Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry is an English comedian, actor, writer, presenter and activist. After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from two schools and spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, Fry secured a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English literature. While at university, he became involved with the Cambridge Footlights, where he met his long-time collaborator Hugh Laurie. As half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth24 August 1957
CityHampstead, England
It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.
Mind you, Mount Rushmore isn't exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either. After the naïve daftness of the Crazy Horse monument, I find the pompous idiocy of those four presidents somehow more risible still. Wishing to show respect or feel a vicarious thrill of admiration and pride, I can only giggle. For which I am very sorry. Any loyal American reading this who feels outraged and insulted is free to explode with derisive snorts of laughter at any British equivalent.
Families where there is not much laughter I think are signs of some sort of dysfunctionality or sickness.
It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
These women work incredibly hard. They take drugs for the same reason a truck driver takes drugs. To stay awake and do their job. Like steroids, these are performance-enhancing drugs.
it's important to make that show. You have to go away for at least a month and then do an interview with a talk show.
There's a piano in my house, and I play when no one's around - but as soon as anyone listens, my confidence goes and I lose my sense of rhythm.
I don't watch TV. I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.
There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.
I could rent a room, paint it black, bolt on a few chains and call it my punishment room, Then have men in posing pouches in the background.
The service took place on one of those afternoons that occur only in the past.
Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.
I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language
Nudity is a deep worry if you have a body like a bin bag full of yoghurt, which I have.