Humor is essential. If you can't laugh at yourself you might wind up killing yourself.
I'm not altogether convinced that this is a profession for grown men. What I'd like is to get on a 55-foot steel hull craft, an old North Sea trawler, bundle up my bride and take off for the Greek islands for a year. I'd fish, sail and write pearly words on my Big Chief pad and for this somebody would send me bags of money.
[on the end of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In] We just ran dry. If you consider the amount of material that had to be consumed and heard, it was monumental. Dick and I would open every show with a monologue, and we'd have what they call the middle monologue, and then we'd have a monologue at the end. You're talking about more than 300 monologues. It's difficult enough to find something to talk about - much less to be funny about - 300 hundred different times.
My role in the team is to be the well-intentioned but not always correct authority.
[1958] Three years ago I was living in a cheap hotel room in New York with a two-burner hot plate. I'd buy a dozen franks, carrots, potatoes, anything I could boil. For entertainment, you'd get on the subway and go catch a 49 cent movie.