Comedians From Canada

"Divorce is simply modern society's version of medieval torture. Except it lasts longer and leaves deeper scars. A divorce releases the most primitive emotions; the ugliest, raw feelings. Emotionally wounded people do their best to inflict pain upon the other party, but rather than using claws they use divorce lawyers."

"My being Jewish does not inform the things I do, necessarily. 'Exodus' is a wonderful piece, no matter what religion you are. 'The Shiva Club,' which is a movie I am attempting to make sometime soon, is about crashing a shiva, if you will. A couple of comics crash a shiva. I could have, I suppose, made it an Irish wake, but the shiva I was more familiar with."

"I'm not a Starfleet commander, or T. J. Hooker. I don't live on Starship NCC-170... [some audience members say "1"], or own a phaser. I don't know anybody named Bones, Sulu, or Spock [picture of Dr. Benjamin Spock is shown on screen behind him]. And no, I've never had green alien sex, but I'm sure it'd be quite an evening. [Pomp and Circumstance begins playing.] I speak English and French, not Klingon! I drink Labatt's, not Romulan Ale! And when someone says to me 'live long and prosper', I seriously mean it when I say, 'get a life'. My doctor's name is not McCoy, it's Ginsberg [nude picture of Dr. Ginsberg shown on screen]. And tribbles were puppets, not real animals. PUPPETS! And when I speak, I never, ever talk like Every. Word. Is. Its. Own. Sentence. I live in California, but I was raised in Montreal. And I believe in Priceline.com, where you never have to pay full price for airline tickets, hotels, and car rentals! I've appeared on stage at Stratford, at Carnegie Hall, Albert Hall, and the Monkland Theatre in NDG. And, yes, I've gone where no man has gone before, but... I was in Mexico and her father gave me permission! My name is William Shatner, and I am Canadian!"

"You know who I am?! I'm William Tiberius Shatner!"

"Jason [Alexander] says he was inspired by me. Why is everyone who's inspired by me such a fat, fucking loser? You know, I look back on this amazing evening and I can't help but think to myself, "Who the hell are you people?" What right do you have to make fun of me; what have you ever done?""

"Yeah, I don't think you can live anywhere else -- it's such a great city [New York]. L.A. is kind of a necessary evil, but man, I love going back to New York."

"I never considered myself a comic. I don't have much experience doing improv or stand-up. I moved to New York and studied at the Strasberg Institute. I wanted to be a serious, dramatic actor."

"When all of your friends are getting pregnant, you start thinking about it. But for Amy and I, show business is our baby."

"(on Blades of Glory) Playing the assholes in the movie is fun."

"The summer of 2000 was a real turning point for me, and I kind of got my act together and laid the bottle down and got to work, and really last five years have been the greatest five years of my life, personally and then -- as a result of that, I guess -- professionally. Six months after that, I met Amy [Poehler]. We had sort of met before, but we started dating. From the moment we met, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It was great. We didn't know what we were doing, and all of a sudden she got SNL, so we kind of decided that I guess I had to move to New York; otherwise it wasn't going to work out. So I moved back to New York and it was the greatest. It was great. Probably the best thing that's ever happened to me is Amy."

"I did The Mike O'Malley Show. It aired twice. You know, that was a really tough experience because Mike is a really good friend of mine, and was before that, and we were all friends, everybody on the show. It was Mike, and it was me, and Mike's sister Kerry, and Missy Yager, who I was then dating...well, we had just broken up; we had lived together for four years and we did that. And this guy Mark Rosenthal and Kate Walsh. And we were all friends, and we were all excited at the opportunity to do this show together. We were kind of shocked, and we thought, "God, this is so cool, that the six of us are doing this show!" And then we realized that they never intended to follow it or support us. You know, I think that show got a really bad rap, but by the end -- by the sixth or seventh episode or whatever it was that we made -- we were starting to find a voice on that show, and we were very disappointed. I took the disappointment of that really to heart, and the year after that got cancelled was probably the darkest year of my life. It was tough. It was a really tough time for me. And I didn't get a lot of work. And I didn't do anything, I just kind of drank those years away."

"I guess my first pilot was February of '96. I did a pilot with Kevin Pollak and his wife, Lucy Webb, for CBS, that was not picked up. And then I kind of started being more in the process. I kind of hung around, looking for work. Didn't do a pilot the next year, but in that time did this film called Southie that we shot in south Boston with these guys that I knew. But really was more focused on doing dramatic stuff. And then every year or couple of years doing, you know [with forced cheer] sitcom pilot!"

"I did terrible little plays in New York that we put up ourselves. My first movie was this independent that I did on the Erie Canal in 1995, called Erie, that I don't know if you could even get, actually with Felicity Huffman. And then from that I did this film that was eventually called The Broken Giant later that fall. And then I kind of started getting into doing pilots."

"I started [acting] when I was a young teenager. My mom encouraged me to go to read for some stuff in Toronto, and I ended up doing a couple of crappy commercials and was like, "Oh, yeah, I'd like to do this!" And then kind of put it on the back burner, and then pursued it a little bit when I was in Toronto, like studying a little bit here and there. And I decided to move to New York and go to Lee Strasberg. And I kind of, for the first time ever, really felt like I was doing something that I enjoyed, and that I felt like I could conceivably be good at. And when those two things happen, [ironically] you're off to the races."

"(On his Emmy nomination) I am humbled by the nomination. I got to work with a cast and writers made up of geniuses. The good news is I can finally realize my life long dream and buy my wife a solid gold speed boat.""

"Arrested Development was such an amazing experience in every way, and you know it was very unique in that it was a show that received a lot of critical acclaim, and yet we didn't ever achieve the ratings that we wanted."

"Arrested Development opened a lot of doors for me, and once I sort of became, I guess what you'd say "available," there was a lot of opportunity out there, and it's been nice; a lot of people have found it in their hearts to offer me movie parts."

"When my dad died at the end of my sophomore year [at university], I stopped and took stock of my life. There was this real sense that my childhood was officially over. I decided I wanted to be an actor. I knew I was loved as a kid. The thing you can always rely on, your core person, comes from your family's attention and love. When my mother got sick, and I'd see her fight to survive, it gave me an early view of bravery and what life was about. I was able to prepare for it. Your mother dies, and you're eighteen, and you face a choice. Are you going to take drugs? Become a drunk? Or are you going to try to become more spiritual? Why not go with the thing that seems more positive? [pause] Why do I tend to be optimistic? Because the alternative is just crushing to my soul."

"I truly believe that when you're funny, you're blessed. Your whole life is kind of golden. I was happy, although it was not perfect happiness. There was illness and sadness and death."

"I'm totally aware of how lucky I am. I have health, family, children. I do work that gives me total joy and allows me to make a living, and maybe, if I'm lucky enough, I'll feel I've fulfilled a little bit of service to society because I brought other people some laughter."

"It's the bane of existence for anyone in comedy. 'The photograph must be funny!' So the people coordinating the shoot throw rubber chickens at you, 20 at a time. Or put a feathered hat on you. Or give you a clown nose. Of course, all of this makes you depressed, so you wind up looking more like you're promoting A Long Day's Journey Into Night."

"[Ed Grimley] lives in a retirement home in New Jersey. It's called the Retirement Home in New Jersey for Characters Who Were Interesting in the '80s for About an Hour. He's there with the Whiners, Gumby and Jon Lovitz's 'That's the ticket' guy."

"w:Marla Lukofsky: "My parents were so worried that I might not get married, so I finally got married. There's just one problem; she's black. But she's a doctor, so that's okay.""

"w:Marla Lukofsky: "I am indeed shrinking, but that's okay because I can buy my clothes off the rack in the children's department. It's great. There I am at a wedding wearing this gorgeous gown. A five year old was wearing the same one. Bitch!""

"Nixon's the kind of guy that if you were drowning 50 feet off shore, he'd throw you a 30 foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way."

"Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost."

"Washington couldn't tell a lie, Nixon couldn't tell the truth, and Reagan couldn't tell the difference."

"The bravest thing that men do is love women."

"In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you've got to be a girl."