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History often reads as a hard and grim experience. But people are remarkably resilient and funny, even when the going is very hard.

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

Humor is so important to the American scene throughout history.

What's funny is funny. The same thing that made you laugh a hundred years ago makes you laugh now.

Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then.

I believed that old people never laughed. I thought they sighed a lot and groaned. They walked with sticks, and they didn't like children on bicycles or roller skates... or with big dogs.

Our records, if you have a dark sense of humor, were funny, but our records weren't about comedy. They were about protests, fantasy, confrontation and all that.

When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.

I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.

I think we grew up thinking that the funniest things on TV were the old, serious movies. I always liked the Marx Brothers, but the thing that always made us laugh were movies like Zero Hour. That's what inspired us.