Humor & Life Quote by Darrell Hammond

Hammond’s line lands like a comic aside, but it’s really a tiny anatomy lesson in how damage leaks into performance. The repetition of “If you’re injured” is a stand-up trick: set the premise twice, tighten the noose, then deliver the second observation as the quieter gut-punch. Of course an injury changes how you move. The surprise is that it changes how you talk, too. He’s widening “injured” from the literal body to the whole system that presents a self to the world.

As a comedian and impressionist, Hammond is obsessed with micro-behaviors: cadence, posture, breath, the tiny mechanical tells that make a person readable. The quote reads like backstage wisdom from someone who knows that “voice” isn’t just sound; it’s held in the ribs, the jaw, the guarded shoulder. Pain makes you compensate, and compensation becomes style. That’s the subtext: we don’t simply endure injury, we edit ourselves around it, and the edit becomes our new baseline.

Context matters here because Hammond’s career is built on embodiment. Impression work requires a kind of physical empathy, a willingness to let someone else’s rhythms inhabit you. His point suggests a darker corollary: injury, whether physical or psychic, is also an impressionist. It rewrites your gait, then rewrites your story. The sentence is plainspoken, almost clinical, which is why it stings. No melodrama, just the grim efficiency of cause and effect: hurt the body, and you’ve already started changing the person others think they’re hearing.