Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The victory of the show is in the writing. Coming up with sketches and stand-up bits. The rest is just hitting buttons on a machine more or less.
The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.
Why marry myself to an entire album? I don't have to. If I download four songs from somebody on an iTunes sojourn, that's about as good as it gets.
My entryway into hip-hop was - my biggest introduction was obviously like, you know, the Def Jam, Run D.M.C., Beastie Boys, like, that conglomerate.
I do have weird habits when I'm directing, or even think as a director, like when I move a cup, I make sure to put it back in the exact right place.
I can always tell the demographic that will probably recognize me - white dudes, sort of skater-y hip hop white dudes, and working class black dudes.
Honestly, I've always thought that Charles Barkley is the best guy on TV because he will really tell you what he thinks. But it's all well thought out.
In true, narcissistic fashion, when my father was diagnosed as a narcissist, he called us all up individually to tell us, and he did it with true pride.
I find that I like what I like. I like a strong melody, I like an inventive structure and I have to like the singer's voice or I have no interest in it.
If I go to the store, I'm not trying to slip in the middle of the aisle so I can talk about it onstage. I'm at the store because I need food or medicine.
I love the fact that I can make a podcast in my house and tens of thousands of people will hear it. I also like that it's gotten rid of a lot of gatekeepers.
It wasn't so much figuring out my voice comedically, because that was always pretty clear. It was more about performing and being a good, watchable performer.
Someone like Bethany Frankel goes from being, like, 'some lady' to a star with arguably as much charisma as anybody else on TV. I personally find that riveting.
I think the thing I had going for me is a good pedigree and joke-writing ability. But a good pedigree, for the audience, doesn't matter past the first 90 seconds.
I think that [Eddie Murphy's famous "White Like Me"] is probably the first time I thought, "Oh. Being black is different. That is a totally different experience."
I generally don't read articles about myself/'Chappelle's Show,' nor do I read reviews. It's basically playing Russian Roulette. They're not all gonna be positive.
Being able to write jokes is great, but you still have to get used to performing them and being on stage - and enjoying being on stage, not just like tolerating it.
3 Mics' has gotten me fans who actually like me. Now they have a sense of what I'm like, so I get to talk in a way that I really want, and it's fun to go on the road.
I'm making fun of midwestern homophobia [in the joke], but I'm still saying faggot. And almost every month as I'm doing that joke it gets five percent less of a laugh.
I get that money is important, and it's scary to think that you won't have enough. At the same time, we can set up reasonable social safety nets and take care of everybody.
It wasn't surprising to me because I've had the conversation with him personally, but Will Smith is more interesting a guy that you could ever capture in a movie or TV show.
[Robert Smigel] is one of the greatest comedy writers in the last 50 years. "TV Funhouse" and Triumph and all those sketches.He's really unique, and he has an amazing comedy mind.
There were some things I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about depression in public, I wanted to talk about being in the shadow of people I've dated and people I worked with publicly.
Brent Weinbach made [Gangster Party Line].I guess I saw it when it first came out. And that is so goddamn funny to me. The guys are real dudes and they're not good, but they're also good enough.
Sentimental is not bad, but it's probably the most likely to go awry. It's the hardest to do and not have it end up being 'Forrest Gump' or something. Maudlin - I just don't want it to be maudlin.
With comics it's very close, like, "I don't want to say anything onstage that I wouldn't say offstage." Or vice versa. I say "faggot" in my special and in the joke I am the faggot, if that makes sense.
Team America must have been the biggest pain in the ass. And if we want to talk well-organized, they got Bill Pope, who is the DP on The Matrix, because he was just like, "I want to do something less serious."
There are things that start small on Reddit, then they sort of gather and become major trends. Having said that, I mostly stay on the Top 100 page, so it's mostly just pictures of a dog looking like Chewbacca.
Steve Allen was on Johnny Carson one time - I looked for it, but I couldn't find it - and he read the lyrics to 'Hot Stuff' by Donna Summer like a poet. He read them very seriously. I was maybe 8, but it killed me.
I think the biggest influence on my stand-up would be Chris Rock, in that I love that Chris is basically an essayist, in that he'll take a subject and just try and attack it from as many different angles as he can.
I would like to do theaters. That's always been a dream. I think that would be a good way to tour. But for the most part, in terms of, do I want to get recognized on the street? No. There's not much I want about fame.
If the word police want to come and get me, they can come and get me. If someone wants to blog about me, fine. The bloggers can come and get me. I clearly say the n-word in public, eight times. I think that's the count.
I get music from odd places that I assume are fairly typical at this point. I'll just go on iTunes, go to EDM and just look at the Top 100, or I'll go on the Beats app and look on the playlists that are sort of curated.
I just don't believe in the old definition that a fan of music is: I find a band, I listen to all of it and I pretend to like stuff that I don't like. Now if I don't like it, I just go, 'I don't like this.' It's way fairer.
There are words that I wouldn't say because they hurt people's feelings. I just happen to be a white guy who writes for a lot of black comedians but if I wrote for a lot of gay comedians there might be stuff I would say then.
I think the future belongs to the comedic polymath. It belongs to the person who can generate the most good material in the biggest variety of ways, whether it's sketches or stand-up or songs or tweets or television or films.
America doesn't have poor people, they have temporarily embarrassed millionaires: meaning there are people who are poor for now but that's all about to end when 'blank' happens, or when the number comes in, or when the invention takes off.
Here's the thing about standup directing: not that hard. As I said on Twitter one day, or maybe it was Instagram - sorry, I want to keep my platforms straight - it's essentially the same five shots over and over again. Seven if you're ambitious.
I love doing stand up. I think it's a really worthwhile art form. It's so unique in all the things it combines, in terms of it being philosophizing, preaching, speaking truth to power and basic communicating. It's a good way to talk back to the world.
Everyone has some secret and some source of pain or sadness and I just said mine first and then everybody went after me. I get it every day in my Instagram direct messages, people thanking me for talking about depression and telling me how it helped them.
You know, when I was a kid, I used to cry every day, like, when I was like, you know, 7 through 11 or 6 through 11, to the point where my brother and sisters would like - there was an ongoing joke where they would make me cry to keep my streak alive of crying every day.
Movies are grander, with (in my experience) more heavy weight chefs in the kitchen: the studio, the producers, the writers. All of them get to weigh in and you have to listen to all of them because they hired you. With TV, it's a way smaller scale, with only a few people weighing in.
There was a thing in the Andy Kaufman movie that Jim Carrey [Man On The Moon] about how he would do it. I didn't even see the movie. I read the script. But someone asked me, "Do you know what the best part of the Jim Carrey/Andy Kaufman movie is?" And I said, "me lee see ree bee." I just knew that would be the best part.
Slavery is the most insane thing... I don't know that we've ever seen in history, but it's got to be close. The idea of slavery is such a base impulse. It's like, "I'm going to kidnap you and then you're going to do everything I want." Like, what? And then there's the historical aspect. It had a huge effect on human history.
The Berlin Wall comes down in '89, so then there's basically a vacuum of who was the enemy and then Fox News comes along in '95 and it becomes Democrat versus Republican. Now people on the right are fed a steady diet of anti Democratic party propaganda so they believe Democrats are the enemy and they will not believe anything.
You know, I liken it to - when you write a joke for somebody else, it's like you - you know, like the Wile E. Coyote dynamite plunger, where he pushes the plunger down and then you see the fuse go then there's an explosion in the distance? That's like writing a joke for somebody. When you tell the joke, you're in the explosion.
Like, your body has to get used to being in front of people. Like - and you have to be like - you have to be kind of a ham, you know? Like, the thing about writers is they're generally self - comedy writers - self-loathing, sort of play small. And as a, like, performer, you have to think like a comedy writer but act like a performer.