When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.

I want to sit down, and I want to laugh. Nothing works better for me than watching somebody slip on a banana peel.

I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are?'

His venture sounds like a banana peel awaiting its victim.

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

And I admit it: there's a rather dirty thrill when 700 people laugh at a joke you've written.