I don't want to be too critical of what other people do, but when people go back to do the same thing that they did, I'm completely confused. I'm like, 'Didn't you make that movie already?' I've been very fortunate, and I'm well taken care of, so the least I can do is try to go forward.

There's different kinds of laughs. It's like a baseball lineup: this guy's your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we're gonna win.

When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I'd get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.

You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That's how you know you're still alive.

Real life doesn't exist on a network television comedy. They just don't let you travel down any road that is presumably 'dark.'

Now a 'funnyman' can get a laugh before opening his mouth - looking funny. Lou Costello was one of your great funnymen. Harry Langdon, Larry Semon; they were all funnymen - they looked funny. W.C. Fields was never a comedian. Slim Summerville was a comedian, yet looked funny. Now if you have both attributes, you are in good shape.

Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble.

Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business.