One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for commun...
History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.
We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.
History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budg...
I'm a huge sci-fi geek, and I also really get into all of the alien shows on the History Channel where you see air force pilots talking about UFOs - I love that stuff.
There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I'm forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.
All my kids were raised on computers: They were home-schooled on the Internet, so they're pretty good at that stuff. And I'm proud of them, but I don't really keep up with it.
I was once in a very, very bad car accident. So my drawing arm is full of pins and platinum stuff. Occasionally it hurts. But I found that after the arm was put back together I could draw better than before. I have no idea why.
It was all that stuff about taking your parents' car when you're 13, sneaking booze into rock shows and ditching school with your friends. I could relate to that as a former teenager, rather than as a present parent.
I remember when 'The Right Stuff' opened in Hollywood. I got dressed that morning and drove my car down to the theatre that it was playing on, thinking that there would be mobs of people outside. When I looked, there was nobody there.
I've got more stuff asked of me every week. But I drive a race car for a living. My car owner lets me race as many sprint car races as I want to run.
Well, because I have twin seven-year-old boys, I enjoy the gift giving stuff a great deal. We do both Hanukkah and Christmas, so it is a costly, though extremely pleasing proposition.
Then, when I got in the military, I used to host - even in high school - I hosted the talent shows, and when I was in the military I would host all of our base Christmas parties and stuff.
You can tell your uncle stuff that you could not tell your dad. That is kind of the role of an uncle. I feel very much like a father sometimes but sometimes I feel like a teammate.
I was recording stuff with my dad when I was like five, six years old. I played with him on tour. I'd gone with him to Japan in '91, played some gigs, did a couple shows at the Albert Hall.
My dad had an eighth grade education, and everything that he did in his life was just stuff that he went out and did - figured out what he needed to know and read. Very successful, a union contractor.
My mom's a translator, my dad's a woodworker; that's the world I grew up in, that's the world I'm most comfortable in. The whole idea of Hollywood or any of that other stuff that unfortunately goes along with film, that wasn't part of my upbringing, ...
Death Valley is really wide-open - it's bigger than Rhode Island - and it's less a part of California than an ungoverned territory, so there's lots of weird cops-and-robbers stuff going on.
The buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to...
