Watch This: Robert Downey Sr. on Canadian TV, 1967

“If everybody could get turned on to not taking themselves too seriously and having a sense of humor about themselves, I think we could get over a lot of things that we take very, very seriously. We could approach the serious matters in a different way, like war, poverty, and all the things that are going on.”

Robert Downey Sr. (born on this day in 1935) is one of the underappreciated masters of comedy filmmaking. His films often have a deep satirical bite, and they’re also just plain funny. He’s a funny guy with a serious belief in the power of humor, as he conveys in the following interview from 1967.