Mike Myers and Deepak Chopra were on the Sundance Channel’s program Iconoclasts recently. It was basically a fusion/comparison of comedy and spirituality, which was pretty illuminating.
Here’s stuff Mike Myers said, or that he said other people said. I felt this was worth logging just because these types of utterances are such rare gems:
- “Lenny Bruce defined comedy as pain plus time.”
- “Rob Reiner said comedy is when you fall into a pit and are impaled by a spike, and tragedy is when I stub my toe.”
- “Haha and a-ha! are related industries.”
- “It’s like most comedians, I want to be the architect of my own embarrassment. I will slip on that banana peel, thank you very much. I will drop my pants to my ankles, thank you very much.”
- Jerry Seinfeld on the Deiter character: “You’ve managed to break all the rules of American parody, you’ve parodied something that nobody knows”
- “My hope for what I do is not quite like progressive rock and it’s not quite I’ve suffered for my art and now it’s your turn. But there is just a little bit like I would like to do comedy where it did not exist before.”
It is amazing to have this insider look at comedy. It’s very meta. I don’t know if Mike Meyers would be who he was if he had all this “behind the laughter / behind the music / the making of / DVD extras” type of stuff available to him while he was developing his art. Nowadays there’s a SHITload, including another one to checkout, History of the Joke hosted by Lewis Black.
When you are actually amidst the act of creation, I don’t think it’s possible or even beneficial to actually be thinking of any of those things. You have to just let that kind of stuff sink in by giving it time, but just empty your head of any of it when you are live.
