When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.
People try to put ownership on things: 'That's mine, that's my joke.' No such thing. Like if you tripped or stumbled and people go, 'Oh, that's Charlie Chaplin.' You know what I mean? You can't own a joke. You can be the guy that tells it the best, but you can't own a joke. Nowhere can you own a laugh.
The U.K. and Europe in general seem to be a lot more patient. The U.S. are expecting 'joke joke joke joke joke joke joke.' They don't actually sit and listen to you.
Something is mighty wrong with our priorities when professing Christian men joke about their wives, joke about their children, and joke about God, but fight to the death over their favorite sports team.
Twitter is a good medium to lean how to write jokes. It pushes you to write a better joke in that, on Twitter, the first joke about something has already happened. You need to think of the second joke and the third joke.
What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.
It is the mind that tells you that the mind is there. Don't be deceived. All the endless arguments about the mind are produced by the mind itself, for its own protection, continuation and expansion. It is the blank refusal to consider the convolutions and convulsions of the mind that can take you beyond it.
I think anybody who's curious about anything, including their own mind, is inherently a skeptic.
What's cool about Twitter is that you can make a joke about something very of-the-moment or random that I wouldn't be able to joke about in stand-up.
When I was governor, if I told a joke in front of the press - I learned. I would go, "That was a joke, joke, joke," and I'd say it three times.
Anything that I'm passionate about and surprises me usually ends up turning into a joke simply because I have questions about it and I'm curious and I want to talk about it.
I believe you can joke about anything.
To observe and watch one's own mind is something really interesting. The untrained mind will run and follow its old habit patterns. Because it has not been trained and taught, it will get lost in all kinds of stories and issues. Therefore we have to train our mind. The meditation practice in Buddhism is all about training one's own mind.
You can joke about anything. It just depends on your angle and the way you go about it.
Now, some people do this for shock value. Shock is just another uptown word for surprise. Granted it has a different quality to it, but a joke is about surprising someone. I'm a great believer in context. You can joke about anything. I do like finding out where the line is drawn, deliberately crossing it and bringing some of them with me across the line, and having them be happy that I did.
No one really has any idea about me. To me, what I give you is what happens onscreen, and past that, anything you're coming up with in your own head, you're creating in your own mind.