A Quote by Michael Keaton
My first manager, he had left Germany when he was five, but he would joke about the Nazis. And I'd laugh, but I'd look at him, and he was the first one who told me, 'You know, funny is a powerful thing; it's a wonderful weapon.'
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Comedy is a very personal thing, as you would know if you've ever told the same joke to two people and had one of them laugh their head off and the other one look at you as though you were a completely cretin.
Someone trying to be funny probably isn't as funny as someone who doesn't want to be funny but is and can't help it. Someone being serious or angry might be funny. If you get angry, the first thing I want to do is laugh because I don't know why you're getting that angry. Pathos makes me laugh, funerals make me laugh.
That's something - you laugh about Eminem... It's funny, man, because I didn't like him when he first came out, ya know. It seemed like a big joke. But I think the guy's for real, and I like his lyrics!
The first thing you start with when you're trying to write something funny is it has to - it really has to come to you first. I has to be an idea that you have that first makes you laugh, that strikes you as funny.
Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone. What happened in their first five minutes? Time stopped.
A joke is either funny or it's not funny. If I hear a funny joke, you know what I do? I laugh, that's what I do. I don't start a focus group to see who got hurt by the joke.
The first time I was called up for Germany, it was Mesut who decided to look after me. He told me if I ever had any kind of problem, he would try to help me out, and that is exactly what he did. For sure, he helped me a lot.
If a comedian tells a joke that you find funny, you laugh. If he tells a joke you do not find funny, don't laugh. Or you could possibly go as far as groaning or rolling your eyes. Then you wait for his next joke; if that's funny, then you laugh. If it's not, you don't laugh - or at very worst, you can leave quietly.
When I was working with Barry Sonnenfeld, I'd watch him set up a shot and talk to him about what he was seeing and what it was to shoot comedy. He told me that a lot of times with comedy, it's not just about getting the joke, but getting a reaction to the joke. That's the laugh - it's somebody's else's reaction to the joke.
If a comedian tells a joke that you find funny, you laugh. If he tells a joke you do not find funny, dont laugh. Or you could possibly go as far as groaning or rolling your eyes. Then you wait for his next joke; if thats funny, then you laugh. If its not, you dont laugh - or at very worst, you can leave quietly.
I keep on repeating something told to me by an American psychologist: "When you are making a joke about someone and you are the only one to laugh, it is not a joke. It is a joke only for yourself." If people are making a joke they have the right to laugh at me but I will ignore them. Ignoring doesn't mean that you don't understand. You understand it so much that you don't want to react.
I have a German friend who works on memorialization. The last generation of Nazis and Holocaust survivors are now dying. So literally, we are threatened now for the first time ever, with memorializing that, with no first-person account of it left on earth. There's a lot of worry amongst scholars in Germany about what comes next: "All the memorialization has been done, we've done with everything we can."
Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.
If I see someone not laughing, the first thing I'm thinking is, "OK, am I cursing too much? Am I doing a joke he doesn't understand? Is he resting?" Then he starts becoming my focal point. Once I see him laugh, I'm like, [snap] "All right, now I'm funny."
Most people, when they hear the disease name, it's all they know about it. It sounds so mild. When I first was sick, for the first 10 years or so, I was dismissed. I was ridiculed and told I was lazy. It was a joke.
In Germany there's something about rock music much more political than it really is - like everything you were doing was an indictment of the American culture. I read an interview with one of the members of Sebadoh. He was saying he had just got back from touring Germany for the first time in five years or whatever, and one of the interviewers asked him, "Why aren't you still relevant?"
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