If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.

Sense of humor is so much more subjective than anyone believes.

Would you take a billion dollars, if as part of the deal the Earth were made uninhabitable a year after your death? ... well, of course not; you care about your friends, above all your children, any grandchildren. But ... what if the deal calls for the planet to be poisoned a thousand years later? We feel strong obligations to generations in the near future - should we not feel the same way about our children's great-grandchildren and generations beyond them?

You can't make Christ funny. He's self-aware, he's too flexible within the situation. It's rigidity, it's when the ego takes over and the behavior becomes inappropriate that it becomes funny.

What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion, it's what followers subsequently make of it.

When people quote sketches to me, half the time I don't know what they're talking about so I have to sort of go, aha, yes, oh yep, I remember that and lie my way out of it.

I was always a sports nut but I've lost interest now in whether one bunch of mercenaries in north London is going to beat another bunch of mercenaries from west London.