Dana Carvey Quotes

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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 tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.

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 did a lot of ridiculous television. Between 1980 and ’85 I had no confidence, so I did everything I was told to do.

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

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.

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 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.

I grew up middle class – my dad was a high school teacher; there were five kids in our family. We all shared a nine-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom. That was exciting. And my wife is Irish Catholic and also very, very barely middle class.

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.

Definitely for me, my personality, having children was a definite sea change. I found it very, very hard to balance show business and being a dad. The narcissism of show business and the complete, total focus of it was very difficult.

I always grew up with, ‘Question authority.’

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

I never read the tabloids.

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