Lily Tomlin was one of the early comedy greats who influenced my courage to be the person I am.

Comedy is so hard to do, so it was very cool to do dead pan humor.

There's no idea or concept in comedy you could do that hasn't been attacked from some angle. But if you start leaving punchlines out so you'll look cool, I don't get that. But I don't watch standup anyway, so I don't know what they're doing.

You can think of Hollywood as high school. TV actors are freshmen, comedy actors are maybe juniors, and dramatic actors - they're the cool seniors.

There's an audience out there for all these different types of things. Whether it's comedy, motion-picture drama, family movie or a cool, cutting-edge indie, it's nice to know that I can span all those different genres.

Mike Myers as Austin Powers makes me laugh - that was genius - and Daffy Duck makes me laugh, but I like odd behavior. I don't like hip dialogue and one-liners and all that sort of cool, sophomoric comedy. It's just not for me.

Comedy has sort of been my life-long obsession. I literally obsessed over comedy. I really didn't play sports - for me it was just comedy, computers and chess club; those were my big things.

For a long time in my adolescence, comedy was the only tool I had for communication and dealing with the world and dealing with people - I didn't know any other lens in which to do it.

If you work on a comedy show, your basic form of communication is teasing. That's generally how we speak to each other: you communicate the information between the lines of insulting sentences.

The only way I could get comfortable around people was to make them laugh. I was an obedient girl, and humor was my one form of rebellion. I used comedy to deflect. Like, 'Hey, check out my zit!' - you know, making fun of yourself before someone else has a chance to.

If there is a chance to do so, I want to work with Stephen Chow in a romantic comedy film.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

The stuff I did in 'Rescue Me' was great. It gave me the opportunity to play comedy, and Denis Leary was the first one to take a chance with me. And from that experience, we had a comedy pilot that we did that I was going to play the lead in. And then 'Person of Interest' came along. They're all new experiences.

I've been driving in the city for years because, as a stand-up in N.Y.C., you can perform at more comedy clubs a night if you have a car. Getting from club to club by subway is too slow at night and too expensive by cab. So, many comics live far out from Manhattan and drive in every night.

I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.

The beauty of comedy is, when people come to a comedy club, there is a certain veil of reality suspended.

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo's sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey's angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

Audiences like me doing action and comedy. I am a jovial person and have been so from childhood. I like to laugh my way through my work, and that attitude reflects in my roles. Even women hate me doing rona-dhona roles. So I don't do emotional films.

You can't study comedy; it's within you. It's a personality. My humor is an attitude.

The key to a happy marriage is myself being absent for long periods of time. My wife Leesa and I will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary next year, but if my comedy gigs petered out and I was around the house more, we'd 100% be getting divorced.

For a hate group originally focused on video games, anger over a comedy movie for starring women might seem ridiculous. But at its core, Gamergate is about a toxic male sense of ownership over geek culture.

I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.

I feel like everything comes into your life for a reason. With 'Awake,' I got to do a drama, and with 'Anger Management,' that's my comedy.

One of the interesting things about comedy is it's tension release, and nothing creates tension faster than anger.