I don't have a desire to do reality. Because my truth is not what people are responding to. My truth is funny; I laugh with my husband every day.
I walked in thinking, 'I have ten movies under my belt and now they want me to go back to making commercials?' I said, if I do that, I want it to be funny.
A lot of movies that come from Israel are about war, but there is such good, funny, rounded writing that comes from the country that I wish more people would discover.
My knowledge of Vancouver and Canada was limited to what I knew about Bob and Doug McKenzie. I thought they were funny, talking out of the sides of their mouths and saying 'eh' and wearing toques.
For years, it's driven me crazy that women don't have better roles, especially in comedies. I know so many funny women but I always felt... misogynist streak is too strong a term - but a dismissiveness.
A lot of my friends are club people. It's not me. It's funny to represent that, because it's not me. I don't fit into a gay club setting. It's just ironic that I represent that somehow.
It was kind of scary because working with Woody Allen becomes sort of a big deal in your mind. He directs in that Woody Allen character some of the time - he has these idiosyncrasies that are really charming and funny.
It just so happens that people aren't doing comedy about abortion or cannibalism or waterboarding. And that to me doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't aspects of those subjects that are funny, it just means that people are too uptight.
When you're in the editing room, the dangerous thing is that it becomes like telling a joke again and again and again. Eventually, the joke starts to not be funny. So you have to be careful that you're not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
It's funny that it all becomes about clothes. It's bizarre. You work your butt off and then you win an award and it's all about your dress. You can't get away from it.
I can play a cat lady. I can't put my foot down and refuse to play anything but playing the perfect, well-adjusted woman, because those people aren't as fun or funny.
If you are a great dramatic actor then you often don't know if people are enjoying your stuff at all because they are sitting there in silence. But with comedy it's a simple premise. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't.
What am I responsible for? Who am I responsible to? Everybody? How come when Archie Bunker nailed everybody, it was funny - but when I do it, it's not?
It's so funny when you're actually directing because things start popping that you don't expect to pop, and something that you think is going to pop, maybe doesn't quite have the impetus that you thought it might.
When I worked with Robin Williams, now there is improv! He is just as funny as you think he is. We did at least five or six takes of every scene, improvising every scene differently. He was a riot.
I think maybe I became funny because as a kid, I was a Jew in a town of no Jews, and being funny just instinctively came about as a way to put people at ease around me.
When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, 'Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.'
A lot of modern comedies are difficult to watch too, because they're so ironic and so detached and so quote-unquote clever. They kind of keep you at arm's length. They can be really funny, but they're not really nourishing.
Comedy needs to happen naturally and be in touch with the character. When you see that guy in your office that everybody laughs at, he doesn't think he's funny. He's just being him, and that's the joke.
When you go back to 'Friends,' and you look at that as New York, there's no black people. That's not real. You're in New York City, and there's no black people at all. That's a little funny.
I play a female Indiana Jones, a professor who hunts down precious objects, like a bowl that belonged to the Buddha. They tailored the role to me: I wanted to be smart, funny, and to kick some ass.
