Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it's amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects.
As a comedian, you want people to like you. That's part of why you're there in the first place: You have this unquenchable need to be liked, and then when you divert from that and take a chance at doing something that has moments of fierce unlikeability, you can hit some real low points.
I've lived this very dramatic life, with high points and terrible low points. Nothing has been ordinary, and I want to have the experience of the last breath. I want a little drama to it.
Today I said to the calculus students, "I know, you're looking at this series and you don't see what I'm warning you about. You look and it and you think, 'I trust this series. I would take candy from this series. I would get in a car with this series.' But I'm going to warn you, this series is out to get you. Always remember: The harmonic series diverges. Never forget it."
Ive lived this very dramatic life, with high points and terrible low points. Nothing has been ordinary, and I want to have the experience of the last breath. I want a little drama to it.
The thing is, I was never really a comedian - a comedian would scoff at the notion of me as a comedian because I've never done anything, really. I've always just been some guy who's funny.
You know, you can't see or touch and isn't embodied. But they were all fallible, the Gods. And they would kind of rise and fall. You know, they all, like Achilles, Icarus, you know, they all had their high points and their low points.
I never saw my career as a journey with a beginning, middle, and end, with high points and low points. It is just a whole, big mass of experience, and I take each experience as it comes. I don't strategise.
Wonder is that possession of the mind that enchants the emotions while never surrendering reason. It is a grasp on reality that does not need constant high points in order to be maintained, nor is it made vulnerable by the low points of life's struggle.
To the extent that our workers compete with low-paid Mexicans, it is as much through undocumented immigration as trade. This pattern threatens low-paid, low-skill U.S. workers. The combination of domestic reforms and NAFTA-related growth in Mexico will keep more Mexicans at home. It is likely that a reduction in immigration will increase the real wages of low-skilled urban and rural workers in the United States.
I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.
After I left 'Laverne & Shirley,' I got a ton of offers to play the goofy guy next door, and there were a couple of series that I was offered that turned out to be successful series, but it was too close to what I'd done on my series, and I was really glad I didn't take it.
Some street jokes are just timeless. There's an old street joke about comedians. The joke is that a beautiful girl comes up to a comedian at the end of the night and says, "I saw your show tonight, and I just loved it. I want to go home with you, and I'll do anything you want." And the comedian says, "Were you at the 7 or the 9?" That's just a perfect joke, because it points out how egomaniacal and obsessive comedians are. Even though I'm not waiting for a groupie, I can completely understand it. It just defines how comedians are driven.
I know firsthand that many employers who comply with other labor standards still hire the undocumented. Many businesses pay the minimum wage and have barely tolerable working conditions because there are sufficient undocumented workers willing to accept those terms. If we care about low-income workers in this country, we need to create pressure to improve their economic condition by reducing the supply of unauthorized workers.
Ricky Gervais would have you believe otherwise, but Sacha Baron Cohen is the most successful British comedian in the world.
In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.