Gad Elmaleh

“I love the Comedy Cellar. The audience has no expectations because they don't know me. It's great. It's only winning - if I bomb, they just say, 'Oh, the French guy sucks.' But if I do well, then they remember me.”

“Comedy in America is very serious. Either they laugh, or they don't.”

“I was in a steak house once, and someone proposed. I was so embarrassed. The woman started crying, and I thought, 'She was just proposed to in a steak house - I'd be crying, too.'”

“I did movies because I was flattered and for money and because I wanted to kiss Sophie Marceau.”

“I love coming to New York. I think I'm going to come really often here. I need to - for the show, for the comedy. I want to do the shows here and have a beer and hang out with the comedians.”

“Journalists ask me, 'Why don't you ever talk about sex in your performances?' True, I don't talk about sex - not in my personal life and not in my professional life. This is modesty.”

“That's only in America. We don't have French doors in France.”

“When they don't know you, when you don't have credits and they're thinking, 'I don't know this French guy,' your first five minutes are trying to seduce them, trying to get them on your side. And it's not easy.”

“I want to talk to the audience. This is what I've been doing in my work in French forever - talking about small things becoming big problems. I notice all the details, all the tiny little things.”

“I go to New York to see live shows, not movies.”

“In France, I'm not going to say the audience will laugh for nothing, but you could compare the response I get to the response Louis CK or Chris Rock would get if they go up in a club in Denver tonight.”

“When you succeed, at a certain point, you want to challenge yourself. Otherwise, you become boring. You become a has-been. It's not very interesting. I don't want to be this guy who has only succeeded in France.”

“When Americans, who have no idea who I am, laugh at my jokes, it's exactly the same if someone loves you even if you're not rich and famous.”

“Everywhere I go in America, when they learn I'm from France, the first thing they ask me is if I'm a huge Jerry Lewis fan. I've never been able to figure that out.”

“I don't feel any need to play the role of the clown. In my private life I take a break from humor.”

“When you succeed, at a certain point, you want to challenge yourself. Otherwise, you become boring. You become a has-been. It's not very interesting. I don't want to be this guy who has only succeeded in France. I could say, 'O.K., that's it; merci.' But I'm not interested in that.”

“It's a time where every country and every human should be united. I mean, every country has its problems.”

“In America, going on a date is really more like 'interview night.' You have to give your resume.”

“Eventually I was saying to myself, maybe it would be better, instead of trying to become an American comedian in France, to mix those two styles and those two genres. Because of course it's good to be efficient and sharp, and to have a joke every twenty seconds, but it can be a little cold and dry.”

“Morocco is completely alive for me because I spent about a third of my life there. The first few times I went back to Casablanca, I walked through the streets and remembered how years earlier I had walked those same streets and prayed that a miracle would happen and I would leave and become famous.”