Robert Orben
American magician and professional comedy writer.
A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success.
I'd be surprised if Ronald Reagan doesn't run again. To us it's a second term. To him it's a double feature.
The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it.
There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs, there'd be no place to put it all.
Humor gives presidents the chance to be seen as warm, relaxed persons. Humor reaches out and puts its arm around the listener and says, 'I am one of you, I understand,' and implicitly it promises, 'I will do something about your problems.'
Noise pollution is a relative thing. In a city it's a jet plane taking off. In a monastery it's a pen that scratches.
If you can laugh together, you can work together.
Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral.
Humor is a marvelous communications tool, as Reagan has demonstrated so well. He has weathered many a storm that others might not have. With Reagan, people just say, 'There he goes again.' A sense of humor allows a president to back off a little from the tensions of the moment and take a calmer view of things.
Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work.
It's mandatory in this day and age to be considered to have a sense of humor and to demonstrate it. You're not paying me for a joke, You're paying me for the right joke.
More than ever before, Americans are suffering from back problems: back taxes, back rent, back auto payments.
I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
You wouldn't want Alan Greenspan to write the instructions for assembling a beach chair.
Very few people ever meet celebrities. All we really know is what we read about them and the most memorable lines are jokes. That's how we tend to define what we think of a public figure.
A young person today has a nanosecond attention span, so whatever you do in a humor has to be short. Younger people do not wait for anything that takes time to develop. We're going totally to one-liners. Telling a joke is risk taking. Younger people are more insecure and not willing to put themselves on the line, so a quick one-liner is much safer.
Humor starts like a wildfire, but then continues on, smoldering, smoldering for years.