Steve Allen

Many comedians and comedy writers have shared the childhood experience of learning to joke to protect themselves from neighborhood bullies when challenge or physical defense were not among the sensible options.

The hair is real - it's the head that's a fake.

Do I ever get questions that are rude or impertinent? Yes, but I love to use them. The audience immediately perceives the emotional awkwardness of the situation.

It often seems that, for whatever strange reasons, comedians, in addition to their formal performances, have more comic experiences in real life than other people do.

I personally find it difficult to accept that there could be anyone on earth insensitive to the comic abilities of Laurel and Hardy, Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, or Martin Short. But no matter who the comic entertainer is, there is always at least a minority prepared to say, 'What's all the excitement about? He doesn't seem funny to me.'

Much of the best humor is found in the frequently tragic reality of human experience.

Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots.

To the extent that there is anything properly identifiable as dignity in our society today, our present writers of comedy would be inclined to treat it as a proper object of ridicule.

In general, the straight line of a joke sets up a premise, an expectation. Then the funny ending - the punch line - in a sense contradicts the original assumption by refusing to follow what had seemed a reasonable train of thought. Many jokes involve that simple matter of leaping outside what had appeared to be the rules of the game at the moment.

We will take almost any kind of criticism except the observation that we have no sense of humor.

If we do not know what humor is, that may be because we do not know what humankind is.

There used to be an art form called the 'comedy of manners.' Why aren't comedies of manners made now in this country? The answer is simple. We no longer have manners to speak of.