing things that I didn't know were happening at the time.

When I go to Brazil, I feel like an American, and in the U.S., I always notice the traits that make me Brazilian.

Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.

No country can become a nation by producing a race of imitators.

Shopping as lifestyle is really a sub-cultural problem. When the strictures that set you apart or oppressed you, disappear, is there a way, legitimately, to maintain your sense of specialness and difference? And how do you express that? Does it just become a kind of kitsch? You can say this of gay people, but it's true for Jewish people, Italian Americans, everyone who deals with it. It's a question of assimilation. How can you be assimilated and special at the same time?

I think fundamentalism is this radical attitude toward one's own identity and civilization as compared to other people's identities and cultures.