British - Comedian | July 9, 1957 -
In 1987, I was in Edinburgh doing my first one-man show. I took part in a kickabout with some fellow comedians and tripped over my trousers and heard this cracking sound in my leg. A couple of days later I went into a coma and was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism.
Paul Merton
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Maybe there's a perception of me as grumpy old bugger who suffers from depression. It's a total misconception. I don't think of myself as any grumpier than the next person. I'm not even grumpy first thing in the morning.
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At one point in the mid-Eighties I shared a promoter with the Smiths. One night, we were sitting backstage when Morrissey burst in, utterly distraught, sobbing his heart out. Turns out someone had thrown a sausage at him on stage during 'Meat Is Murder.'
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When I used to do the Edinburgh Festival, there was a bunch of guys selling fresh oysters and I'd eat ten daily - marvellous.
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I'll never forget my first experience of swede. It was at school and I thought I was getting mashed potato. I've never got over it.
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I was flying to the Maldives in 2000 when the plane went through turbulence - after that, I didn't fly for four years. Then a job came up in India, so I did a simulator flight and learnt about what goes on in the cockpit. I'm fine now.
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If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.
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I was never one to go up to someone as a five- or six-year-old and say, 'Hello, my name's Paul, will you be my friend?' But I found if I did an impression of the PE teacher or whatever and people laughed, then they did like me, and so then they started talking to me, rather than me making the initial overture and then maybe being rebuffed.
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I read every book about Buster Keaton and Chaplin to see how they worked - it's all about dedication, tunnel vision, pursuit of perfection, getting the gag right.
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It was a bizarre existence I led in my early twenties - that cliche of the comedian who goes out and entertains a roomful of people and then goes home to a lonely bedsit was unbelievably poignant for me because that was exactly what I was doing. I had periods of real loneliness.
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There's something magical about film, it's the ultimate for me, because it's kind of permanent - inasmuch as anything is. When I went to see Buster Keaton when I was about 14 and I came out of the cinema having really laughed at this film which had been made 50 years before, I thought: That's immortality. It's fantastic.
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It seems like a contradiction, but the shy person who is a performer actually does make sense, because in a way, when you're young and shy, making people laugh is a good way to make friends. It's an instant connection.
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