I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there's not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.

When I'm doing an appearance somewhere and taking questions from the audience, I can always count on: 'Tell about the guy who died on your show!'

I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.

Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You'd think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.

I had to fight the intellectual label when I started in television, because, first of all, it's not going to help you commercially, and also, it wasn't particularly true of me. I mean, if anybody thought I was an intellectual, they probably had never really seen one.

I'm sure I've all but lost friends by maintaining that, despite their love for it, I always saw Stanley Kramer's 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' as more of an exercise in anti-comedy than humor.