Quotes

[To Eddie Cantor, on the racist treatment he received] "You know, it wouldn't be so bad, Eddie, if I didn't hear that applause still ringing in my ears."

It was not until I was able to see myself as another person that my sense of humor developed. For I do not believe there is any such thing as innate humor. It has to be developed by hard work and study, just as every other human quality.

What little voice I have left has to be nursed and petted like a prize cat. I study carefully the acoustics of each theatre I appear in. There is always one particular spot on the stage from which the voice carries better, more clearly and easily than from any other. I make it my business to find that spot before the first performance, and once I find it I stick to it like a postage stamp.

Songwriters say that I am a particularly hard man to write songs for. Whenever they have a song a man can use, they seem to want a portion of his life before thy will sell it to him. They want war prices for their songs, but I have not observed any war salaries being paid to artists. The way some of them deal with me is to calculate what my income ought to be for the next ten years, and then ask ten percent of that.

Troubles are funny only when you pin them to one particular individual. And that individual, the fellow who is the goat, must be the man who is singing the song or telling the story. Then the audience can picture him in their mind's eye and see him in the thick of his misfortunes, fielding flatirons with his head, carrying large bulldogs by the seat of his pants, and picking the bare bones of the chicken while his wife's relations eat the breast.

One of the funniest sights in the world is a man whose hat has been knocked in or ruined by being blown off - provided of course it be the other fellow's hat. All the jokes in the world are based on a few elemental ideas, and this is one of them. The sight of other people in trouble is nearly always funny. This is human nature.