Most of what gets made now, you laugh your way through, go home and forget you've seen it.
It's like our go-to notion of innocent and secure mythology of American life. I was always amazed when people would come up to me and say that 'Far from Heaven' was exactly what it was like back then. [laughs] I was so disinterested in what it was 'really like' in the 1950s when I was putting the film together, I was only interested in what it was like in movies.
And the goal really is to make the audience laugh, to bring them some joy.
I struggle to try not to read the press about my album. It was great when the first stuff came out to hear that people liked it, but at the same time at this point it's almost hard for me to read because as much as I'm uncomfortable with my voice, trust me, I'm more uncomfortable with the things I say. [laughs] To see it on a written page, it's like, "Oh my god. I told that guy I'm a hopeless romantic! What am I doing?"
Live a good long life. Grow old and die after I do. And if you can, die laughing.
Most of the time, it just sat there in my body, until the weekend. After five or six takes of crying, your body does not want to cry anybody. Your body is like, "I'm over this, can we start laughing, or something?," but you have to keep the emotion. It's a really weird process and it definitely just stays with you.
Sometimes when you're doing a comedy, the director will yell out "alts" and then the director gets the first laugh.
The only way I could get comfortable around people was to make them laugh.
It's hard to get laughs when you're new.
At some point, you realize that people might be laughing at your jokes because they're afraid not to laugh.
Last night the Taliban offered to release eight Westerners if the U.S. promised not to attack. The State Department declined but thanked the Taliban for the offer, saying it really felt good to laugh again.
I do suppose what any political satire, what any political joke can count as a gaffe or a possible career-ending move. It changes what counts. I don’t know, I do feel like day to day even though Trump is so terrible and ridiculous, day to day we still laugh at Jason Chaffetz and we still laugh at Ted Cruz and we still laugh at those guys, at just how bad they are at their jobs.
That kind of language is what makes us laugh. Like, "Well, just eFax that to me, and I'll take a look at it."
The thing that struck me is so many people that said, "Hey, I've been watching you since I was 12, and I'm 25 now." It was a weird shift, because you start off fighting for an audience based on doing something so strange that only you find funny, and it's weird when other people find it funny. Those people aren't always ready to laugh yet, and there's a sort of standoffish quality to it.
When anything doesn't hit with a huge laugh, as comics, it feels like, Oh no, oh no, we're sinking.
I think for me the trick is not to aim to impress or to even try to make people laugh but instead to tell the truth.
But instead they tell you they'll come to fix your cable between noon and five, and I say, okay, I'll pay my next bill between July and November, but they don't laugh.
If you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?
I love Twitter, you know? I try to read everything I can on Twitter. You get so much nice feedback about stuff, you know you just put out a sentence and everybody laughs or everybody's just sending something back. It's amazing. Same with Facebook, you know? I'm a lot on Facebook and it's just - it's just amazing. And YouTube, of course, as well.
There are people - I think this is why there are so many commercial directors doing well in big studio movies, for whom it's not a personal choice - it's "What's the coolest, most effective way to make them laugh, make them scream?" It's a very calculated approach. And that's different. It's not better or worse. It's just a very different approach to filmmaking. That's always been the case.
Humor is more so. For this, there's definitely moments that I think, "I know this part is really funny and I want to see people laugh." And they do and you go, "Yesss." That's really satisfying, because I'm so proud of the performances in the movie and everybody worked so hard.
I used to like eating frozen corn straight out of the bag. But I also love microwaving frozen corn and adding butter and sugar and garlic powder and chili powder to it. And sometimes I just like to microwave it and add a little bit of hot sauce to it. My friends always laugh at me when they catch me eating it.
We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
The basics of acting are really better in America than in Europe. Just the basic "fake laugh" is impossible to get in France.
Old School has humongous laughs all the way through it.
