Americans just don't understand dry wit.
I would never heckle someone. That's why I think I'm so interested in someone that would.
Every empire has to get sucked down the drain. As a British person, I know how it feels.
You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn't be when it is literally your job.
I'm not really much of an actor, so when I started on 'The Daily Show', I was just trying to adopt the faux authority of a newsperson.
Here in America, people come out to see what they've known you to do. In England, it's like everyone comes out to tell you exactly how well they think you're doing.
People are friendlier in New York than London.
I'm British; pessimism is my wheelhouse.
I'm always interested in audience interaction. Not so much aggressive audience interaction - I'm genuinely interested in how people see things.
People are always going to say stupid things, and you're always going to be able to make jokes about that, but it should be the last thing you add in, because it's the easiest thing.
People really have come for a dialogue when they go to a stand-up show in the U.K. They say, 'I understand that you have now finished your little comedy monologue; now I have something to say regarding what I've just heard.
I do one accent - my own. I can make it louder or quieter. That is the sum total of my vocal range. I thought I could do an American accent until I tried it in front of an American - the expression of horror is still burnt onto my retinas.
Democracy is like a tamborine - not everyone can be trusted with it.
Believe it or not the war on Iraq is based on a sound scientific principle, The bee hive principle. Which clearly states that if you are stung by a bee, you should follow it back to its nest and then proceed to beat nest to a pulp with a baseball bat...
There's never any time I think I'm a real journalist, because I don't have any of the qualifications or the intentions for that.
You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well.
You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.
Being a Mets fan is like lending someone a lot of money and you just know that you'll never get paid back.
Politicians don't really bring up religion in England.
In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face.
There is no greater anesthetic than sport.
