British Comedian Quotes

From Bradford Yorkshire to Bristol Temple Meads
you don't have to change your underwear
but you have to change at Leeds

You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.

Weep if you must Parting is hell But life goes on So sing as well.

They said it was a sitting-room, but I don't know why they'd decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture.
It could rain in a room this big.

I'll start the show any second now, I'm just warming myself up into a bundle of spite.

Modest about our national pride—and inordinately proud of our national modesty.

Criticism should be done by critics, and a critic should have some training and some love of the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist training seems to be enough qualification. I suppose an ability to stand on your feet through interminable cocktail parties and swig interminable gins in between devouring masses of fried prawns may just possibly help you to understand and appreciate what a director is getting at, but for the life of me I can't see how.

No matter how much you give a homeless person for tea... you never get that tea.

What makes a date so dreadful is the weight of expectation attached to it. There is every chance that you may meet your soulmate, get married, have children and be buried side by side. There is an equal chance that the person you meet will look as if they've already been buried for some time.

You're fourteen years old. You've only had that hair for fourteen years and you want to change it already! How bored are you going to be with it by the time you are thirty? What color will you be up to by then?

Louise Rennison

He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, This daring young man on the flying trapeze; His figure is handsome, all girls he can please, And my love he purloined her away!

George Leybourne

I don't think I'd have done comedy if I was born eighty years ago [...] I'd have been a lord. Shooting people that were on my land [...] With a wig, yeah. And some crisps.

Anyone who's been poor and gets rich is stalked by guilt and fear. Guilt because you know it isn't fair, that life hasn't changed for everyone

Pope Pius XII was meant to go and castigate Hitler for being a [air quotes] "Genocidal Fuckhead … [air quotes again] with bunny rabbit ears". But he didn't, he wimped out, and for that history has renamed that Pope as "Pope Gutless Bastard I."

As Tony Blair:

Look we believe Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Now if we don't attack him, then he might not use them, and in that case we'll never know whether he's got them or not. And you know, that's not a risk I'm prepared to take. Besides if we do conquer Iraq, and remove Saddam Hussein, there's a chance we could win the Nobel Peace Prize, and you know, frankly, isn't that something worth going to war for?

... he felt frustrated, his sense of fate and direction subverted by banalities - the frustration of the man who, having thought himself following his destiny, finds he is actually on the A318 to New Malden.

Sometimes there's a tackiness about Route 66 that out-tacks any tackiness I've ever seen anywhere else. And the Meramec Caverns are the pinnacle of that tack.

I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identified by their dental records. What I can't understand is, if they don't know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?

He had the kind of handshake that ought never to be used except as a tourniquet.

I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician.

[On David Cameron] When I heard this inherited multi-million ex-Etonian talking about a culture of entitlement, well, I'm sorry, but my irony meter went through the red and then exploded in a gale of bitter laughter. It actually went "HAA!" I was furious, because I've only just had a new irony metre installed after Rebekah Brooks complained about how she had been unfairly reported by the British press.

Marcus Brigstocke

I was brought up to be a good boy and proud of myself so I suppress all the things about me that are bad.

I stared down at the cemetery and the sight felt rich, rewarding, physically so, in the actual eyes. The very eyeball itself felt good. I became the most recent person on earth to see that everyone in every single or double plot had known life in all its extremes. They had all known extreme pain and stress; all been overjoyed. All had been enchanted; and they'd all known extreme grief so bad they thought it must be meant for another species.

She said,"What are you supposed to do?"
I said, "I'm supposed to stop Hitler's army landing."
She said, "What! – you?"
I said, "No – there's Charlie Evans, Dick Roberts... I said, "There's seven or eight of us, altogether." I said, "We're in a group." I said, "We're on guard in a little hut behind the Dog and Pullet."
She said, "What's the good of being in a little hut behind the Dog and Pullet?" She said, "I suppose that was your idea!"
I said, "Aye, and that Charlie Evans wants to claim it as his!"

Much is written of the power of the Press, a power which may last but a day; by comparison little is heard of the power of books, which may endure for generations.