Humorists From The United States

"There is no time like the pleasant."

"Many are called but few get up."

"Only the young die good."

"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."

"This is Ze Frank, thinking so you don't have to. (Standard sign-off for "The Show"; varies at times)."

"Just a reminder, what other people think of you is none of your business.."

"Who likes the little little duckies in the pond? I do, I do, I do, a-chicka quack quack."

"When I get sick I start scripting the video tape that I'm gonna leave behind when I die. Sometimes imagining that even makes me cry. Both hurting and happiness make me feel more alive, but as I get older it seems that hurting's the low hanging fruit. So I pick it. ."

"Are the new viewers gone yet?"

"Look what I found; a litter version of the Internet! This used to be something that could convert carbon dioxide to oxygen using only sunlight, water, and a few nutrients. But now it's way cooler; it has two functions. You can either put little words on it, or crumple it up into a tiny ball and throw it! ."

"Any individual entity that pretends to understand the rules that guide this space is under an illusion."

"Generalized statements … which instill nebulous fear without specific information are exactly in line with the goals of terrorism. ."

"...next time you rake up those leaves realize you're about to jump into a pile of tree shit. ."

"If you don't know what a cat is, it's sort of like a stuffed animal... but with a working asshole. I'll admit that when I went to the pound, I was actually shopping for a never ending box of shit, um, and the cat just came with it."

"in the summertime sometimes i sleep "macho": ah, white t-shirt, no underpants. Sleeping macho looks very attractive on a man. I feel like it helps me breathe."

"Say the opposite, say the opposite, say the same thing, say the same thing. (song/refrain on "The Show")."

"It's complimacated. (sounds like compli-ma-kayted, emphasis on first syllable)"

"A wedge strategy is where you focus on a highly charged issue at the borders of rationality and emotion. The emotional content of the issue can create a moral conviction that the issue needs to be resolved at any cost. Tactics that would otherwise be called into question can then be employed to resolve the issue. This sets precedent for the future use of those tactics in other arenas."

"Look! A see-through wall of glass!"

"(On airplane etiquette) Although reclining your seat is technically your right, just like free speech if you exercise it to your limits everyone around you will think you're an asshole."

"Water boarding: Is that like snowboarding?! ."

"Shock 'n' Awe. We bring the BoomWow."

"The word vagina is a beautiful word, like all words that have v's and g's in them, like gavel, or evangelical. I love vaginas, and evangelicals. I fucking hate gavels though."

"I'm not sure, but I think I might be an adult.... Someone the other day told me I should act more like one, but I don't even know what it is. What's an adult? I blame it on my parents; they caught it before I was even born. When I break things now I have to pay for them. I rarely get cake at parties anymore. When people give me sheets of paper I'm not supposed to draw on 'em. I'm just supposed to put the letters of my name on a line. Where's the fun in that? People get funny when I say the obvious, like "you've got a big nose." All of a sudden I'm supposed to know about the weather. And have plans! I even checked on the internet and no one's working on a cure. I'm not sure I like it."

"'Army of one': when the shit hits the fan, you're on your own.."

"The president said some words, like nouns and verbs."

"Don't swim up stream, baby. The future was right where you were. ."

"Both hurting and happiness make me feel more alive, but as I get older it seems that hurting's the low hanging fruit. So I pick it."

"Trying to defeat an ideology by killing individuals is like trying to save a marriage with a blowjob. It might buy you some time, but in the end it'll just suck. ."

"[T]errorists are desperate assholes who see no institutionalized recourse to address their grievances, so they resort to random acts of violence in order to instill fear into the general population."

"A surprise party is where your friends and family lie to you to make you feel alone and unloved. Then, when they throw you the party they would have thrown, regardless, you experience a sudden rush of emotion as your depressed self returns back to normal. Some people think that life in general's like that. They keep waiting for the party. I call that: denial."

"[T]here's more than one way to skin a cat. But from the cat's perspective, they all suck. ."

"Pat Buchanan likes to say we're in a culture war. The Civil War was a culture war, and brothers killed brothers. I wonder if they avoided dinner conversation about politics. What if this culture war turned into a real war? I'd look back on that dinner and wish that I'd ordered a side of argument."

"This little bathtub smells like ass.."

"I don't think you understand what the word cool means.... Being cool is about not participating in traditionally enjoyable experiences and creating the illusion that happiness can be found in alternative, less enjoyable experiences. The degree to which other people around you try to emulate your alternative lifestyle and fail determines how cool you are. You're only as cool as people wish they were."

"Okay, roll-call, no talking. Benny, Marc; Ethel, Shakina, nice shoes. Bobo twins, anyone seen the Bobo twins? Those Bobo twins."

"You talk a great deal about building a better world for your children, but when you are young you can no more envision a world inherited by your children than you can conceive of dying. The society you mold, you mold for yourself. It was this way with my generation. We were unhappy with what we inherited and we tried to reshape it in ways that would make it more tolerable to us. You were not uppermost in our thoughts. Now, in middle age, some of us are trying to rewrite history. Some of us tell you, "We labored and dared and sacrificed — all for you — yet we hear no thanks." You will not be unduly moved, I hope, by these laments. They are sentimental cries from persons so attached to the society they have rebuilt that they cannot bear the thought of seeing it overhauled by new proprietors."

"The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality."

"In televisionland we are all sophisticated enough now to realize that every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic somewhere in the universe. It is not a candidate's favorite statistic per se that engages us, but the assurance with which he can use it. We are testing the candidates for self-confidence, for "Presidentiality" in statistical bombardment. It doesn't really matter if their statistics be homemade. What settles the business is the cool with which they are dropped. And so, as the second half hour treads the decimaled path toward the third hour, we become aware of being locked in a tacit conspiracy with the candidates. We know their statistics go to nothing of importance, and they know we know, and we know they know we know. There is total but unspoken agreement that the "debate," the arguments which are being mustered here, are of only the slightest importance. As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual? This accounts for the curious lack of passion in both performers. Even when Ford accuses Carter of inconsistency, it is done in a flat, emotionless, game-playing style. The delivery has the tuneless ring of an old press release from the Republican National Committee. Just so, when Carter has an opportunity to set pulses pounding by denouncing the Nixon pardon, he dances delicately around the invitation like a maiden skirting a bog. We judge that both men judge us to be drained of desire for passion in public life, to be looking for Presidents who are cool and noninflammable. They present themselves as passionless technocrats using an English singularly devoid of poetry, metaphor and even coherent forthright declaration. Caught up in the conspiracy, we watch their coolness with fine technical understanding and, in the final half hour, begin asking each other for technical judgments. How well is Carter exploiting the event to improve our image of him? Is Ford's television manner sufficiently self-confident to make us sense him as "Presidential"? It is quite extraordinary. Here we are, fully aware that we are being manipulated by image projectionists, yet happily asking ourselves how obligingly we are submitting to the manipulation. It is as though a rat running a maze were more interested in the psychologist's charts on his behavior than in getting the cheese at the goal line."

"Of all the people insistently expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing headlines to trample him flat."

"Unaware of history's higher significance, I slumbered through the bliss of infancy, feeling no impulse whatever to make something of myself."

"Listen here, Buddy, the dead don't come back. You never have to worry about the dead hurting you. It's the living you've got to worry about in this world. (Lucy Baker, Russell Baker's mother, to Russell)."

"At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke."

"President Reagan brought us to the ultimate: America As Total Television. During his governance the printed word simply ceased to matter. White House dynamos had once telephoned newspapers to complain about unfair reporting. Not anymore. Now they telephoned network bosses. Even then it wasn't poor reporting they complained about, but poor pictures. A network reporter who thought her report on shortcomings in Reaganland would anger the President's cadres was amazed when the man in charge of propaganda thanked her for doing them a good turn. But, she said, that was a tough piece of reporting. Oh, the words may have been, said the gentleman, but on television words didn't matter. What mattered were pictures. And the pictures had been wonderful."

"Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not."

"Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them."

"He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to the past."

"One may speculate whether the contemporary idea of American society in decay is not a false notion which has been created, at least partially, by this old movie portrait of a society that was once stable, orderly and governed by the immutable justice of the Hollywood censorship code. This is the ever-popular myth of a golden age which persuades so many generations that there was once a wonderful moment in the past when the world was sound and good people ruled and evil was justly punished. After Camelot came chaos and despair, except, of course, that Camelot never existed, any more than the world portrayed by those old Hollywood films existed."

"Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used."

"By any precise definition, Washington is a city of advanced depravity. There one meets and dines with the truly great killers of the age, but only the quirkily fastidious are offended, for the killers are urbane and learned gentlemen who discuss their work with wit and charm and know which tool to use on the escargots. On New York's East Side one occasionally meets a person so palpably evil as to be fascinatingly irresistible. There is a smell of power and danger on these people, and one may be horrified, exhilarated, disgusted or mesmerized by the awful possibilities they suggest, but never simply depressed. Depression comes in the presence of depravity that makes no pretense about itself, a kind of depravity that says, "You and I, we are base, ugly, tasteless, cruel and beastly; let's admit it and have a good wallow." That is how Times Square speaks. And not only Times Square. Few cities in the country lack the same amenities. Pornography, prostitution, massage parlors, hard-core movies, narcotics dealers — all seem to be inescapable and permanent results of an enlightened view of liberty which has expanded the American's right to choose his own method of shaping a life. Granted such freedom, it was probably inevitable that many of us would yield to the worst instincts, and many do, and not only in New York. Most cities, however, are able to keep the evidence out of the center of town. Under a rock, as it were. In New York, a concatenation of economics, shifting real estate values and subway lines has worked to turn the rock over and put the show on display in the middle of town. What used to be called "The Crossroads of the World" is now a sprawling testament to the dreariness which liberty can produce when it permits people with no taste whatever to enjoy the same right to depravity as the elegant classes."