Dana Carvey Quotes

My characters all start with rhythms and sounds. Once I hear the voice and get into the rhythm, the attitude and the physicality just come out on their own.

I don’t find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff.

I had written in another draft a completely different kind of fight, but they said they couldn’t afford to shoot it. They needed a fight scene, though, so I was told to put a fight scene in, but not the one I had written.

We didn’t even think about it, you know? I used to collect laser discs, and you’d have some college professor analyzing It’s a Wonderful Life or Citizen Kane, and now it is pretty funny – the idea of commentary for a silly kid’s movie, you know?

I have this dream life where I get to be a celebrity but I get to kind of navigate the world fairly easily because I’m always in character.

Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It’s sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn’t the star.

I wasn’t very good as a puppet. A lot of times in a movie, you need a really good puppeteer: you’re sort of a puppet, and you’re doing what you can. But I always, from the beginning, was kind of making up my own stuff from stand-up and sort of directing myself, so I wasn’t very good in movies where I didn’t have control.

I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.

A mom and dad found an S&M magazine under their 10-year-old son’s bed, and the dad said, ‘Well, we sure can’t spank him.’

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

I really enjoy being a dad, and maybe I took it too seriously, but I love being around my kids.

I’m a friend of the CEO of Twitter and he showed me how to be on it, but it causes such an uproar if what you post is perceived in a negative light.

If you live in New York or L.A., and you’re liberal, and you’re playing to a liberal crowd, it’s almost like a rally… it’s not edgy.

The two things that can hurt you are if you need money or if you need fame. Those are the things that can be your Achilles’ heel. But if you don’t need money and you don’t need fame, then you’re free.

If you just kind of live a regular life and make good ‘Hollywood’ money, you have a certain freedom.

I’ve never really worked on them. Just once in a while one hits me and makes me laugh. My Al Gore was sort of like a gay Gomer Pyle.

You know ladies and gentlemen, a long time ago , there were lots of people, but that was a long time ago

There was no Groundlings or Upright Citizens Brigade where I was from. Looking back on it, I was trying to do sketch comedy in my stand-up, which is still kind of what I am doing now. To go full-circle here, it’s kind of like one-man sketch.

I never read the tabloids.

If she were a President, she’d be Babe-raham Lincoln!

I used to sneak up to the 8th floor and watch Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo rehearsing ‘Saturday Night Live’ and could only wonder if I would ever have the chance to be funny. It took me five years to go up the two stories, but it is such a sense of fulfillment to be able to show what I can do on national television.

I always tend to think of all of my shows as possibly my last show. I’m like a junior Springsteen, without the underbite.

I’m from the old school – you go where the power is, and you try to make fun of it. When it becomes off limits to say or do certain things without being brutalized or censored or whatever, it’s unfortunate.

I think ABC sort of hoped I would be really like Carol Burnett. I mean literally, I think.

Every celebrity in the world, if their movie bombs or whatever, they hold their kid up on a magazine and say, ‘I’m really a dad.’

If I only ran when nothing hurt, I would never run.

The two things that can hurt you are if you need money or if you need fame. Those are the things that can be your Achilles heel. But if you don’t need money and you don’t need fame, then you’re free.

I’m thirty years old, but I read at the thirty-four-year-old level.

My Obama is getting pretty good … I think I’ll vote for whoever makes my portrayal easier. It takes time to put together a comic impression. It takes time to recognize the tics. Right now, for instance, I could do a dead- on Paul Ryan and people wouldn’t recognize it. Personalities take a while to sin.

I was not in ‘Iron Man 2,’ but I take a daily iron supplement.

Monty Python never directly said, ‘We’re liberals’ – they just did their sketches, and you had to figure it out. Generally, they were anti-establishment, of course, making fun of the people in power. I think, comedians, that’s their job – pointing out what other people might not notice and going, ‘Yoo-hoo, over here.’

I know it’s a cliche, but the whole family is just whacked. I mean, we’re all out of our minds. They’re the funniest, most eccentric bizarre people I’ve ever met, my siblings.

I have a theory that if you’re famous more years than you’re not famous, then you get a little nutty.

Now we’re here in 2009. My boys are 16 and 18, one’s going to USC film school, and the other seems to be a natural comedian. So now I have to go back into show business as a senior comedian. So I hope to get Walter Brennan-type roles, Gabby Hayes kind of stuff, be the old-timer. We’ll see what happens.

Well, I loved variety in television, I loved sketch comedy. At ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I stayed almost seven years.

It’s almost like he’s started to sound even more exotic the more people started doing him. I don’t know why, but there’s just something about Al Gore that makes me laugh.

I always grew up with, ‘Question authority.’

While many comics have a secret persona, I fundamentally want to be myself.

I have no regrets. I wanted to raise the kids and be a present father. When I developed a movie, I was gone for a year. That didn’t really work for me. That isn’t fair to make these life-forms and then disappear.

I’m a real people-pleaser.

That’s why modern corporate movie making has become so laborious that comedians are kind of kicked out by 50.

The kind of money that show business will pay you, unless you need to have shoes made of diamonds, you can actually put it in the bank and sort of be okay.

I’m more of a people pleaser.

When people come to see my stand-up, they get a chance to see my characters interact with each other. I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

Am I not turtley enough for the Turtle Club? Turtle! Turtle!

I think there’s a big price to pay for consciousness, knowing that it’s all going to end and we’re mortal. I envy dogs. They don’t know they’re getting old! And they don’t know it’s towards the end. I mean, they never think, ‘I used to get by on 16 hours of sleep a day. Now, if I don’t get 19, I’m a wreck.’

I have this dream life where I get to be a celebrity but I get to navigate the world fairly easily because I’m always in character.

There’s always been a confusion about my sensibility. ‘Is he kind of edgy, or is he Carol Burnett?’ I’m a little bit of a hybrid. I like to please, but I like dark stuff, too.

I think free speech is probably the coolest thing we have in this country, and again, you can label it hate speech and dismiss it, and then you’re allowed to censor it.

I remember doing a comedy show with Jim Carrey once, and he was out there with his foot behind his neck and rubbing his face with it.