Top Highlights

• “Is this anything?” is what every comedian says to every other comedian about any new bit. Ideas that come from nowhere and mean nothing.
• All comedians are slightly amazed when anything works.
• Then in 1974, two things happened that tripped my head out of whatever thick, suburban haze I was in and off into a whole different realm of life. I read a book called The Last Laugh and saw a movie called Lenny. The Last Laugh by Phil Berger was the first book completely about the world of stand-up comedy. Lenny was a Dustin Hoffman movie about th...
• I still don’t know exactly for sure where jokes come from. I think it’s from some emotional cocktail of boredom, aggression, intense visual acuity and a kind of Silly Putty of the mind that enables you to re-form what you see into what you want it to be.
• But when I’m in the company of other stand-up comedians I feel like I’m rolling around in a litter of puppies.