Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's a deeper conversation to be had on guns, and just because I happen to know where I fall into that conversation doesn't mean that I don't want to have that conversation.
I did the first HBO special ever in 1975 at Haverford College. Cable was new then: HBO was a Time-Life entity, with maybe 400,000 or 500,000 subscribers and maybe 50 employees.
I was so in love with the idea of making people laugh for a living that I didn't care what I had to do to get there. Or how much money I was going to make when I did get there.
One UK paper described me as a "miserablist", a word I'd never heard before or since. I looked it up and it means someone who can only be happy when they are miserable. Perfect.
I'm just saying, tonight, if you're going through a breakup and you're drinking, don't call. Just don't do it. Don't call. Because here's the thing: booze has information in it!
That's where depression hits you most - your home life. It doesn't affect your work. I can't do this zany, wacky, funny thing any more. I haven't been like that for a long time.
I hated high school. Ugh. I couldn't wait until it was over so I could sleep in. In college, I made sure all my classes were in the afternoon. I hated getting up in the morning.
Now I almost overly embrace how weird I am, how I look and how oddly camp I am. It's almost too honest for me because I harboured ambitions to be quite a cool, good-looking guy.
I've always been attracted to sad. If you look at Woody Allen movies, he's often playing a sad clown, and it's always been interesting. And angry clown is even more interesting.
As I got older, I got into all kinds of things in the streets - but for some reason, I never got caught up with the gangs growing up. Everybody dug me, man. I never had problems.
People with a sense of humor tend to be less egocentric and more realistic in their view of the world and more humble in moments of success and less defeated in times of travail.
I certainly don't delude myself that there aren't certainly more important things to do in life than make people laugh, but I can't imagine anything that would bring me more joy.
All inspiration comes from a higher power. The body is a shell. The creative spot is from God - You hear voices, everybody does. When you get older, you refer to it as intuition.
As soon as a roast is announced, I get everybody - family, friends, waitresses, cab drivers - giving me jokes about the person getting roasted. I'm the mouthpiece for the masses.
I don't really like actors. Actors are like terrible comedians with no punch lines. It's all about them. They talk about themselves all the time. They bore the sh - t out of you.
I think you can go from being not very funny to working really hard for 10 years and figuring out how to make a living on the road, but I don't think you can rise much above that.
If you look at Jack Benny, George Burns, or Don Rickles, they've all had long, successful marriages. So, I think there's something about laughter and the durability of a marriage.
There's a bunch of places in the world I haven't been to, 'cause I can only be on a plane for a little bit. I'm like, 'How long is it to get there? Two days on a plane? What? No.'
Ultimately, when I go back to the stage, I want to be able to do everything. I want to be able to do music and comedy and all that stuff; that's what all this stuff is leading to.
Faggot never meant "gay" when I was a kid. You kind of knew that you could call a gay person faggot if you were ignorant, but nobody ever called someone a faggot if they were gay.
I know, it's weird that I've never done a musical. I turned down two of them. 'The Lion King' and 'The Producers.' I turned two of the biggest Broadway musicals down, am I a mess?
I went to several public schools. I went to religious school. I was thrown out of Hebrew school, which was the final straw. They said, 'God doesn't like you anymore. Go eat pork.'
I really don't know what makes a comedian. I think it's a family background and environment. Yet if you put the same ingredients in another person, he may never utter a funny line.
The ancient Greeks were the first ones to say an unexamined life is not worth living. They don't tell you of course what we found out, an examined life not that fascinating either.
My iPod holds 3,000 albums. I own, like, 90 albums. My iPod sits at home, sullen, frustrated, and underused, like a wife who gave up her career and the kids turned out to be shite.
The reason it's so painful when someone disappears is you have to face the fact that the person you loved had probably left you a long time before he grabbed his coat and scrammed.
Christine Todd Whitman had to resign as the head of the EPA. You know, when the governor of New Jersey decides the environment is hopeless, you gotta really think that one through.
I'm a big foodie! I eat, like, three times a day... but most of all, I'm a breathie. Breathing air? That's the best thing in the world! I couldn't go two minutes without breathing.
There was one week where I got mistaken for Hasan Minhaj, who is on 'The Daily Show;' Kunal Nayyar, who's on 'Big Bang Theory;' and Karan Soni of 'Ghostbusters.' This was one week.
I was in the De Witt Clinton Hight School marching band. One of the worst bands ever formed. When we played the national anthem, people from every country stood - except Americans.
My life has been wild enough to derive all of the stories you need out of it. I've been through many, many years of behavioral problems, so I don't really look outside for stories.
However wack anyone thought 'Whatzupwitu' was, there's not a lot of people that have footage of themselves dancing around in the clouds with Michael Jackson. I do have that forever.
It's all about self-esteem now. Build the kids' self-esteem, make them feel good about themselves. If everybody grows up with high self-esteem, who's gonna dance in our strip-clubs?
As for basic jokes about sex and even my religious stuff, I don't find any problems with that, even if I'm gigging in the Bible Belt, because religious people don't come and see me.
There's a fallacy with stand up comedy, which is, people come up to comedians, and they go, 'You say what I think but I'm not brave enough to say,' and that's not particularly true.
Also I can come up with new bits - people yell stuff out and it's a new subject or a subject that I've been thinking about that I haven't done onstage yet and I'll just run with it.
I don't know about other comedians, but I know that I never have felt anything like stage fright. I've felt nervous before big shows, but I think that's different than stage fright.
But I think the other is a little more like bullfighting, a little more daring and although I appreciate good acting and I liked being versatile my whole career, it kept me working.
The bulk of my fans are my age, and I'm aging at the same rate they are. That makes me relevant. They like hearing what I have to say. I work hard at it, but it's addicting, really.
To be really great, you need to be naturally funny in order to stand out. But you can work at it, and find the best vehicle that you have to communicate what you're saying to people.
Like a lot of black people, I grew up straight po'. Wasn't no question about whether we was po', either. If you really wanted to know, all you had to do was look in our refrigerator.
When you're going for a joke, you're stuck out there if it doesn't work. There's nowhere to go. You've done the drum role and the cymbal clash and you're out on the end of the plank.
When we're picking someone who we want to spend a lot of time with, even perhaps for the rest of our lives, we generally try to pick someone who likes to do the things we like to do.
Sometimes you have to suffer a little bit in your youth to motivate yourself to succeed in later life. If Bill Gates had got laid in high school, do you think there'd be a Microsoft?
When I heard you could get a disease from playing with your prairie dog, I thought, 'Wow, what a euphemism.' I thought playing with my prairie dog was the best way to avoid diseases.
Most people, when they think of an insult, they keep it to themselves. But you wouldn't believe the things people say on my Twitter feed, and I'm a nice guy. Imagine if I was a jerk.
I read the things that scientists have figured out, and apply what they say is beneficial, but at the end of the day I'm the wrong person to get unchallenged nutritional advice from.
TV requires a lot more patience. No one's ever like, 'I gotta get up at 5 A.M. and write my stand-up!' It's an easy life. With 'Silicon Valley,' it's long hours and very unglamorous.
I'm way too famous and rich to be on a dating app, but if I get very desperate by the time I'm 60, I'll go on Tinder. Or I'll go on 'Millionaire Matchmaker'; I'll call Patti Stanger.
I was probably just trying to be Dennis Miller, but without the vocabulary to actually be Dennis Miller. I guess I was just less interesting than I am now, if I am interesting at all