Technically, I've learned that having good legs and wind is good for being on stage. You have to be in shape and have endurance.
When you're a father in a marriage, you sort of become the mother's assistant, and you sort of get a list from her every day, and you do, you know, you run down the list, and it feels very much like a chore. And a lot of fathers live in kind of an avoidance. They sit on the toilet for several hours a day... Oh, honey, it took me 40 minutes to go to the post office... But once you become a dad without the mom there, you have to take it all on, and you sort of activate male skills that you didn't know you could apply to fatherhood.
You need to build an ability to just be yourself, and not be doing something.
You're a tourist in sexual perversion. I'm a prisoner there.
I do actually use a boxing trainer when I train for stand-up.
You have to be able to do a bunch of things at once, and not think about things you're not doing while you're doing other things. You have to be disciplined about not trying to do everything, all at the same time. It's hard and fun.
Gay men have to go through something to own their - who they are. They get beat up. They get ostracized. Whatever they go through, if they survive it, they come out very confident people.
I know what it's like to have a bunch of material that's working that you don't care about. You want to die.
I like all ladies of all different ages.
There's been a lot of simple vilification of right-wing people. It's really easy to say, 'Well, you're Christian, you're anti-this and that, and I hate you.' But to me, it's more interesting to say, 'What is this person like and how do they really think?'
Credibility lasts about two cycles of bad material, and then you'll probably never get it back. If you let people down, that's really hard to come back from - harder than climbing from nothing to something, even.
I don't feel those limits when I'm on stage. For some reason, audiences let me get away with things. Remember, it's all comedy. Words. Thoughts. All thoughts are safe and worth exploring.
I'm not motivated to entertain people through Twitter, so just by having Twitter and not saying anything, I make people mad.
It's hard to know where your thoughts come from, especially when you have a thirst for material because you need it professionally.
I was talking to my friend and he said his girlfriend was mad at him. I said, "What happened?" He goes: "Well, I guess I, uh... I guess I said something, and, uh... and then she got her feelings hurt." That's a weird way to phrase it: "She got her feelings hurt. I said something, and then she..." Could you more remove yourself from responsibility? "She got her feelings hurt." It's like saying, "Yeah, I shot this guy in the face, and then I guess he got himself murdered. I don't know what happened. He leaned into it."
If you had a jetpack you'd be like I have the shittiest jetpack. Who's your service provider on your jetpack? Did they make the new one? I hate this thing.
You can't direct without a good crew.
You have to do a show as honestly as you can. But you also can't afford skepticism, because it's preparing for failure, which is useless.
The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby. I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don't remember the first time I saw him.
Anytime you see a bit where some stranger does something to me, it's me.
You have to be really tenacious. You have to keep at it. There are many roads to get there. If you can get yourself into Harvard, that's a good way to go, because every Harvard graduating class, the agencies come trolling around and they'll look for you. So if you go to Harvard, you'll get found there.
You could drive a rental car until you don't want it. Just get out of it while it's moving and just walk away. No, I don't feel like being in that car any longer. Just call Hertz. Hi, your car is drifting into the intersection of 28th and Broadway, if you're interested. It's now your problem.
It’s been a very old thing for people to gather together and laugh at stuff. The first comedian in America really was Abraham Lincoln. He used to go to a pub near where he lived and stand in front of the fire and he packed the place every night and he would just talk and bust everybody in their guts. He was just a hilarious speaker and that’s what he did.
When I was a kid there was a show called 'Holmes & Yo-Yo' about a robot cop. I LOVED that show and I think it only lasted like three episodes.
The Jackass movies are honestly some of the best movies I've ever seen. I laugh so hard at them. Those guys are geniuses. If they had grown up with a different group of people, they could've been performance artists at Bard College, and people would be writing papers about them.
