Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I would love to see the Replacements get back together at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina, because I never got to see them live and I love Charleston.
A struggle in my life is to feel like I'm a good person and to feel like I'm a nice person. I try to be and anytime I fall short of that it feels really bad.
The bike has very few controls. It's very simple to operate and understand and your field of vision is certainly greatly expanded as opposed to being in a car.
Ice-T is a great sport about people doing impressions of him, apparently, obviously, and so I have no choice but to be a great sport about being pranked by Ice-T.
In an effort to devote more time, energy and focus to fewer projects, I've had to make some tough decisions, and one such decision was 'retiring' from 'Speakeasy.'
I haven't seen comedy as popular as it is now since when I started, in the late 1980s boom. It feels like that again, in that it's everywhere, and it's great to see.
Performing live can be a drag, the process that leads up to the actual performance. It's all the travel, it's working up all the details and everything, which I hate.
Nobody held a gun to my head and forced me to write recaps about the tenth season of 'American Idol.' Although I feel like someone must have and I just forgot about it.
If you pay attention, stand-up can be great improv training ground. But one of the things that helped me the most was doing warm-up for the 'Mr. Show' tapings way back when.
There's so much being said about Donald Trump already, all the time, and the more you joke about him, the more you risk making the same jokes other people are making about him.
Puppets can get away with saying things that human beings can't. Because they are cartoonish just to look at, they're not real, you can assign them insane things to feel and vocalize.
I like being around people who are good conversationalists, when there's a give and take, and you are heightening an idea, exploring it together, that is my favorite thing in the world.
When I first started doing stand-up back in Philadelphia, the idea of being a professional writer was completely beyond me. It didn't even occur to me that that was something you could do.
It is so easy to avoid getting in a fist fight. If you're at a point where you're squaring up against someone in public, then it's on you. There are so many ways to not get in a fist fight.
We each have our own style but yeah, when you boil it down like there are certain things that human beings just are predisposed to laugh at and we're just kind of all putting our own spin on it.
As much as I love live performance and as much fun as it can be to travel around, it really is nice to be able to stay at home and make a living and pay the mortgage and spend time with my wife.
It's great to work with friends. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, but everybody goes into it knowing that. Like, 'We might be really good friends, but we might be terrible collaborators.'
Obviously a president can't rule as a king and ban all guns. But I think we need a president who is going to make sure that there is gun control and that people still feel like their freedoms are intact.
Politics is a thing that is kind of the same over and over and over again. But we have to find new ways of poking fun at it and letting the air out of people and satirizing things that are worthy of satire.
TV jobs that I've had in the past, one of the side effects that is so wonderful is that it gives you a sense of normalcy because you're going to the same place every day, and you sleep in your own bed at night.
You can find nice clothes that suit your style at any number of places - Goodwill, Salvation Army, stores like that. They're all over the place. If you put in the time, you can find good stuff at decent prices.
Cake Boss, I guess, has been made aware of my impression and finds it amusing and recognizes that it's not a completely accurate impersonation of who he is in his daily life. He seems to be a good sport about it.
In my late teens, early 20s, when I started stand-up and I was living downtown for the first time, I was deep into my blues and Bukowski phase. And, you know, that's when that's appropriate. And I grew out of it.
The first thing you start with when you're trying to write something funny is it has to - it really has to come to you first. I has to be an idea that you have that first makes you laugh, that strikes you as funny.
You can make me laugh at a thing that I think is horrific. You can make me laugh at a thing that affects me personally. But if you've done your homework and you've gone about it the right way, it will still be funny.
The way we get our news is very important, and the idea that the media doesn't always do right by us, and that they focus on things they shouldn't for ratings, is very important, and it's absolutely worthy of ridicule.
I love clothing, and I love fashion, but I think that there is too much pedantry in fashion, and saying, 'You have to wear all of these things together; you can't button this button.' You know, all of that kind of stuff.
Happy Days,' 'Laverne & Shirley,' 'Mork & Mindy' - it takes no effort at all to conjure, physically, the profound excitement I felt watching these shows in prime time. I remember sitting on the floor, too close to the TV, rapt.
I long ago vowed, as Batman did before me, never to make fun of stuff that people couldn't help. Because it's (1) easy and (2) not fair. There are plenty of things that people have complete control over that are worthy of ridicule.
The podcasting world has changed the way I book my shows. I knew that I could announce a gig on a podcast and that people would hear it. People that like what I do would hear, 'Oh, he's in my city.' And that makes it so much easier.
I do think I'm terrific at giving advice. Although in our hearts we usually know what we should do. It's rare that you get in a situation in life where you don't know how to proceed. You know the thing you should do, but don't want to.
On 'Best Week Ever,' I met a few previous 'Idol' winners, and they were the nicest young people you'd ever want to meet. It is a tribute to them that they emerged from 'Idol's' cynicism factory seemingly without mercury poisoning of the soul.
I'm fascinated by people who can keep who they are in the midst of this business, which is all about not only pretending to be other people, but also that perception of who you are and how successful you are and your standing in the business.
When I was younger I was strictly meat-and-potatoes and I just wouldn't try things. As I have gotten older, I'm much more adventurous but still not like whoever that dude is on whatever show it is who just goes around and eats bugs everywhere.
I have a friend who only buttons the bottom button of his suit jacket, which you're not supposed to do. 'Supposed to do.' But it's his thing, and it's his personal style, and it's like you've got to honor that. People can do whatever they want.
Earwolf had approached me a long time ago, even before I had started the 'Pod F. Tompkast.' I knew that I wanted to do a podcast, and I knew everyone there and that it was something for me to do, but I didn't know quite what I wanted to do yet.
Mork, played by Robin Williams, was my introduction to improv, and my first real peek behind the curtain of television production; I had seen Williams riffing on 'The Tonight Show' and soon put it together that certain scenes with Mork were not scripted.
You know, back when I was a kid who wanted to be in show business, everybody on TV wore nice clothes. They were very glamorous when they would be on the 'Tonight Show.' All the dudes wore suits and ties and that just seemed like real show business to me.
We all forget that when a TV network says, 'Look, we're broke,' it means that they're not making as much money as they would like to be making. They're still making millions and millions of dollars - they're just not making billions and billions of dollars.
When I go in to 'Comedy Bang Bang,' I'll go in most of the time with some beats of where we're going with the idea. Everything else is improvised. Nothing is scripted. A lot of times I'll go in there with nothing and it's just conversation with the character.
I've had people - I've seen people do routines that I knew they didn't take from me but they had - because for whatever reason I had stopped doing it a long time ago. There's no way they would have heard this bit. But it ends up being pretty much the same thing.
When the task is mocking pop culture, it's easy to make sarcastic comments and consider the job done. After a while, I began to feel like this route was completely pointless. Talking about silly, inconsequential stuff doesn't mean you can't put some effort into it.
The first time on stage is such a blur to me. I remember how it felt more than anything. I remember everything about the day before I went on stage - what I ate, the first person I met in the club, how I felt beforehand - but the actual being on stage is a total blur.
Up until I think eighth grade - when I found out in front of a roomful of people - I believed that England and Great Britain were two entirely different places. Like I didn't know that England was a part of Great Britain. I thought they were completely separate in every way.
I famously stole tons of VHS tapes from a video store I worked in. It was detailed in my special, Laboring Under Delusions. I worked at Tower Video and stole a bunch of videotapes from them, and then got caught and had to return the videotapes. It was a mortifying experience.
When the response to comedy becomes cheering instead of laughing, that is so irritating. It's the worst. Here's what cheering is: "Look at me!" That's what cheering is. Cheering is not "Hey, I agree with what you're saying"; cheering is "I'm liking this more than anybody else!"
Well 'The Pod F. Tompkast,' as much as I love the result of it, was a really labor intensive show. There's a lot of writing, there's a lot of scheduling, there's a lot of recording - it's not a show that we can necessarily do in one day because there are so many moving parts to it.
What I love about improv so much is that we are all discovering it at roughly the same time. The performers are maybe, what, a half second ahead of the audience? There's very little lag time. I think of a thing, I say it, then the audience is laughing and it all happened in a second.
Overall, I just love performing so much that when I write, I want to write for me. I kind of learned that on 'Mr. Show,' that even in an environment where you can write whatever you want - which is what that environment was - I realized, 'Man, I still want to be the guy out in front.'
There's something strange about comedy requests. I guess if you enjoy something, why not hear it again? But there's something weird about it being live, when the person is there, and asking them, "Hey, do this thing like you did it, but make it seem like you're making it up on the spot.".