Back in 2004 Kellie Overbey handed me her play 'Girl Talk' to read. I fell in love with her brutally delicious humor and the fearlessly deft way in which she drew her characters. They jumped off the page and begged me to give them a space in which to stomp around.

I genuinely liked all of the cast members very much. Steve had a wicked sense of humor. I remember Russell coming to my rescue once. I watched Eric evolve before everyone's eyes. Maurice loved what he did so. He treated his character with respect down to the costuming.

I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that.

With actors like Steve McQueen Paul Newman and Harrison Ford what made them such icons is that even in dramatic movies their characters had a sense of humor.

One of my favorite things about 'Star Trek' wasn't just the overt banter but the humor in that show about the relationships between the main characters and their reactions to the situations they would face there was a lot of comedy in that show without ever breaking its reality.

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

There are certain things I learned when I first started learning about acting to try and place the character physically and emotionally. And the way you place them emotionally is often with humor.

I think people are sexy when they have a sense of humor when they are smart when they have some sense of style when they are kind when they express their own opinions when they are creative when they have character.

This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.