Stand Up Comedians

"The Italians have got opera, the Spanish have got flamenco dancing. What have we got? Weight Watchers."

"I don’t say 'who'. I do say 'whom'. I never use the toilet, just the smallest room. I don't say gay. I still say queer. I think that Mussolini had the right idea."

"[On remaining unattached after a divorce] Well, I think there's not much of a chance for me finding somebody of my age. Gentlemen of my age are dropping down 30 years to find girlfriends. [Informed: "That's not always the case."] You're right. I need to get out of the house."

"I was just thinking as Alan [Bennett] and I walked up the steps, how nice it would have been if one of us had come up in a stairlift."

"[On a difficult relationship with her mother, Helen] If she'd only gone out to work, we would all have been a lot happier. Being in the house drove her mad. She hated housework, cooking. She'd go into the garden and chop down trees. She was full of energy and batting against the walls with it. And this gave me a real sense that you had to have your own life. It's ridiculous to stay at home with your children if it drives you nuts. Children would much rather see a happy, smiley person come back."

"[Asked if being interviewed is a form of torture for her] No, people always think I hate doing interviews. I don't. I wouldn't do them if I didn't like them. I have to say that at the start of every interview."

"Where are you in the menstrual cycle? Taurus."

"[Asked if she ever had childhood holidays in Blackpool] No. What do you take me for? We used to go to Vienna."

"People think I hate sex. I don’t. I just don’t like things that stop you seeing the television properly."

"Sometimes I think that being widowed is God's way of telling you to come off the pill."

"We'd like to apologise to our viewers in the North - it must be awful for you."

"[Song]] Not bleakly, Not meekly Beat me on the bottom with the Woman's Weekly Let's do it, let's do it tonight!"

"I just want to be the best friend who comes in, steals the scene, and bounces ...and then use that small amount of fame to sell out theaters and play to bigger audiences…So as we were starting to write the show, I kept saying to [her co-writers] 'You know what? [Abishola] needs a funny friend ... a confidant.'"

"I’ve never had any of my specials aired anywhere on British TV. If I’d sat in England waiting for someone to give me a TV show, I’d still be there, being the token black face on Mock the Week. That, to me, is a slap in the face."

"My sense of humour has always been quite in-your-face. I haven’t got that quintessential dry British humour, so my style fits in quite well...A lot of Americans have never been outside America. So if I’m doing something about Malaysia, say, I have to explain where Malaysia is and what the culture is before I go into the joke."

"I wasn’t like every other comedian at the time because I was coming from a different perspective. I was an outsider looking in. And I was even different from all the other black comics on the scene because a lot of them were of Caribbean origin and a lot of their jokes were poking fun at Africans. So I got my first taste of success quite quickly just from being different. It was taking it to the next level that was difficult."

"I was more qualified than most of the guys I was working with, which they hated. I’d come into work and there’d be a banana skin stuck to my overalls or a picture of a monkey on my coat."

"I think Catholicism is actually so counter-cultural to capitalism that it’s great to get relief from that economic narrative. It’s great to go to a place where it’s all about the losers. Capitalism is all about winning and ‘be the best that you can be’. That’s a tiresome mantra. ‘I am legend’ is appropriate if you’re a superhero, but not if you’re a human."

"Whitehall, on being "posh", or coming from an affluent background"

"He's always been the person who's made me laugh most. He uses humour in a very disarming way. I've seen how people enjoy his company and have always envied that, and have wanted to aspire to that."

"I was embarrassed by it and racked by middle-class guilt. But when you're on stage, if you're trying to be something you're not, it becomes so much harder. It's better to be honest and take every vulnerability and flaw you have, and mock them and deal with them."

"I am completely behind the #MeToo movement. You'd have to have Down Syndrome to not feel sorry for— #MeToo is what you want for your daughters and you want that to be the future world, of course""

"Roseanne was so broken up [after her show was canceled] that I got Louis to call her, even though Roseanne was very hard on Louis before that. But she was just so broken and just crying constantly. There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day. Of course, people will go, 'What about the victims?' But you know what? The victims didn' t have to go through that."

"Every generation has believed they lived ins the End Time, @NellScovell. It is a product of Man's narcissism. Deeply, we believe that when we die, so then does the world. Which is true. Because when we die, we don't disappear, the world does."

"My dad died, and my grandfather died, and my great-grandfather died. And the guy before him, I don't know. Probably died. … I come from a long line of death. That's my point. And so I fear it. I fear it a lot."

"I'm not gay, so I don't know much about Broadway musicals."

"Patton Oswalt, he told me, "I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy." And I disagreed. Yeah, I thought it was the raping."

"The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you're not careful, it's too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth."

"You know, with Hitler, the more I learn about that guy the more I don't care for him."

"Macdonald is currently 49, and looks worryingly like he'll be hailed as one of the greats only in retrospect. Watch him at your earliest convenience, and start making recommendations soon."

"I would love to stay at SNL forever. But you can't stay in the same place. People think you're a loser."

"If there is a god, why did he make me an atheist? That was his first mistake. Well, the talking snake was his first mistake."

"I think a comedian's job isn't just to make people laugh. I think it's to make people think."

"The truth doesn’t hurt. Whatever it is, it doesn’t hurt. It’s better to know the truth."

"Animals are not here for us to do as we please with. We are not their superiors, we are their equals. We are their family. Be kind to them."

"Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe” comes across as both patronizing and impolite."

"It’s awful to think of people eating dogs, but some people eat pork. I don’t, but some people do. And a pig is just like a dog, there is no difference between them."

"If humanity was , the Earth would return to a paradise in a few hundred years. If we lose bees, we’re a desert, forever. We’re not that important. We’re just one species of narcissistic ape. And some people on social media get annoyed when I say we’re apes. You know, religious types, Americans."

"You have options. You can either continue to be miserable or you can just stop being angry at everyone and accept the way things are. Allow yourself to live."

"Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leech down your trousers and pray."

"If we took something like any fiction, any holy book… and destroyed it, in a thousand year’s time that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book, and every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years time, they’d all be back."

"You get these people, and they'll probably always be with us, who get offended by comedy. And I used to not mind until it occurred to me one day; most people who get offended at jokes watch porn! Like, pretty much all of them! There's someone right now watching torture porn going (mimicking someone masturbating) "I hope nobody makes a joke about a fuckin' swimmer's nose!" And then you get these people who defend comedy and say "oh this is a free speech issue", it's not a free speech issue; it's an artistic license issue. You're allowed to talk about it because it's not real on some level, right? There will always be people who won't get it, there's always those people who go "I think you'll find that if two blokes actually took a crocodile into a pub, there would be fucking carnage." But it's not real, so we get to joke about it. I think people sometimes get confused with how they use humour in their own life with what this is. So most people use humour as a form of politeness, as an ice breaker - this isn't that. This is sentences that end in a very surprising way."

"(Speaking about jokes he made about the 2012 Summer Paralympics Opening Ceremony) The one that papers hated the most was "The Saudi Arabian Paralympic team are mainly thieves.""

"At least Theresa May went, she had to go didn't she? Towards the end she had all the authority of the "Do Not Tumble-dry" label. She always had the charm of a fucking war crime. Towards the end her body language had gone; I didn't realise it was possible to limp with both legs. So now we've got Boris Johnson; an evolutionary dead-end of the Honey Monster. A bin bag of albino body parts. A cross between the Incredible Hulk and a Haribo fried egg... is the fucking prime minister! The Prime Minister! It's not just that he's the worst person for the job, he might be the worst mammal! And let's not forget how they create these people; they're created in the public school system, that's where they lose their empathy. They're forged in the crucible of hierarchical sodomy. That's why they can't get along, the last time the cabinet saw eye-to-eye it was over the back of a weeping first year. Incidentally, I'm not one of those people who thinks there's a paedophile ring in Westminster, I think it's probably more of a queue."

"People get the wrong idea about me, they think I'm depressed or something - I'm not depressed. I don't wish that I was dead, I wish... that you were all dead."

"(Speaking about Comic Relief and charity) Look, there's a colonial side to British charity, it's true; look at Yemen, right? We're the number one provider of weapons and bombs and expertise to Saudi Arabia that they use to bomb Yemen, to engineer a famine in Yemen. At the same time, we're the number two provide of aid to Yemen - and why not? Life gives you Yemen, you give Yemen aid."

"Hello you cunts, black power!"

"I don't like people who lash out at jokes - at the same time, I don't like people who lash out at political correctness. I think it's lazy, and I think it sometimes encourages people to dismantle stuff that protects them. So I'll give you an example; there's a guy I talk to a lot in Glasgow, he's a homeless guy and he was an alcoholic - I suppose that's why I talk to him, because I was an alcoholic. (...) So I was talking to this guy the last time I saw him and I went "What would you say is your biggest problem in life at the minute?" and he went "Do you know what's my biggest problem, Frankie? It's all these fucking snowflakes in the media!" It can't be! It just literally fucking cannot be! You're sleeping rough in the streets of Glasgow, your biggest problem is actual flakes of fucking snow!"

"(Speaking about Pope Benedict XVI's resignation) The Pope must have done something that even the Catholic church found unacceptable. My theory is that he fucked an adult woman."

"I wish the Queen had died the night before the Royal Jubilee – I wish she’d just fucking died. But they wouldn’t have been able to tell us that she’d died. They would have had to hollow out her body and get that guy who plays Gollum to wear it."