I thought I couldn't afford to take her out and smoke as well. So I gave up cigarettes. Then I took her out and one day I looked at her and thought: 'Oh well,' and I went back to smoking again, and that was better.
I'm single. I don't have a family. I certainly don't have to work. I don't want to be the richest man in the cemetery.
I changed it to Leslie Hill, only that seemed more like a cocktail pianist. Eventually, being an admirer of Jack Benny, I took his name.
The mistake British comedians often make is trying to beat the Americans at their own game - getting visiting American singers on their shows, talking about 'sidewalk' instead of 'pavement,' sitting on high stools in a white dinner jacket doing ballads. That way, you simply end up with a mid-Atlantic mishmash.
A man who fails is funny... if my sketches teach anything, it is that, for the male, sex is a snare and a delusion. What's so corrupting about that?
The odds against there being a bomb on a plane are a million to one, and against two bombs a million times a million to one. Next time you fly, cut the odds and take a bomb.
I sometimes use a girl singer the way Henny Youngman uses his violin - as a bridge between one laugh and the next.