Dick Cavett: He had such a great time being Bob Hope.  And when I would get him on a show of mine– I’d see him and come on with me and– of course with Johnny and Jack and everybody.  And– he always– swapped gags.  He had– got a bunch of gags– ready and he came on and ready to do.  And about current stuff. And I thought– as many people have wondered– was there anyone underneath the Hope façade– the great comic picture that he was covered with.  And– was there anything under the covers?  So I would– intentionally not steer him into something I’d knew he’d do a joke on. Sometimes it was fun, too.  As in, “Were you really a bad boxer back then?  And you knew you were gonna get– I was on the canvas so much they called me Rembrandt.  And I was the only fighter carried into the ring.”  He– he would come right up with them like– a machine or like a computer.  But– so I would ask him to talk about himself.  And I got one show– it’s also on the DVD.  It’s the one where I got so conversational with him without his doing gags, that at one point he stated some fact about himself.  Oh, he talked to him when he was a kid– but he got a scar– the scar– “Little scar you can see– ’cause I got that from protecting my dog. And it was some– guys were throwing rocks at my dog and I went up– “  And he didn’t have a punch line for it.  But he was charming as hell just talking.  At one point he said something– he said, “Hey, would you rather have a gag on that one?” And I said, “No.  That’s just fine.  That’s fine.”  Amazing man.

Cheech Marin: He used to live out here in Malibu where I live and I’d see him at the market and he’d being going, walking up and down the aisles doing these characters.  “Okay, Jonathan, it’s time to buy your groceries and go now.”  But he was, he was the, the master at doing that kind of improvisational free association thing which Robin Williams and some of those other guys came up after did.

Jeffrey Ross: Cheech and Chong was like the first dumb guys I kinda heard doing comedy.  And they were a little bit slower paced.  “Uh, what’d you mean by that?  Huh?  What?”  And, you know, just not hearing things correctly and just like– almost like two Gracies (PH).  And– it was fun to hear that stuff.  I– I was– young to really appreciate it as stoner humor.  To me, it was just dumb guys.  They were like, what we would call burnouts, guys that– you know, we didn’t know much about drugs.  I was too young to really understand about– how marijuana would ruin your brain.  But I did understand it, there was plenty of dirtbags hanging out at the 7-11 that were– dumb, and that’s all they were ever gonna be.  And for me, Cheech and Chong sort of was that.  They gave voice to these idiots that I knew around the neighborhood.

George Carlin: Well, I had always—I was a disc jockey.  I was in Shreveport Louisana, I had—I was out of the Air Force living with a roommate in an apartment building.  He worked at one radio station, I worked at another.  And he came home one night and said, “Man, I heard about this guy Lenny Bruce, you know.”  And I was a big fan of comedy and I knew that was my next step, “I’ll get out of radio, I’ll be a comic.”  And I liked—let’s see, that would have been nineteen fift—hold on for me a second here.  That would have been 1958 or nine.  So some of that ferment was, was begun, had begun and I was—I guess I knew some, about some of it.  But he said “Lenny Bruce,” and I didn’t know anything about Lenny Bruce.  And he got the album, “Interviews of Our Time,” on Fantasy Records, it was a combination—Henry Jacobs did the album and Lenny was on it, in a few performance pieces.  And then there were these other things like an interview with Sheldom Stein, which is a mock-academic who talks about the connection between the wandering Jew and Bahama Mama, which is the mother myth of the Bahamian ind—you know, just wonderful stuff.  But the whole album wasn’t a Lenny Bruce album, but it kinda was.

And I heard things he did.  And then came the “Sick” album.  “The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce,” I think that was second.  And we got that.  And what it did for me was this; it let me know that [pause] there was a place to go, to reach for, in terms of honesty in a self-expression.

Carol Burnett: Oh.  I loved The Sid Caesar Show.  We, I never watched, never got the chance really to watch Your Show of Shows that much because I was going to UCLA at the time and we’d just gotten a television set and I had homework, I had all kinds of projects that I was doing at school.  So, when I got to New York, I moved into a place called the Rehearsal Club, which Stage Door was written about.  It housed 25 young ladies interested in the theatre and had a, we had a, a woman who ran the club.  It was all very proper.  Young men couldn’t go anywhere beyond the parlor.  And I started on Saturday nights to watch Sid, because Sid Caesar Hour, I guess it was called that.  And that was when Nanette Fabray was on.  And of course Howie and Carl.  And I think Pat Carroll.  And I just couldn’t get over how clever everything looked and how funny, how funny they all were.  And, then I met a, a fella that we’d always go to the Stage Delicatessen and get coffee [COUGHS.] And his name was Milt Kingman and he was a wonderful comic.  And he stood in for Sid Caesar when they were blocking before they were gonna go live on Saturday nights.  And we became friends and he said, “Would you like to come see a rehearsal?” I said, “Absolutely.” And so he snuck me and, and I sat up in the balcony and I watched, watched Milt stand in for him and then Sid would do… looking at the camera shots.  And then he’d come out and then they’d do this rehearsal with all of ‘em.  And then I’d run home, and that would be at 5 o’clock and then at 8 o’clock the show would go on.  And I could see where’d they’d made changes and done different things and how they had tweaked it and made it better. And My Fair Lady opened and two tickets were donated to the rehearsal club and I won the lottery.  And so I won two tickets to My Fair Lady on a Saturday night.  I never told this to Julie.  Anyway, I gave the tickets to my roommate because I said, “Fair Lady’s gonna be running for a hundred years.  I know I’ll get to see it but Sid Caesar is live and I’ll never see that again and I want to see what they’re doing.”

Jonathan Winters: When I first met him, they chose me to do the baby of all things, as Merth, on Mork and Mindy.  I had only seen Robin a couple of times and thougt he he was funny.  And now I’m his dad’s age.  So he said, “Pops, God” he said, “I love your stuff, I love ya.  And we’re gonna have a good time.”  And, and we did, he said he started talking to people after the show about being interviewed and what’s it like to work with Jonathan Winters, and he said time and again, “Jonathan is my mentor.”  And I turned to him and I said one day, “Don’t say mentor anymore I tell you why, in Ohio they think that’s a salve.  Say idol, we all know that.  See mentor’s a little cutie stuff.”

Richard Lewis: When I was kid, I mean when a new Jerry Lewis, when it was on TV, or when it opened up and I was eight or nine I had my parents had to take me to the matinee. I could not miss it. I mean it was like this was something that was too good to be true. You know I sort of felt like he made you feel like it was okay to be silly and dopey, but he did it on a consistent level basis, even when he did his solo stuff, and an amazing performer, you know not to mention what he did with charity obviously. I mean this guy, you know, and I understand how you know I mean I don’t totally get it, you look at other comedians to talk about why just as a comedian why, you know in Paris he’s regarded as a Chaplin in here, you know he’s looked down upon. Why because he didn’t talk politics like Mort or he didn’t break through like Lenny Bruce, or didn’t’ have the didn’t do the kind of stuff that Pryor did, why, it’s he’s different. He’s just as different as as I am as as the Kaufman, and Billy, Robin, Larry, all of us, you know I mean, and he’s you know one of the great film director’s ever for for I mean he’s you can’t get bigger than Jerry Lewis worldwide, we’re not just talking about you know how the special do in the states, you know he’s always everywhere. You know I mean the guy the guy doesn’t get enough credit he never will. He never will. They should give this guy one big gigantic award at the Oscars.

Richard Belzer: As time went on, he became more and more surreal and daring and esoteric and strange and provocative and not always funny, but certainly compelling. Like a for example, one night he came up on stage and (INAUDIBLE) a sleeping bag and went to sleep and you know, and you know and stayed there. Another time he had this boil on his neck and he invited people up from the audience to touch the boil. Another time he came up, he used to do this, he would read from Great Gatsby and you know and start reading it from Great Gatsby and you know the audience would laugh and but he !@%$ going and going…people started leaving, he just kept reading it. And it was like holy !@#$, this guy is amazing. And the thing about Mighty Mouse and all that, thats what he did in his basement literally for his friends and himself. He just brought that onto the stage and there was this kind of devilish innocence that he had. I mean he knew full well…(SNEEZE) He knew full well what he was doing. He wanted to get the audience challenged.

Roseanne Barr: I think she was more, I think if, if you’re going to compare Phyllis to any male comic, she was Bob Hope.  She was the female Bob Hope.  She just was like so loved and so accepted and…she kind of like was the butt of her own jokes even though she sideswiped her husband in there, too.  But it, it was very sophisticated for it’s time, like Bob Hope’s.  You know, you could see, you, she could make anybody laugh and still does.  She’s really, a really intelligent woman.

Sid Caesar: Well, you take a picture like, with Chaplin, ‘City Lights’. There was a part in that picture where he’s running away from the cops, he’s always running away from the cops and he sees a traffic light, and he sees the traffic light and he goes “ah!” He gets an idea. And all the cars are stopped for the traffic light, so he walks through the back of all the cars, and the last car he gets out of is a limousine. Of course, that’s how he got the idea of a blind girl seeing – thinking that he is a millionaire. I mean, how do you do that? How do you do it? It’s a blind girl, in a silent movie, and she falls in love – I mean, she knows that this guy is a millionaire. And Chaplin gets out of the car, slams the door, and he sees that she turns around because she heard the door, and she offers him the lilacs that she’s selling. And he looks at her, and it’s immediate love. Immediate! He falls in love – aah! (laughs) And then he takes his last dime, and he takes it and he gives it to her. And she takes the dime and she gives him the flowers. And he takes the flowers and she takes this cup, and she’s going to walk down to the fountain in the park and rinse it out. So he follows her, and she gets the cup and she rinses it, and then she throws the water in his face! And the whole audience went “ah!” because they were in a serious situation, and all of a sudden there’s something that’s funny. Right there. No introduction or nothing, boom. Bang. A switch. And the audience went “ah!”, they drew in because they were in a serious situation and you get a thing like this, they didn’t know whether to laugh or not, because they would – in those days, they were afraid to laugh because they thought that they’d embarrass somebody on the screen.