Pastoral Resources

We love the Stooges, and young kids today don't watch them. They think it's their dad's comedy. So we thought we could reintroduce them to a new audience.

In comedy, though, it's good to get feedback from the audience about what they find funny.

In the West audiences think I am a stereotyped action star, or that I always play hitmen or killers. But in Hong Kong, I did a lot of comedy, many dramatic films, and most of all, romantic roles, lots of love stories. I was like a romance novel hero.

Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.

Saturday Night Live is such a comedy boot camp in a way, because you get to work with so many different people who come in to host the show and you get thrown into so many situations and learn how to think on your feet, so filmmaking actually feels slow, in a good way.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

All you have in comedy, in general, is just going with your instincts. You can only hope that other people think that what you think is funny is funny. I don't have an answer but I just try to plough straight ahead.

I think a lot of the instincts you have doing comedy are really the same for doing drama, in that it's essentially about listening. The way I approach comedy, is you have to commit to everything as if it's a dramatic role, meaning you play it straight.

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

There was really a snobbery from people in film - they did not want people who had come from television. It was the poor relation of show business, and especially situation comedy.

When I read the script, I liked the script very much and I thought it was a marvelous part for her, because I think it is a change of pace. I mean, we know how wonderful she is in romantic comedy.

I would like to do maybe a smaller romantic comedy.

Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.

With comedy I can search for the profound.

Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible.

Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.

My theory is, if you can do comedy and you can be in a scene with someone like Brad Garrett and hold your own, you've really got a future in this business.

I think comedy is one of the hardest things to do.

First of all, to defend my work, I had to believe that I am doing a totally silly, stupid, innocent comedy.

Well, a lot of politics is communicating with people, and obviously comedy has something to do with that. I've been a producer and led people. Also, being a comedian, you're under pressure.