In my experience, it's not just that serious books get a hearing on comedy shows. But serious books get a serious hearing, as well as a funny one, on comedy shows.
In the Netherlands I read the first chapter of Exquisite Corpse to an audience that laughed in all the places I thought were funny - an experience I've never had in America!
You have to be funny about it and honest about it. You can't leave yourself out of that mix. You have to be honest enough to say, I'm that messed-up one in the family.
I still read the British papers, but I've never been a Royalist, ever. It's funny, there always seems to be much more of a fascination with the Royal Family over here then there does in England.
When I was a child, I always wanted to be funny and to please people in my family. As you grow up that instinct becomes more refined, but it's still there.
Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.
It perhaps has a chance, a commercial chance, this film. It's funny, it's charming, the idea is original, it's unusual and it makes fun of the movie industry in a way that it needs to be poked fun at.
Since the goal of my programs is to show audiences how humor can both help them heal as well as deal with not-so-funny stuff, I decided to discuss the events of the previous week, the pain all of us were feeling, and how humor and some laughter might...
I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.
I'm the kind of person, if I see something, like a funny video, I want to share it. With Twitter and Tumblr you can do that on a mass scale, and people get to know your personality.
For 35 years, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren't funny. Some of them weren't appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.
It is funny because the guy who is my boss now, Howard Stern, has a similarity there. He got big being a regular guy. He wasn't the greatest looking guy in the world.
I'm like the master of ceremonies being funny, and then sometimes people you're with, girlfriends and stuff, are like, 'God I wish I had the person on stage to be with all the time.'
The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way, you can break the ice. It's crazy, but even at funerals, people will get huge laughs.
It's funny because I'm a sucker for glitz and glitter when it comes to clothes and nail polish, but with my makeup, I'm more comfortable with a natural look. It feels more like me.
I don't think I'm an intentional liar, but I'm a little bit of an exaggerator sometimes. If I'm exaggerating, and the journalist exaggerates on top of that, then we end up in funny territory.
When you're a kid, 'Star Trek' is a slower burn. It's funny, it's entertaining, but it also has a maturity about it - which is its universal appeal, I think.
My grandmother raised me. She was a real no-nonsense but very funny lady. I drove tractors, made hay, milked cows, fed the chicken, fed the pigs.
And write what you love - don't feel pressured to write serious prose if what you like is to be funny.
This is funny because I just had a job over the summer for VH1, a project I did called Strange Frequency where I got to play a Goth rock band singer.
