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I'm interested in the fact that comics are people who are oddly courageous in their desire and their commitment to sacrificing any sense of normalcy in their lives, any sense of security, and most of them are oddly unique individuals. Let's have a broader conversation with people that have spent their last however-many-years thinking about their lives. I mean, they're philosophers. They're poets. They're people who are on the outside looking in at the world through a different set of values.
Then, of course, through the umbilical link we all tumble backwards down the spiralling DNA staircase to one common ancestor in Africa, and before that some bunch of curious monkeys. Down and down we go unto the sea, unto the dust, the single cellular dust. What impulse drove one cell to become two? What yearning pulled the fish on to the land? What caused apes to walk upright? Some invisible magnetic pull. Is there a difference between attraction and intention? Where is evolution taking us?
This world is bullshit. And just because I appear in music video wherein I am in my underwear, and make young women feel not good enough so that they become anorxeic; and okay, maybe because of that I became popular more quickly than other singers who are, I don't know, maybe more talented or better songwriters. That doesn't matter because, and... um... my boyfriend is a magician, and he can pull a quarter out of your ear and say things like 'We have not met before have we?' Go with yourself.
For years I was an undiagnosed anorexic, suffering from a little-known variant of the disease, where, freakishly, the appetite turns in on itself and demands more and more food, forcing the sufferer to gain several stones in weight and wear men's V-necked pullovers. My condition has stabilised now, but I can never stray too far from cocoa-based products and I keep a small cracknel-type candy in my brassiere at all times. Fortunately, I wear a 'D' cup so there is plenty of room for sweetmeats.
And isn't that weird? Think about this, when you're born, you nurse on your mama. And then you get a little older, you go to applesauce. And then you see these toddlers walking around with these Ziploc baggies full of Cheerios. Then you get to be my age, and the doctor wants you to start eating Cheerios to watch your cholesterol. Then you lose your teeth, you go to applesauce. I now know why old men like women with really big boobs. They see a trend. I mean, they call it a nursing home, hello.
I'm a fan of Bill Hicks. He did things that no other stand up did at the time. He was making fun of religion, at that time it was a lot harder to say those things in the States than it was here. To slag off Christianity and fundamentalist Christians, and to be pro drugs and anti gun in the deep south, that's a big ask. And he did that and made it funny. Bill Hicks was able to say things that he really thought, and he managed to make those thoughts funny without a care if it antagonised people.
My grandmother instilled in me a toughness that comes with survival. She was a tough lady and never truly enjoyed her life. She would always worry about things and I would tell her that it wasn't going to get her anywhere and it didn't. I wasn't even that smart back then, but I knew that worrying about everyone else wasn't good for her health. As Latinos, we stress and worry so much about the future when the future is today. As long as we protect what's good in our lives, we will be all right.
Please don't make the mistake of thinking that the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid and damaging idea. You don't have to be unscientific to make beautiful art or to write beautiful things... science is not a body of knowledge or a belief system, it is just a term that describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome. The arts and sciences need to work together to improve how knowledge is communicated.
I still don't really know what my style is. I like a lot of different kinds of comedy, I like watching it and I like being inventive and original. That's the problem with doing a longer set - you can't do every joke that you have because some stuff contradicts other stuff. Even when you know that the audience knows that you're joking and it's not true, you still can't do a joke about your family dying and then later talk about your Mom. I mean you want to keep some kind of cohesive order going.
I think when I envisioned my documentaries, what I wanted to do when I left, I had no business doing those documentaries. I didn't know what I was doing. I was delving into an arena that I had no experience in, and Netflix paired me up with two documentarians that really executed my vision perfectly. That was great, to see that. All of a sudden I'm at Sundance, and those are premiering. I just thought, "Wow, they were four ideas I pitched one day, and now it's coming to fruition on this scale."
It was a strange feeling going into a church I did not know for a service that I did not really believe in, but once inside I couldn't help a feeling of warmth and security. Outside there were wars and road accidents and murders, striptease clubs and battered babies and frayed tempers and unhappy marriages and people contemplating suicide and bad jokes, but once in St. Martin's there was peace. Surely people go to church not to involve themselves in the world's problems but to escape from them.
I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.
My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the wood stove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like?" It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick." That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home.
One of the most unattractive human traits, and so easy to fall into, is resentment at the sudden shared popularity of a previously private pleasure. Which of us hasn't been annoyed when a band, writer, artist or television series that had been a minority interest of ours has suddenly achieved mainstream popularity? When it was at a cult level we moaned at the philistinism of a world that didn't appreciate it, and now that they do appreciate it we're all resentful and dog-in-the-manger about it.
Losing builds character. So, if you're the loser in your family, don't worry. 'Cos twenty years form now, that perfect can do no wrong brother of yours is going to show up at your house, bald, fat, divorced, with six kids who all hate him and he's going to ask you for money. And because of your character, you're going to look him right in the eyes and you're going to say, You know what, I'll give you some money. If you mow my lawn and detail my car. Oh yeah, then you can shampoo the tail. Loser.
I am not a difficult man by any stretch, and I'm saying that with a full and honest inventory going on. I'm not. And I'm not angry on stage. There is a heightening. There is an intensification of the feelings on stage in order to let them carry the room. There is a theatricality about it. The whole thing is oratory, so there's persuasion involved. There's the art of rhetoric involved. And so, with hyperbole and with the desire to really punch the thing home, some of it reads a little more angry.
I meet Daniel Day-Lewis. He's just sitting in a chair on the set. Now, I had been told that Daniel Day-Lewis was kind of an intense person. And he's really not. He's really THE MOST INTENSE PERSON THAT HAS EVER EXISTED ON THE PLANET OF EARTH. He's not doing anything, he's just sitting in a chair, and I am terrified of him as if a jungle cat has wandered onto the set, like- WHOA! What do we do! Are we supposed to move around a lot or stay perfectly still?! What are the rules of Daniel Day-Lewis?!
It's just if one person says anything it becomes click bait and then they start talking about the comedy climate which is hilarious, so no. You know what it is? People are adults and they know they're at a comedy show but every once in a while somebody isn't an adult and then for some reason, you know, it's lazy reporting. They're trying to create this thing that isn't happening. It's not like people go in there and are just sitting with laptops open getting ready to blog about every stupid joke.
We Americans commercialize everything. Look at what we did to Christmas. Christmas is Jesus' birthday. Now, I don't know Jesus, but from what I read he was the least materialistic person who ever walked the earth. No bling on Jesus. He kept a low profile and we turned his birthday into the most commercial day of the year. In fact we have a whole Jesus birthday season. And then at the end of it, we have the nerve to have an economist come on TV and say what a horrible Jesus birthday season we had.
My dad also survived five divorces, and the women he married cleaned his ass out every time. I used to think my dad got divorced because he wanted new furniture. At one point in my life, all we had left was a wooden box, a 12 black-and-white TV, and a four-man rubber raft for a couch. And yet, I was the coolest kid in third grade. Mom, can we have a sleepover in Christopher Titus' house? They have a raft in the living room! We can row to breakfast in the morning. I can actually be Captain Crunch!
I think that if you see that people are laughing, you know they haven't given up hope. You see that people are laughing because everyone has identified the collective hypocrisy of a law or of a politician who is crafting those laws. It's really nice to know that you can have a range of emotion on an issue. You can feel outrage, you can feel sadness, you can find humor, and all of those things are part of coping and dealing, and really, they give you an inspired way of moving forward as you fight.
I've found is that by doing stand-up, I've actually learned how to combat depression. I don't have clinical, but I've definitely had my bouts with it. I just figured out that it's a choice. You're in control of your brain. When your brain is sending you bad information or bad thoughts, you can decide to go to the gym, or write a new joke - or if you're on the road, go to a ball game... something that's going to get the blood going. Or you can let those thoughts take you right down the rabbit hole.
People do this a lot. They don't seem to realise that the future is just like now, but in a little while, so they say they're going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materializes. But everything's not going to be made of leather, the world won't stink of sherbet. Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where you'll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to animals -- you'll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment.
Politicians will promise some pretty ridiculous things. They will promise a chicken in every pot. They'll promise that they'll keep Social Security solvent. They'll promise drugs for old people. They'll promise lots of stuff. But it doesn't come near the kind of promises that religion makes. The Mormons promise that if you're good while you're on Earth, you get to rule over your own planet in the afterlife. Now, there's an entitlement that goes a little bit beyond prescription drugs for old people.
I don't know why in this country we coddle corporate criminals, war criminals, and racists. People walk on eggshells around them, and yet they will say a word like "liberal" as if it's pejorative. Or somebody who wants unions or reproductive justice, they will treat them like there's something wrong with that person. Does that make sense? People seem to be more frightened of upsetting a war criminal or a racist and more willing to disparage a very nice guy like Dennis Kucinich. Does that make sense?
I heard there were two local guys in town doing songs and comedy so I thought I'd take a look....they took my breath away...with their music, comedy, and showmanship.... 'Dakaboom'.. is the genuine article! Two voices in perfect harmony, and with joyful abandon and humor, they take you on a magical, musical, modern day vaudeville tour!! Ben McLain and Paul Peglar are headed for stardom. They are unique, they are original, and they are known as 'Dakaboom.' Don't miss 'em 'cause you're in for a treat!
In the short term, it absolutely feels devastating to break a bond of friendship. In the long term, it is the best possible thing. You're actually doing something noble and good if you do it in the right way. You can leave them with, "I wish you the best, but I have to take care of myself." Or you don't have to wish them the best. It's okay if you don't. Maybe they don't deserve the best. That's not up to you to decide. You not wishing someone the best is not going to make anyone's life not the best.
There's a part of me that is angry. Not in the sense of, "Gee, George is an angry guy!" I mean, anyone who's been with me five minutes, five years, whatever, they would tell you they've rarely seen me in a moment of anger. Yes, I can become highly irritated in a line that's moving slowly, or with a clerk who's incompetent. But I don't yell. I don't get rude. I am clear about what I expect. In a store, my mother always told me, "Ask for the manager immediately. It changes the tone of the conversation."
I was like, wow, this guy's [Donald Trump ] going to do well. And I remember people laughed at me. People were like, oh, you silly ignorant person who's just come to this world. You clearly shouldn't be at "The Daily Show" 'cause you don't know what you're talking about. And I was like, but I don't know. He seems like he connects with people. I can relate to him as a performer. I can see what tools he's using. He's good at riffing. He's good at taking the crowd on a journey. I can see what he's doing.
So here are some foolproof recipes for those of you who understand the true function of food. Bean Treat: Gingerly pour four fluid oz of beans or something into a jug. Cry. Eat the beans from the jug and pour the rest from the can down your throat. N.B. These taste better if they belong to somebody else in your house. Pain au Dunk: Fists of bread, rent from the loaf and dunked into anything runnier than bread. Should eat at least six of these because…you should. Don’t toast the bread. Toast is cookery.
Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.
I went to network on a handful of pilots, and going to network is the most stressful situation anybody can ever be in. You're supposed to be on point, you're supposed to be at the top of your game, the funniest you can be, in about five minutes, in front of people wearing suits who really don't care, and they've probably already picked their person, but they have to see a handful just to satisfy the process. It's the most horrible, horrible process known to man. I wouldn't want anybody to go through it.
I think that if you want help from somebody, you ask. You ask not expecting anyone to give it to you, unless it is a friend or a loved one with whom you should have those expectations, because friends should help friends. Even so, when I ask friends for blurbs or for endorsements or instructions, I always leave room for the fact that they're probably busy and have a million more things to do in their day than give me Ryan Gosling's phone number. Which I've never asked for, just by way of casual example.
I didn't like what was on TV in terms of sitcomsit had nothing to do with the color of themI just didn't like any of them. I saw little kids, let's say 6 or 7 years old, white kids, black kids. And the way they were addressing the father or the mother, the writers had turned things around, so the little children were smarter than the parent or the caregiver. They were just not funny to me. I felt that it was manipulative and the audience was looking at something that had no responsibility to the family.
People, especially the liberals, just live in this world where if anything is said that offends anybody even a little bit, not only does that person have to apologize; sometimes they have to go away forever. Go away, bad person. My analysis of this is that most of us don't do anything decent in our life. I'm not saying we're evil. I'm just saying we don't make a contribution, so the way they [liberals] think they're making a contribution is to point at the bad people [which] is somehow even more pathetic.
My parents took me to that I think is just one of those near-perfect comedies is Young Frankenstein. Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, they're at the height of their game. The two of them working together was amazing. Yeah, just a terrific story. You get emotionally involved. Jokes all the time, jokes that come from story. Like, they don't have to go wildly out of their way to make the jokes. It's a parody of Frankenstein movies, but also it stands as one of the great ones, one of the great Frankenstein movies.
You know when you go into a restaurant, and it gets busy and they start a waiting list, and they start calling out names, "DuFresnes, party of two." They say again, "DuFresnes, party of two." But then if no one answers, they'll just go to the next name, "Bush, party of three." Yeah, but what happened to the DuFresnes? No one seems to care. Who can eat at a time like this? People are missing! And they're hungry! That's a double whammy! "Bush, search party of three!" You can eat once you find the DuFresnes!
It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.
The Obama administration asked General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner to step down, and he agreed. This is good news for Obama; the last time he tried to get someone to quit, it took months -- and even then, he had to promise her a job as secretary of state. ... According to the government, Rick Wagoner was forced to resign because of poor performance. That's embarrassing -- run an organization that loses billions of dollars and then get fired by a guy who heads up an organization that loses trillions of dollars.
If people want to watch that five hours [of stream show] on their own terms in their own schedule. It needs to work if somebody wants to stop after an hour and a half or stop after half an hour. People talk about it like food. Like, "I just want to let you know I'm saving it." They talk about it like pasta. "I'm saving it. I'm only going to have one a week." And I love the fact that everybody can have their own experience and I want to make sure that what we put out there works in as many ways as possible.
When I was 9 or 10 years old, my dad took me over to a neighboring farm to help get stuff for the meal. The farmer, Vic, told me to look at all the turkeys and pick one out. I saw a cute one with a silly walk and cried, 'Him!' Before my pointing finger had even dropped to my side, Vic had grabbed the turkey by the neck and slit [the animal's] throat. Blood and feathers went flying. I had sentenced that turkey to death! Up until then, I didn't know where meat came from—and I've been a vegetarian ever since.
I have got so low that I have asked to be hospitalized and for deep narcosis (sleep). I cannot stand being awake. The pain is too much... Something has happened to me, this vital spark has stopped burning - I go to a dinner table now and I don't say a word, just sit there like a dodo. Normally I am the centre of attention, keeps the conversation going, - so that is depressing in itself. It's like another person taking over, very strange. The most important thing I say is 'good evening' and then I go quiet.
I don't know what in the hell's going on with cranberries, but they're getting in all the other juices. Whoever the salesman is for cranberries is doing a great job. He's showing up everywhere. Hey, what do you got, some apples? Put some cranberries in there. We'll call it cran-apple and go 50-50. What do you got grapes? How about cran-grape. What do you got mangos? Cran-mango. What do you got pork chops? Cran-chops. Why don't you back off, cran-man. Why don't you take your sales trophy and have a vacation.
I used to be jealous; I'm not jealous anymore. And a miracle happened to me, because if you're jealous, it's a cancer, it's a plague on your spirit, it really is. And I actually cured jealousy in a very weird way - I cured it with mathematics. And I'm not a math person at all, but I've been with my wife for about seven years, so we have had sex probably, I'd like to think, like, 9 million times or, at least, 1,500. So, the way I figured it, if she goes out and screws some other guy once - I'm still winning.
I went to England to tell jokes, and I wanted to tell my Smokey the Bear joke, but I had to ask the English people if they knew who Smokey the Bear is. But they don't. In England, Smokey the Bear is not the forest-fire-prevention representative. They have Smackie the Frog. It's a lot like a bear, but it's a frog. And that's a better system, I think we should adopt it. Because bears can be mean, but frogs are always cool. Never has there been a frog hopping toward me and I thought, "Man, I better play dead!"
Geologists and paleo-climatologists know that in the past the Earth's temperature has been substantially warmer than it is today, and that this warming has occurred under purely natural circumstances. Until we can say precisely how much of the current global warming and greenhouse gas increase is the result of this normal temperature cycle, we will not be able to measure how much human activity has added to this natural trend, nor will we be able to predict whether there will be any lasting negative effects.
I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.
I am very athletic, actually, and I'm good at most sports. But I was never a successful athlete, because I have a lot of trouble with authority. To be a good athlete, you have to have sort of a military attitude. You have to enjoy being coached, and that was not something I ever liked. But more than that, I don't like practice, and coaches hate anybody that doesn't like practice. If you saw me throwing a football, you'd say, "Wow, he knows how to throw a football." But put me on a field, I'm not gonna stand out.
What causes homophobia? What is it that makes the heterosexual man worry about this? I think it's because deep down all men know that we have weak sales resistance. We're constantly buying shoes that hurt us, pants that don't fit right. Men think, 'Obviously I can be talked into anything. What if I accidentally wander into some sort of homosexual store thinking it's a shoe store and the salesmen says, 'Just hold this guy's hand, walk around a little bit, see how it feels. No obligation, no pressure, just try it.'
Once I saw a duck walking down the street so I went into Subway and ordered two pieces of bread, and they informed me that they could not do that, like there was some speical rule at Subway that two pieces of bread weren't allowed to touch. So the woman asked me what I wanted on the sandwich and I said I do not care, it is for a duck, and she was like oh then it's free. I was not aware that ducks eat for free at Subway. It's like give me a chicken fajita sub, but don't worry about ringing it up, it is for a duck.