Robert Webb

Comedian

1972-09-29

Quotes by Robert Webb

• Mum was an amazing parent and my best pal. The tragedy of it, really, was that she died from breast cancer just as I was becoming a man, aged 17, and we were just starting to speak as adults. She was snatched away, and it felt cruel. She made me laugh.

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• I'm troubled by how much I like Rowan Williams. I think it reveals character flaws in myself that I'd rather not think about. The softly spoken soon-to-be-former Archbishop of Canterbury is my secret crush, my weird pash, and my guilty pleasure.

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• Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of 'thinker', with stadiums full of young people hanging on his every word, it won't really do.

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• I don't care where you went to school. There - have I made your day? No? All right, I'll go further: I also don't care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.

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• Missing out an apostrophe or two does not make you an idiot. But equating party allegiance with nationhood certainly makes you a thug. And thugs don't often notice that they're thugs, usually because they're also idiots.

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• UKIP trades in the language of fear and division; it seeks power in order to reject responsibility.

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• When I was 15, if Stephen Fry had advised me to trim my eyebrows with a Flymo, I would have given it serious consideration.

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• I don't do much to keep in trim - I try to walk places instead of driving whenever I can, but I really ought to do more.

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• Do I wake up every day and thank God that I live in 21st-century Britain? Of course not. But from time to time, I recognise it as an unfathomable privilege.

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• Car-essential is a real turn-off to me, so yeah, I just want a friendly holiday resort with a villa and a pool, but which is really private, but there again, there's a supermarket and a doctor's and a beach a five-minute walk away. That's all I want, and it's quite difficult to find.

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• Don't get me wrong - intellectual snobbery is vulgar and gauche.

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• Slow, skinny, and an utter countryside coward: I lived in dread of nettles, spiders, and the very sound of a wasp. As a victim, I was beneath the dignity of the bullies in my year but fair game to the ones in the year below.

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• If I hadn't got into comedy, I wouldn't have met Abbey, my wife, and I wouldn't have my two girls, and the whole thing unravels. That's the thing about being basically - whisper it quietly - happy, is that you don't really want to change anything, because once you start changing stuff, then what you've got all disappears.

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• We got our revolution out of the way long before the French and the Americans. The monarchy was restored, but the sovereignty of our parliament, made up of and elected by a slowly widening constituency of the people, has never been seriously challenged since then.

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• Feminism is an attack on social practices and habits of thought that keep women and men boxed into gender roles that are harmful.

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• My childhood was as heavily gendered as any you would find in a working-class household in Lincolnshire.

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