Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What's nice about a lot of Wes Anderson's films is that there's a patience to it. I think that patience brings out a lot more funny things that you would miss otherwise if you just had to make quick cuts and keep the pace, whatever that pace is that bigger budget comedies have to have.
I always found myself feeling that happiness rises and frustration trickles down. If the people at the top are frustrated, then everybody down the line feels that. But if the people at the bottom are happy and fulfilled, then they do their jobs a little better, and it goes up that way.
I always stayed away from political commentary. First of all, I didn't feel entitled. What I may feel about a candidate, I'm a comedian. I mean, if people like my comedy, that doesn't mean they should vote for the person I like. That's why I always kind of stayed away from endorsements.
I consider myself a modern-day dad, where I still got rock'n'roll in me, but yet I take being a parent and relationships very seriously in life. I'm tired of the image of the father as a fat, beer-chugging, stupid guy. That image has to change. I'm changing it, baby, one city at a time.
When I was a kid, I loved really loud things. My grandmother and I went to the Fulton Mall, and I bought a three-piece suit that was paisley. Paisley over the whole suit. I was 6 and thought it was great. My mother took a photo of me in it, sent it to my grandmother, and burned the suit.
I hate false advertising, like 'Skittles: taste the rainbow.' No one's ever been like, 'Rainbow, right you guys?' Or what's Reese's? 'There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's.' Oh, really? Tell that to my uncle who used to put them in my underwear. Alright, maybe your uncles didn't love you.
I wasn't the class clown. I wasn't that obvious. There would be a circle of guys, and they're watching the class clown. And I'm standing in the back, and I turn to the guy next to me and I say something funny to him, and he starts to laugh. And the guy next to him says, 'What did he say?'
With roasting, you've really got to bring your A-game. I hate to admit it, but I probably think and obsess more about the roasts than my own series. Because there's so much attention focused on the roasts. It's like the 'Super Bowl' of comedy. Everybody is going to talk about it. Forever.
If you attach your mind to any ideology, you're going to be on a road, and that road may or may not lead you in a good direction. But you're gonna stay on that road because you are attached to an ideology. It could be a terrible road, but you stick with it regardless of rational thinking.
One of the weirdest things about Christmas in this country is that people love to watch 'EastEnders' when everyone's in floods of tears and there's a huge row. I don't know if watching it makes them feel better about their own day. Personally, I would rather try to be a bit more positive!
In the seventies when I was struggling, I ate the same thing every day at Big Nick's Burger Joint on Broadway and 77th Street. A cottage-cheese omelette with tomatoes, French fries, rye toast, orange juice, and coffee. It was consistently the most satisfying meal I could possibly imagine.
I may sound like a megalomaniac, but I feel like I'm equipped to become a great, memorable comedian, if I keep working my ass off and staying at the pace I'm at, and I feel a responsibility to do that because of the women who have done it before me, and the ones who need to do it after me.
A lot of people say video games can be stifling. Older people say, 'We had to go outside, and we had to make up stories!' For me, video games broadened my horizons. Playing 'Golden Axe,' I was those characters. I imagined myself being in that world, so honestly, it was a really good thing.
Arguably, the first five years of 'Saturday Night Live' were some of the most radical things ever seen on television. When NBC said, 'Okay, you can do a show from 11:30 to 1 on Saturday night,' they didn't think anyone would watch. It was like giving a piece of the candy store to the kids.
I went to stand-up when my rock n' roll dreams weren't coming true. I knew it wasn't going to happen when I was in a New Wave band in 1992 - at the height of grunge. Then I heard No Doubt's 'Spiderwebs' and I said, 'Well, we're done.' They did - and succeeded at - what we were trying to do.
I used to love the election season'cause it's kind of fun. Everyone makes a big sport out of it with all these different news stories and everything. I like it better now that everybody knows all the candidates from the past 15 years. But it does get really ugly. It's ugly and it's pugilist.
Stand-up is still my favorite, but the podcast is a close second. It's so fun, and it's given me the opportunity to have three-hour conversations with people I wouldn't have otherwise been able to talk to. When I talked to Maynard Keenan from Tool, I almost couldn't believe it was happening.
I go to the British Comedy Awards and, you know, quite a few people were making jokes at my expense. It just made me feel awful, because I am there with my wife and she has gone out and bought a dress. And it is my big night and I won, and yet the overriding experience was that of nastiness.
Stand-up is still my favorite, but the podcast is a close second. It's so fun, and it's given me the oppor-tunity to have three-hour conversations with people I wouldn't have otherwise been able to talk to. When I talked to Maynard Keenan from Tool, I almost couldn't believe it was happening.
Basically, I think some of the weight helped take some of the walls down in reality, so basically I got a little more confident. I'm definitely not super confident, but I am confident that I don't have to hide behind those layers of fat and that I can actually open up to people a little more.
Hard audiences tend to be when it's all men. It's when businesses have dos where they're at conferences all day then book a comedian for the evening. They're men of a certain age - basically middle-aged, balding, 50 to 60 years old and I just know I can't make these people laugh hysterically.
I wrote this 12-page 'Luke Cage' comic book for Marvel once, and I got to create a villain. His name was Lone Shark, so there was this running thing of whether it was spelled L-O-A-N or L-O-N-E. I like the idea of 'I'm a lone shark,' and then people are like, 'You are here to collect a debt?'
The studios gotta start making more stuff where black folks get quality stuff. But I can't trip about that because I've been making movies for 35 years, and I've played everything from an old lady to a donkey, so I can't be on here talking about, 'They don't give us enough roles' and diversity.
Looking back, I remember my family laughing a lot. We were never the kind of people that dwelled on hard times. My family laughs when things are tough. Growing up like that, I got used to making jokes about things that were difficult. So when I started doing stand-up, that's what I went towards.
Most people don't really do too many things because they're afraid they'll fail. There are people failing all the time, all around you. And nobody is going to notice your failure. Your failure is not going to be so spectacular that people write news stories about it. Your failure will be boring.
life becomes satire in real time, what good is the premiere satire magazine? It might as well just be the newspaper. You could pick up The Wall Street Journal and be like, "Oh, what a funny Onion headline!" And then the editor of The Onion is like, "Huh. I guess you won't be needing me anymore."
I do whatever comes my way. But I get burned out on stage. It's a lonely world. I think part of the romanticism about being on the road is you get to meet a lot of - my mom once told me, "You've probably got a woman at every port." Like I'm a pirate. Obviously she doesn't know her son that well.
Every bad decision I've made has been based on money. I grew up in the projects and you don't turn down money there. You take it, because you never know when it's all going to end. I made Cop III because they offered me $15 million. That $15 million was worth having Roger Ebert's thumb up my ass.
I have two rules when you come to my house on Halloween. Wear a costume - 'cause if you've manned your door at your own house, you know how many kids will roll up, 14 years old with no costume and an attitude. My other rule: don't grab. Let me assess you and then design a candy situation for you.
I remember my jaw would hurt because I wasn't used to speaking English all the time. Like how, even if you exercise, you'll play kickball one day, and then you're like, 'Wait, I run, but new places are hurting because I don't use my muscles this way.' My mouth was not used to making these sounds.
People with HIV and AIDS are nothing to be afraid of. They are people just like every single one of us, and each has a story to tell. These people should be helped, embraced, and not dismissed. We need to open our hearts and our minds to them, and we just may learn we're pretty much all the same.
Maybe this is just me, because my priorities have changed as I’ve gotten older. But now I don’t want to be ‘sort of dating’ someone. I don’t want to be ‘kinda hanging out’ with someone. I don’t want to spend a lot of energy suppressing all my feelings so I appear uninvolved. I want to be involved.
["Faggot"] is a great word! The whole thing about language is, it's supposed to be broadcasting your intentions. These are my intentions and these words broadcast my feelings. If all of a sudden you have forbidden words that doesn't make the intent any better. It's just appeasing sensitive people.
There were some particular themes that I knew I wanted to hit, and when I got deeper into the project I found that it was becoming serious in and on its own. By the end, it's not very funny at all. I think, now, that part of the power of the book is that the jokes are kind of sparkly distractions.
There`s a division in most major police departments called, `Special Victims Unit,` which is what sex crimes are euphemistically called. They`re considered the most heinous crimes, when not only do you violate somebody, but you violate them sexually. So it`s an elite squad that takes care of that.
You can tell on-stage when a joke's starting to lose its pop. It doesn't mean people don't want to hear it anymore; it means I don't want to do it anymore. Because I want to move on to something that has a knee-jerk reaction just like you get when you tell somebody a joke that they've never heard.
I do think that you can dress yourself out of a problem. The way that a haircut and a new pair of pants can make you feel is better than any therapist, because when you look in the mirror, you see a different person - you are a different person. It's superficial change that can lead to real change.
My first time performing was in the black box theater of my high school's basement as a member of 'Clownaz,' the school's improv team. We charged money for tickets, saying the proceeds went to our school's recycling program. Then, immediately after the show, we divided up all the money and kept it.
What you have to do as a comedian, that I suppose is quite difficult, is you have to end it. All the stuff that I've ever done in the past - all the tours - no matter how good it was last year or the year before, that's gone. What exists this year only exists in this time, and then it will be gone.
Mr. Trump, I really can't comment, because he was my boss on 'Celebrity Apprentice,' and I just don't think we should let him be president until he produces evidence that the thing on his head is real. Because he wanted to see Obama's birth certificate, we should ask for a certificate of real hair.
I had some terrible times - comparatively speaking. I saddled myself with a load of debt, I wasn't liked by a lot of my fellow comics and I used to blame other people for me not getting a break. But now I realise I just wasn't very good. And as soon as I became good, things took off pretty quickly.
I think probably - I think, you know, when you're first dating somebody, if they're just not that physical with you, if they don't want to make concrete plans with you, you know, if they're sort of ambiguous about where everything is going, I think that's a pretty good sign that they're not into you.
I love coming to D.C. I think it's a very unusual city. It's so fascinating that it's this weird place that everything thinks of as the capital of the country, there is so much international business, political stuff that is connected to that part of the country that it has a very charred atmosphere.
Despite all the advancements in science, and all things about religion that are disproved it still marches on. The bottom line is that the only real, absolutely provable answers about life and our place in the universe are provided by science, and religion has been holding down science since day one.
There's more to life than being an actor in a Hollywood movie. I'm not going to adapt my life after that existence, where a lot of people do. And they get the publicist, and they get all that stuff, and it becomes them. I think it's a stupid way to live your life. A really dumb way to live your life.
I don't think comedy really does change people's minds; I think you can only get someone who is almost ready to change their mind. You can't change someone from one direction straight into the other, but if you get someone who is considering your view, and you make a good point, there's power in that.
When generally people make race-based jokes to me - even if they're not technically racist, they're sort of based on me being Pakistani or whatever - on Twitter, you know, I block a lot of people who say something weird about my name or something. It does bug me generally, but it is all about context.
I do enjoy having researchers and writers around me because I am getting a lot of different influences now from the opposite sex, different races, people of different ages, who are helping write the routines. So I am seeing things from other people's perspectives, which I never really had to do before.
I think that one of the reasons why people look towards the end of humanity is that people are afraid to die alone. If you die alone, the people you love will miss you, or if they die, you miss them - the sorrow is inevitable. When you truly love someone, the thought of losing them forever is horrible.
I understand why so many female comics quit or change their path, because it is hard. It's hard to be a comedian, and people have so much aggression towards women. I don't really know where that comes from, but I feel a total responsibility, and I'm gonna do my part, to continue on the path that I'm on.