A Quote by Bill Bailey
I never really thought comedy was a career option, just something I did for fun. Suddenly I realised I was getting paid which was a bonus. I studied for a diploma with the London College of Music, and teaching was something I thought I might do but comedy intervened.
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I hadn't really thought about going to college. Nobody in my family went away to school. The other piece of that was I didn't see anybody else in my hometown going to college to give me some kind of influence or something like that you might want to think about. I didn't see any of that. Therefore I thought it was never there. What happened was that my high school coach intervened. Had he not intervened to the measure he intervened, I probably wouldn't have gone.
I always loved comedy, but in my mind, it wasn't a viable career option. I always thought, 'You go to college. You get a job, and then you pay off college.'
I primarily have had my career in comedy, and that is something that I have never been too concerned about because I know there is really no room for vanity in comedy. Comedy comes from pain and it is a lot easier to empathize with somebody who is out of shape.
At those times I got into... I suppose you call it a rut. I used to do comedy, comedy, comedy and I suddenly thought I ought to break away from this somehow.
You have to understand that I never thought I would have a career in music. That kind of thing didn't happen. Not for women, not in Canada, not in the 1960s. It was something I did for fun.
The truth is, I should have never done teaching. I did teaching because I didn't have the bottle to have a go at comedy. Whether there's any gain to comedy is not for me to say. But certainly it was no loss to teaching.
It's so hard for me to kind of fall in love with comedy, but if something comes my way... I mean, I loved 'Weird,' I thought that was a really fun character.
I thought if I could do stand-up comedy well enough, I could parlay it back into films - like Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen did. They merged principles of comedy and drama together, and that's what my first film really was, a stab at that kind of comedy.
I never thought modeling would become my career. I thought it was something I'd do to pay my way through college.
I think I'm one of those guys who was sort of always in comedy. I thought of myself - and other people seemed to think of me - as funny from a very young age. I was a very young comedy nerd and I even did sketch comedy in high school and college. I wrote and shot sketches on video and acted in them.
I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression. I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama. There's a lot of bullshit drama that leaves you totally cold. And there's a lot of wasted comedy time too. But when you get something honest, it doesn't matter what label you give it.
And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.
I've always wanted to do action stuff. I like it. You really want something that's special; that's got something special about it and not cheesy, I guess. I'll tell you something, it's fun, it's different. Comedy is difficult. Doing comedy is very difficult. Action stuff is fun.
Comedy doesn't really matter that much; I know that. I treat it like an adult - I don't treat it like a child or a god, which some people do. This might just be in America, but 'stand-up comedy' is something very particular that I don't particularly relate to.
I've stopped doing things that aren't clear comedy gigs - to do something that's not "comedy night," it's a difficult thing. People have to be given permission to laugh. You need to know it's comedy; otherwise you might just think I'm a man talking out loud.
It bothers me when people say 'shock comic' or 'gross-out' because that was only one type of comedy I did. There was prank comedy. Man-on-the-street-reaction comedy. Visually surreal comedy. But you do something shocking, and that becomes your label.
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