131 Quotes by Harry Shearer

I always used to sit next to Mel Blanc when we’d do the shows. When you have Jack Benny on one side and Mel Blanc on the other, you’re not going to go far wrong.

I have a very strong visual memory of the first time I made him laugh. That was remarkable. I was like, “Oh, God, I just made Jack Benny laugh.”

My parents didn’t want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood.

A movie script more than anything else is a plan of action for the crew. Everybody in the crew looks at the script to see what they’re going to do. It has to contain where you are, and how many people are there, and what they do, and what time of day it is, and what time of year it is.

I think in most cases, if you’re with good people, comedy creation happens faster in collaboration. That’s how I can tell if it’s a good collaboration: If it’s faster than me by myself, then it works. If it’s slower than me by myself, then I get out of the room.

Even under the best of circumstances men are hard creatures to trap. Women who flatter themselves into thinking they’ve trapped one are like people who believe they can get rid of the cockroaches in their kitchen. They’re in for a big surprise late one night when they turn on the light.

I didn’t have a lot of independent film connections. It really took until the digital film revolution came along that I realized that I could do it myself.

As a kid, I really did want to hang out with the grownups, so it was hanging out with the hippest grownups in the world. This was the nicest bunch of people I’ve worked with in show business, with the exception of the people around A Mighty Wind. It really was a wonderful eight years.

Nobody makes a movie thinking it’s still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later.