Humorists

"["Lines you wouldn't hear in a superhero movie"] What's that Joker, you'll be back? Somehow I don't think you will be."

"["Lines you wouldn't hear in a superhero movie"] Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Whatever it is it's heading straight for the World Trade Center!"

"There's a place for McCanns jokes, it's probably here. It's probably not on Dictionary Corner on Countdown. "And as we go into the break, we'd like to remind you that MADDIE is an anagram of I'M DEAD.""

"The Americans want to build a big tower on the site of September the 11th. Freedom Tower they're going to call it but now apparently they're worried and they're looking at ways to try and make it terrorist proof. I think they should have just build a giant fucking mosque. No one is going to fly into that are they?! Or even better, a runway."

"Sometimes I write stuff now and I go "am I really rebelling there, or am I just conforming?" Because our society works on conformity. People talk about racist cops; they don't select for racism. There isn't a test where they go "I'm afraid you failed; you answered several questions about the history of Motown correctly." They test you for conformity so that you'll just nod along with structural racism, and sometimes I say to myself "well, am I conforming?" So look, I compèred Live at the Apollo a couple of years ago - which is a type of conformity in itself - and at the time, you're supposed to do jokes on all these celebrities they've got down at the front and one of them was this really brilliant female boxer who I really admired and I'd followed her whole career. I had written this joke which I was really proud of which was "At the Olympics, in the women's boxing, they fought in two minute rounds which was good, because if had been three minute rounds I think I would have ejaculated my own pelvis." (laughter) And you know, I really laughed when I wrote that. I thought "that's fucking hilarious" because you'd never say that to someone's face, would you? And then as I was walking to the show I was thinking; people do say that kind of thing, people say that kind of thing in school - especially me. People say it now on social media, so am I just fucking conforming here? And what am I conforming with, a deeply sexist society?"

"Men don't have to assess women, that's why we can objectify them so quickly. On some level, we don't really give a fuck. A man can see a woman with a heavy cold and all he'd think would be "I would rattle that fucking phlegm loose.""

"Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody."

"When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them."

"Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead centre of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net."

"Christmas is over and Business is Business."

"There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel"

"The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time."

"Not all cartoon humor is just about having bugged-out eyes and tongues flying out of people's heads."

"Forget the takes. Takes are cheap shots. Anyone can do a goddamn take. [...] You don't have to be a genius to draw a take. It's emotions—the full range of emotions—that works in Clampett's cartoons."

"Let me make this clear: Ren & Stimpy really is a children's show. It was made for kids. I'm not putting anything in there that I don't think a kid can watch, or should watch. It's completely a kid's show."

"The main thing missing from cartoons is today that old cartoons were cartoony. They did things you can't do in any other medium. Today's cartoons are very conservative and are more like live action. The characters look the same in every frame of the dang cartoon. The old cartoons squashed, stretched, and did crazy expressions. They were imaginative and crazy. A lot of cartoons aren't imaginative, they just say things. It might as well be radio. There is no point in having anything to look at in modern cartoons. But you can't say that about every cartoon. Genndy Tartakovsky's cartoons are beautiful. The closest thing now to what I'm saying is SpongeBob but even that doesn't go very far. It's like a conservative version of Ren & Stimpy."

"Illustration from the late 1900s up through the middle of the 20th century was absolutely amazing. In general, American culture was at its highest skill-wise in every aspect of human life in the 1940s. It's all been downhill since then. You just open an old magazine from the 1930s and '40s and look at the illustrations in it. There’s nobody alive that could touch the way they could draw back then."

"I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!"

"Sweetness of life depends to its bitterness."

"It is a strange paradox: Humans drown in the water, fish drown in the land."

"Our lives consist of two numbers: date of birth and date of death."

"Politically I am neither left nor right! And this kind of political-ethical standpoint-- being in the middle-- usually brings about seclusion and isolation! But now I do not mind it anymore and, instead, I work more and more in my self-made solitude!"

"The 4D style, or cosmic comics and relativistic humor, is based on Einstein's theory of relativity which I came up with 20 years ago. 4D works use the idea of the fourth dimension, time, playing on such surrealistic and amazing subjects as motion relativity, space curvature and time dilation."

"The death of our close friends and relatives proves that how close the death is to us!"

"Caricatures speak through visual language and are therefore understandable by all people. They trigger a laugh which is also an international language and reaction. Caricatures can decrease violence and converge cultures. They aim to promote peace, and teach us to be moderate and laugh at our problems."

"The world starts with a Big Bang and finishes with a human-made atomic Big Bang!"

"As long as copyright is breached in Iran and international works are being freely published in magazines and newspapers, no one feels any need for Iranian works."

"Paper is my best friend and paper seller is my worst friend!"

"Erasers remind us there is no faultless human."

"We all laugh and cough with the same language and will die with the same language as well!"

"Le communisme, c'est une des seules maladies graves qu'on n'a pas expérimenté d'abord sur des animaux."

"Tu sais ce que c'est qu'un sandwich polonais ? c'est deux ticket de pain avec un ticket de jambon au milieu."

"Si la Gestapo avait les moyens de vous faire parler, les politiciens d’aujourd’hui ont les moyens de vous faire taire."

"Le capitalisme, c'est l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme. Le communisme, c'est le contraire !"

"Les psychiatres sont très efficaces. Avant, je pissais au lit et j'avais honte. J'ai été voir un psychiatre et ça va mieux. Maintenant, je pisse au lit mais je suis fier."

"He laid into me with the same gusto as a right-wing political pundit on the O'Reilly Factor defending President's Bush right to vacation six days out of the week."

"It became clear when I got in my car that Persians are only really good for two things. Oil and hummus."

"Obviously, if I was serious about having a relationship with someone long-term, the last people I would introduce him to would be my family."

"Are you there vodka? It's me, Chelsea. Please get me out of jail and I promise I will never drink again. Drink and drive. I will never drink and drive again. I may even start my own group fashioned after MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but I'll call it AWLTDASH, Alcoholics Who Like to Drink and Stay Home."

"Most men would never tell a girl her Pikachu smells like a crab cake. It's just not done. But they would have no qualms about telling their guy friends. Similarly, if you're a guy and you pull your pants down, and the girl you're with immediately starts text messaging her friends, you have a small penis."

"At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer."

"The part that wasn't a jackpot was his baseball mound of red pubic hair that looked like it had literally been attached with a glue gun. I couldn't believe how much there was, and wondered how he had never heard of scissors, or--more appropriate for that kind of growth--hedge trimmers. I didn't understand what porn he was watching to not be aware of the trimming that was happening all across the world among his compatriots. I'm not a finicky person when it comes to pubic hair maintenance and I certainly don't expect men to shave it all off, leaving themselves to look like a hairless cat. That's even creepier then than seeing what Austin had, which could really only be compared to one thing: A clown in a leg lock."

"My relationship with my father had been on the proverbial fritz since the time I was fifteen and called the police to report him for child molesting. He had never molested me, but I wanted to have a party that weekend and needed him out of the house."

"I had to feign interest in all this nonsense until I could ask when I could come over and sit on his face. I didn't say that out loud, of course. I never say the things I really want to. If I did, I'd have no friends."

"There is one aspect of our own mentality for which it's difficult as yet to foresee what type of explanation would even be relevant. I'm referring, of course, to consciousness. The point is that although I have no reason to believe that my consciousness is implemented by anything other than my brain, I remain convinced that there's something impenetrably mysterious about the relationship between brains and thoughts. And you can understand, therefore, why it's so hard to imagine, let alone tolerate, the idea that the death of the brain necessarily leads to the end of the personal self—and this, of course, is the "trump card" with which religion has consistently played."

"Although he never admitted himself to be an atheist as such, he was clearly and unarguably the most vividly elegant and eloquent skeptic of them all. I'm referring, of course, to the great Scottish philosopher David Hume."

"There were academics and theologians who spent hours calculating what they thought was the precise age of the Earth, on the basis of the Biblical account of it. And as early as 1650, James Ussher had come to the startlingly precise conclusion that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C. on October the 22nd—in the evening, apparently. What God had been doing that morning is still open to conjecture."

"[In casual conversation] The reason why I feel relatively indifferent to [the Anglican Church of England] is it's lost its power, and it's so desperately keen to solicit support that they're willing to throw God out of the window in order to retain it. God for the many of the Anglicans is nothing more than a sort of awkward geriatric relative, kept upstairs, who might be embarrassingly coming downstairs, incontinently, and cause trouble."

"Paradoxically, some of the sources of disbelief are to be found amongst the arguments of believers. … Theologians often formulated the most dangerously skeptical arguments in their efforts to test the impregnability of their own faith, and in doing so, they unknowingly furnished atheists with ready-made weapons."

"With thoughtfulness—and, above all, with literacy—thoughts themselves become subjects of discussion in a way that they wouldn't have been before they were written down. It's not until they're written down that they become stable enough to bear examination in the same way that physical objects themselves can bear examination."