Satirists From The United States

"I never had a strategy in my dealing with other humans! I've always been very passive socially. I went along with their agenda. I had none of my own! Left to my own devices I stayed in my room or wandered aimlessly in the streets, fantasizing about bizarre things I yearned to do to big ladies, or filled with self-pity and resentment. I was helpless in the presence of other people! My main concern was to make them like me by being as agreeable as possible, and secondly to impress them with my brilliance, my sharp wit, my originality, and my fundamental saintliness. Over time, and after years—decades—of diligent practice, I became very good at this cute little performance of mine. But this performance was improvised in the moment, catered to suit whoever I happened to be with. There was no strategy. It was always an effort. Only in solitude was I completely relaxed. Funny thing..."

"As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn't much like it. I witnessed the debasement of architecture, and I could see a decline in the quality of things like comic books and toys, things made for kids. Old things seemed to have more life, more substance, more humanity in them."

"What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial, commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold. As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world."

"About the only power you have is the power to discriminate. Living in a culture like this, you have to make choices and search out what has the most authentic content or substance. In the 1960s, while on LSD, I realized that my mind was a garbage receptacle of mass media images and input. I spent my whole childhood absorbing so much crap that my personality and mind are saturated with it. God only knows if that affects you physically! As a kid I became increasingly interested in earlier periods of culture. I turned into a little nostalgia boy, and I became steeped in the Our Gang fantasy from watching them on TV. So much so, that my speech patterns were affected. The style of those Our Gang comedies was so charming that I started acting and talking like Jackie Cooper and Alfalfa. They had these cute kids, artificial mannerisms. It must have been embarrassing for people to hear me talk like that."

"I took some bad acid in November of 1965, and the after effect left me crazy and helpless for six months. My mind would drift into a place that was very electrical and crackly, filled with harsh, abrasive, low grade, cartoony, tawdry carnival visions. There was a nightmarish mechanical aspect to everyday life. My ego was so shattered, so fragmented that it didn't get in the way during what was the most unself-conscious period of my life. I was kind of on automatic pilot and was still constantly drawing. Most of my popular characters—Mr. Natural, Flaky Foont, Angelfood McSpade, Eggs Ackley, The Snoid, The Vulture Demonesses, Av' n' Gar, Shuman the Human, the Truckin' guys, Devil Girl—all suddenly appeared in the drawings in my sketchbook in this period, early 1966. Amazing! I was relieved when it was finally over, but I also immediately missed the egoless state of that strange interlude. LSD put me somewhere else. I wasn't sure where. All I know is, it was a strange place. Psychedelic drugs broke me out of my social programming. It was a good thing for me, traumatic though, and I may have been permanently damaged by the whole thing, I'm not sure. I see LSD as a positive, important life experience for me, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone else."

"I was totally amazed. This little home made underground comix thing was turning into a business before my eyes. It went from us going around Haight Street trying to sell these things we had folded and stapled ourselves to suddenly being a business with distributors, lawyers, contracts, and money talk. … The whole thing began to take on a heaviness that I believe had a negative effect on my work. I was only twenty-five years old when all this happened. It was a case of "too much too soon," I think. I became acutely self-conscious about what I was doing. Was I now a "spokesman" for the hippies or what? I had no idea how to handle my new position in society! … Take Keep On Truckin'... for example. Keep on Truckin'... is the curse of my life. This stupid little cartoon caught on hugely. … I didn't want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture! I didn't want to do 'shtick'—the thing Lenny Bruce warned against. That's when I started to let out all my perverse sex fantasies. It was the only way out of being "America's Best Loved Hippie Cartoonist.""

"Before industrial civilization, local and regional communities made their own music, their own entertainment. The esthetics were based on traditions that went far back in time—i.e. folklore. But part of the con of mass culture is to make you forget history, disconnect you from tradition and the past. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Sometimes it can even be revolutionary. But tradition can also keep culture on an authentic human level, the homespun as opposed to the mass produced. Industrial civilization figured out how to manufacture popular culture and sell it back to the people. You have to marvel at the ingenuity of it! The problem is that the longer this buying and selling goes on, the more hollow and bankrupt the culture becomes. It loses its fertility, like worn out, ravaged farmland. Eventually, the yokels who bought the hype, the pitch, they want in on the game. When there are no more naive hicks left, you have a culture where everybody is conning each other all the time. There are no more earnest "squares" left—everybody's "hip", everybody is cynical."

"Nothing in Moderation."

"Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well-done."

"Matt: Having no plan and low expectations always makes the future look brighter."

"Matt: ... Expectations, keep 'em down. Ankle level."

"Mike: I'm Mike Chapman from homestarrunner.com! People are all the time asking me "Mike, how do you do those stupid voices for your dumb animal characters?" and I say "I'm Mike! Matt does the voices!" Let's go!"

"We don't need a flat tax, but a flattening tax, to truly level the playing field."

"And we will NOT let Campbell's Soup, Old Navy, or anybody ELSE, HAMMER into the minds of girls as YOUNG as SIX YEARS OLD that they should ALWAYS hate their bodies and ALWAYS be on a diet!"

"Come, on, EMPTY-V!! [As] far as I'm concerned, Beavis and Butt-head and Dora (sic) are the only two good things you ever DID! [wild applause from audience] But can't you think of a better way to raise audience awareness of domestic violence, than to make it look COOL?"

"Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music...or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed property owners so brain dead and stupid they won't even see that if you're too goddamn greedy to pay taxes for schools and services, they're not going to be any good any more! And that uneducated time bombs are a very poor investment as a future work force. And if you go on teaching people that life is cheap, and leave them to rot in ghettos and jails, they may one day feel justified in coming back to rob and kill you. Duh!"

"Jimi Hendrix once said, 'You will never hear surf music again.' Well, tonight, you will hear 'serf' music again -- S-E-R-F music."

"Shut up, be happy. Obey all orders without question. The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory."

""Buy my soda!" said the Moose Diarrhea Salesman. And we did. We all did. But when we got it home and opened up the package, it was not what they said it was. And rather than chucking it all and searching for something better, we're content with looking for another Moose Diarrhea Salesman."

"We on the left keep dividing ourselves into little splinter groups. "Anyone who isn't a vegetarian is automatically evil!" "Anyone who isn't an environmentalist wants to pollute the world!" "If you're not gay, then you must be homophobic!" "Look at me wrong? You're a racist!" "Wear lipstick? You can't be a feminist!" Divide, Divide, Divide, Divide, Divide! And while the left is all up their own asses with their little pet causes, the right comes in and takes control over that which is rightly everyone's. And speaking of splinters, most pathetic of all: "The only thing that matters in the entire universe is the punk rock scene! And you're an evil, sell-out traitor to the sacred punk rock scene if you disagree with anything I say, listen to music that I don't like, dress funny, dress normal, laugh without permission, or even so much as speak to another artist who ever made a dime off of their years of hard work without at least beating them up first!"...how pathetic is that? Every day, I walk from my home to the offices of Alternative Tentacles, and I lose count of the number of people, including entire families, holding up cardboard signs saying "Homeless: Will Work for Food"! Hard as it may be for some crybabies to believe, people in that situation could care less that "Green Day and The Offspring sold out when they signed to major labels."! Other things are more important!"

"I am Emperor Ronald Reagan Born again with fascist cravings Still, you made me president Human rights will soon go 'way I am now your today Now I command all of you Now you're going to pray in school I'll make sure they're Christian too ... You'll go quitely to boot camp They'll shoot you dead, make you a man Don't you worry, it's for a cause Feeding global corporations' claws Die on our brand new poison gas El Salvador or Afghanistan Making money for President Reagan And all the friends of President Reagan"

"Here we are at the gates of the great and powerful OZ! And we have come for your children! We are the REAL Politically Incorrect ! Our lives are not Charmed ! We WORK for a living! When was the last time [network television] admitted we even EXIST? Roseanne ? Sanford and Son ? Taxi ? [disgusted] Jerry Springer ! Our young people are NOT Teenage Witches! Nor are they Clueless! Fact is, they neither have NOR WANT ANYTHING in common with Dawson's Creek, Popular or Spoiled White Rich BABIES 90210 !"

""Poly" means more than one, and ticks are bloodsucking parasites."

"No lesbian left behind."

"Find what you like, and let it kill you."

"Let Saigons be bygones / Don't you blow this world in two."

"Donald Rumsfeld - "Ronald Dumbsfeld" - ibid."

"Barack Obama - "BaRockstar O'Bummer" -"

"Al Gore - "Prince Albert" - Become the Media"

"George W. Bush - "King George the 2nd", "Cowboy 'Peabrain' Cornholio" - In the Grip of Official Treason"

"Dick Cheney - "Dick 'The Dick' Cheney", Dick Chinny"

"Bill Clinton - "Mr. Bill" - ibid."

"Don't hate the media, become the media."

"Ronald Reagan - "Grandpa Caligula"; "Ronald McReagan" - No More Coccoons"

"Condoleezza Rice - "CondolSleazea Rice" - ibid."

"George H. W. Bush - "King George the 1st" - Beyond the Valley of the Gift Police"

"Our biggest national security threat is the environmental destruction of our planet and the arms race with ourselves."

"I am an anarchist in my personal life. I try to live my life in a way that I don't need cops or baby-sitters to keep me from infringing on others. But I don't feel we have evolved far enough as a species to make anarchy work in society itself. We still need government to transfer the wealth from those who have too much to those who have too little, to make sure important projects get done, and keep territorial humans from screwing over and killing each other."

"What does it say about our country when people are so desperate for an alternative to our one-party state masquerading as a two-party state that they'll even elect a professional wrestler governor?"

"John Ashcroft - "John Ashcrack" - ibid."

"Never had a date That you couldn't inflate"

"We only torture the folks we don't like You're probably gonna be okay."

"Shoppin' online for deals on some writable media I edit Wikipedia"

"I'm nerdy in the extreme Whiter than sour cream"

"Look If you had one shot to sit on your lazy butt and watch all the TV you ever wanted until your brain turned to mush Would you go for it? or just let it slip? Yo"

"I sued Taco Bell 'Cause I ate half a million Chalupas And I got fat! I sued Panasonic They never said I shouldn't use their microwave To dry off my cat!"

"Oh, you don't wanna mess with the R-I-double-A They'll sue you if you burn that CD-R It doesn't matter if you're a grandma, or a seven-year-old girl They'll treat you like the evil, hard-bitten, criminal scum you are"

"I'll never forget the first thing she said to me, she said: "Hey - you've got weasels on your face." Right then I knew it was true love."

"What kind of bananas do you have working at newspapers in Austin that would base an entire review of an artist's performance on whether or not they had a good seat?"

"I think my chances of getting into the Rock 'N' Roll Hall Of Fame are about as good as Milli Vanilli's."