A Quote by George Jean Nathan
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
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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.
Rain Man certainly didn't test really well. If you look at it carefully, you have a disease autism they didn't understand back then, they didn't know in the test audience whether it's okay to laugh or not laugh, because it's a film that's done in a way where, "Well, maybe I'm not supposed to laugh." At the end of the film, Dustin Hoffman gets on the train and doesn't even acknowledge his brother. Not even a glance, nothing. That's why the studio said, "Can't you just have him look at Tom Cruise at the end of the film?"
A hero has to become a comedian to do a comic role but a comedian does not have to do anything. People laugh at him anyway. Even when I attend funerals, people look at my face and laugh.
Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.
Dad made me laugh a lot. He was a real comedian. He had a real sarcastic sense of humour, he could really make a fool out of people. I have to watch it a little bit, because I caught that habit from him. I was really fond of him. He was my idol.
An artist, if he's unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.
Every time [Rand Paul] opens his mouth, it gets a little crazier. Today he angrily demanded that the liberal media stop quoting him in context.
If I say 'political comedian,' then people think you're talking about you, the Senate and Congress, and what's going on in Washington D.C. If I say 'comedian,' people automatically assume that you're a comedian who talks about how his wife won't listen to him and that dummy down at the mechanic who wouldn't fix his car.
I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.
There is a man sleeping in the grass. And over him is gathering the greatest storm of all his days. Such lightening and thunder will come there has never been seen before, bringing death and destruction. People hurry home past him, to places safe from danger. And whether they do not see him there in the grass, or whether they fear to halt even a moment, but they do not wake him, they let him be.
The real test is not whether you avoid failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it. . .
A person who is a comedian does comedy in real life, too. But then there are others, too, who are very good in real life, but can't perform in front of the camera. They get nervous. Nevertheless, an inborn comedian does comedy whether he is in films or not.
An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes.
A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.
Before commencing battle, the Warrior of Light opens his heart and asks God to inspire him.
He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.
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