Comedians From The United States

"Who doesn't like movies? Who has ever said, "Hey, you wanna go see a movie?" "Fuck that and fuck your movies! It’s ridiculous, the whole idea of it! It’s just wrong and fake and NO!""

"We're all gonna lie, we're all gonna cry, and we're all gonna take painful shits. [loud cheer] Yeah. You could be man of the year or woman of the universe. You're gonna be in your bathroom one day, goin' "Aah! Ugh! Are there glass shards in my anus?! Aah!" Somewhere, Halle Berry is clutching her Oscar, goin' "Aah! Aah! Why me? I'm an Oscar winner!""

"When you don't have love, it's like there's a party going on, and everybody was invited, except for you. And you just happened to be walking by that house in the rain... (sigh) "I wasn't invited to this party." But then, once you're IN love, that's like being inside that party, going "Where's my jacket? I wanna get outta here. where's my jacket? I been to this party six years and I wanna see other parties! Where's my jacket. Someone shit on the coats. I think someone shit on, about, or around the coats.""

"Time machine... wouldn't you like to travel through time? I would. I'd go back... mess with people. You know what I would do? I would go back to when my mom and dad were having sex, to have me. Ya'know, come in, spank my dad on the ass *smack* I'M YOUR SON FROM THE FUTURE!! AAAAAAHAHAHHAHAHAHA! *smack* I'M FROM THE FUTURE!! I'M YOUR SON!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAH"

"I've heard on the news that they are thinking of putting microchips inside babies so that if they ever get kidnapped that you can track them on Google. But what if technology fails? Well here is my solution: next to the microchip, put a fucking detonator. Listen, if I can't have my baby, nobody can!!!"

"So I'm hanging out with all my buddies and um... I realized something. Think of the group of people you've known the longest in your life. Think of the group of friends that you've hung out with the most. Maybe you are all here tonight. And this is what I've realized. I had an epiphany and here it is right here. There's one person in every group of friends that nobody fucking likes. You basically keep them there to hate their guts. When that person is not around your little base camp, your hobby is cutting that person down. Example: Karen is always a douchebag. Every group has a Karen and she is always a bag of douche. And when she's not around you just look at each other go: "God Karen, she's such a douchebag. Until she walks up and then you're like: "Hey what's up Karen? Kaaaaren, what's up Karen?" There's always that one person and I'm looking out and some of you guys are like: "Hmmm, I disagree." Well you're the person...you're the person nobody likes.""

"You told your mother I was gonna blow you up with a fucking pumpkin bomb? What did she say?" "She. Was. Terrified. She wants me to move home."

"I was being chased by a giant crab. [Audience laughs] That's not funny."

"The reason I like to watch stuff about the Civil War is because I believe that I was in the Civil War. I went to a clairvoyant and she told me in a past life, she goes "You were in the Civil War." And I said I feel this. Because when I watch programs about the Civil War, sometimes, I feel like I know people. I'm like "There's James!" "Lloyd! I would know you, you fangle-tooth motherfucker! Go build that railroad.""

"Why did you stop at a red light and let me hit you doin' 80?!"

"I saw this on CNN a few days ago. In New York these cops freaked out. They shot at this guy like 15 times 'cause they said they thought he had a a grenade. HE WAS EATING A PEAR! How do you fuck that up?! Unless he was eating it like "AHHHHHH! *throws pear* THAT'S A DELICIOUS PEAR!!!""

"Next time you're at the airport, right, this is fun to do. You're at the airport, and you see somebody waiting for their flight, okay. They're sitting there, reading the paper, whatever, just chilling out. This is what you're gonna do, just like this. You're gonna walk over to them really slowly. Just walk over, alright, and stand right in from 'em. Don't say anything. Like, wait till they feel you there, know what I mean? When they finally look up at you, just really seriously look at them right in the eyes and go like this, "Don't get on the flight". You know they're sitting there goin', "I don’t think I should get on this fucking flight. I think an angel just told me not to get on this flight. Thank you, angel wearing jeans!""

"All you need for this is a pair of gloves. Just take your gloves, right, and go down to the bank. Get in line behind all the people at the bank. And give the person in front of you a nudge, just a little nudge, and they turn around. And when they turn around, start putting the gloves on and go "Now would be a good time to leave...Yeah, right now. Either that or take out a paper and pen and go, hey, how you spell 'Shoot you in the fucking face'? Come on, hurry up. One word? What is it?""

"Buster Keaton... will be around forever, because it's unlikely that human beings will ever go out-of-date the way special effects do. Keaton running and clambering onto a moving Civil War train in The General is infinitely more exciting than Christian Slater jumping from a helicopter onto a speeding locomotive in Broken Arrow because what Keaton does is real, and the camera captures and preserves his feats for posterity. In Broken Arrow we never see Slater (or the stuntman, for that matter) leaping from the helicopter to the train. Instead there are several cuts, and we must suspend our disbelief and assume that the feat has been accomplished. Which means that it's no feat at all."

"What Keaton did physically, is actually quite startling when you discover that he did all of his own stunts… The famous one is when the house falls. He had to stand on a mark. I'm told it was a nail — if he moved an inch to one side he would have been crushed to death."

"Maybe the trouble is that modern comics strive too hard to be sophisticated and knowing. What we've lost over the years is innocence and, as Keaton and company prove, innocence is an integral part of comedy."

"It's said that Chaplin wanted you to like him, but Keaton didn't care. I think he cared, but was too proud to ask. His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes for it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Buster survives tornados, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders, and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising, how without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness. Because he was funny, because he wore a porkpie had, Keaton's physical skills are often undervalued … no silent star did more dangerous stunts than Buster Keaton. Instead of using doubles, he himself doubled for his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own."

"Another 'great,' and I use that word very carefully, not the way Milton Berle uses it. One of the reasons I love Buster so much is because he lives comedy as well as practices it. Some of his things are better than Chaplin's."

"With his dark, sensitive looks, his face in repose evoking years of quiet contemplation, he resembled a mixture of Buddhist monk and fashion model. He offered the ideal face and acting style for motion pictures, proving less is more. He would become a master of knowing when to do nothing at all."

"Watch his beautiful, compact body as it pirouettes or pretzels in tortured permutations or, even more elegantly, stands in repose as everything goes crazy around it. Watch his mind as it contemplates a hostile universe whose violent whims Buster understands, withstands and, miraculously, tames. Watch his camera taking his picture (Keaton directed or supervised all his best films); it is as cool as the star it captured in its glass... The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all — intuitively."

"There are moments in many of his movies that are just poetic... In doing silent movies, no one had done this yet!"

"For me its Buster Keaton's face, with maybe his little hat on... It's being able to look into his eyes and see that sad face."

"I just want that one day, when I retire, that people still remember me like they remember Buster. I really want someone to respect me the way they respect Buster."

"I could tell you that those wonderful stories were 90% Buster's... I was often ashamed to take the money, much less the credit."

"What a creative genius — what an inventor… A guy like that, you just sit back and say, okay, I'll never get there!"

"He was doing stuff that was surreal."

"Perhaps because ‘dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than ‘dry’ wit, there are people that never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly."

"He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply "silent" of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face."

"No other comedian could do as much with the dead-pan. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood."

"One who never smiled, carried a face as still and sad as a daguerreotype through some of the most preposterously ingenious and visually satisfying comedy ever invented. That was Buster Keaton."

"Our hero came from Nowhere — he wasn't going Anywhere and he got kicked off Somewhere."

"If one more person tells me this is just like old times, I swear I'll jump out the window."

"The older Keaton got, the more one could see eternity in his look."

"Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?"

"We used to get arrested every other week — that is, the old man would get arrested."

"The funny thing about our act is that dad gets the worst of it, although I'm the one who apparently receives the bruises … the secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment."

"A picture without falls is as bad as Niagara in the same fix."

"Marriage is fine as an institution, but bad as a habit."

"The screen was just a white sheet. They had this flickering machine. That was the first time I saw this angel with a white face and these beautiful eyes. I knew this was something special. It was the first time I saw Keaton. He wore a flat pancake of a hat, and I just couldn't believe the man's grace."

"Spirits are as real as the powers they personify."

"It is the profoundest of cosmic ironies. The divine power, our true spiritual essence, does not achieve perfection until it hits the ‘rock’ bottom of the cosmos – the dense and crude earth. It remains imperfect until the moment of entombment for the simple reason that until that dark nadir is reached the experiential adventure of existence remains incomplete, and Self is not yet endowed with the entire spectrum of the light of consciousness – from spirit to matter – from the highest high to the lowest low."

"Religion exalts mystery as an unknowable secret that must be sealed in glass like the corpse of an enchanted princess and fearfully worshipped from afar. Initiation, on the other hand, requires direct participation and demands each of us to smash the casket and press mad lips to mystery, wooing her as a lover who will offer up her treasurers in a succession of sweet surrenders. This she will do, but only in exact ratio to our evolving ability and worthiness to receive them."

"Do I think I'm a holy man? Sometimes."

"The gods of one age become the devils of the age to follow. The priests look forward to the age to come and see only the end of the world."

"It's all in your head — you just have no idea how big your head is."

"God and I will achieve Supreme Enlightenment at the same moment."

"If we can’t wake up to the fact that deep down inside we are good, then we deserve to remain asleep dreaming we are evil."

"In a world that’s gone hellishly mad we’ve always taken comfort in the fact that the faith of our fathers is the one thing that remains solid and unchanging. It occurs to very few of us that perhaps for the last 2,500 years the faith of our fathers has been one of the main reasons why our world has gone hellishly mad."

"Aaaah. It's Rewind time. If I could controlled Rewind I would want Fortnite and Marques Brownlee."

"Keep my wife's name out [of] your fucking mouth!"