Comedians From Australia

"That quote, "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never."

"I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people."

"Can you see what it is yet?"

"There's an old Australian stockman -- er, , trying, dying. They get themselves up on their collective elbows, revert to their sixties instrumentation, and they try again."

"I'm Jake the Peg, diddle-iddle-iddle-um, with my extra leg, diddle-iddle-iddle-um."

"There's an old Australian stockman, lying, dying... and he gets himself up on one elbow, and he turns to his mates, who are gathered 'round him and he says..."

"My attitude is one of unswerving devotion to myself. I am single-minded in my pursuit of money, fame and power. I also collect spoons."

"Because I "needed" them for school I had previously extorted a chemistry set, a soldering iron a magnifying glass, a tape recorder, a fountain pen, a Stanley knife, a compass, a torch, a set of oil paints, a speedometer for my bike, some sea monkeys, an Electra set, a halliwell's, a subscription to Weapons and Warfare and a ticket to the opening night of the Hamilton film festival. I'm sure if I'd claimed I needed one for biology she'd have hooked me up with a prostitute."

"And here endeth the sizzle"

"Dogs, now they're the real arse bandits!"

"I blame that cow Mother Teresa"

"People think that if you get up onstage, a joke is funny or it’s not. No. The audience is participating in this conversation. The audience brings their own baggage. So I would never say you cannot do rape jokes. I’m just saying can we please acknowledge that women get raped? Men also. People get raped, and it’s traumatizing, and we do not have a language or a narrative in which to place that wider trauma. So just having throw-away punch lines, sure, you can do it, but people get triggered, and the reason people get triggered is because other people don’t care. They’re like, “We think it’s funny; get over yourself.” That’s because there’s no broader cultural context for the viewpoint of people who’ve been traumatized. I don’t believe in censorship, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to say, “Hey, be better.”"

"In recent years, the public has slowly become familiar with the idea that women with Autism exist, and a few excellent books like Jenara Nerenberg's Divergent Mind and Rudy Simone's Aspergirls have worked to build awareness of this population. It's also helped that high-profile Autistic women like comedian Hannah Gadsby and writer Nicole Cliffe have come out publicly as Autistic."

"A Netflix deal is fantastic, but it hasn’t changed my life, because I keep my life small."

"I built my career on writing jokes apologizing for myself. It’s what most people do. You have to explain who you are, and you point to a difference that you have. That’s your angle. But when it becomes the only reason you speak, it becomes an issue; all your material revolves around why you’re different. The great freedom post-“Nanette” was that I’d put all that on the table."

"There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself."

"I am never not cross-referencing the trees with the forests, and it can be a very exhausting way to engage – but I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I believe communities need thinkers like me."

"Please stop expecting people with autism to be exceptional. It is a basic human right to have average abilities."

"I only wear blue clothes because blue makes me feel calm. I listen to the same music, watch the same shows, and eat the same foods over and over again without any qualms. I find joy in my life where once I couldn’t because I was too busy trying to do the “right” thing instead of checking in with my own needs first."

"I am unable to intuitively understand what I am feeling, and I can often take a much longer time to process the effects of external circumstances than neurotypical thinkers. But it is they who get impatient with me, and under that pressure I feel forced to guess my needs before I have had time to process stuff in my own way, and so mistakes are made...You know how sometimes you put your hand under running water and for a brief moment you don’t know if it is hot or cold? That is every minute of my life."

"I wish more than anything that I had known about my ASD when I was a kid, just so I could have learned how to look after my own distress, instead of assuming my pain was normal and deserved. There is no one to blame, but I still grieve for the quality of life I lost because I didn’t have this key piece to my human puzzle."

"As a coping mechanism for teenage me, masking was an incredibly successful tactic – I was only bullied intermittently during my school years – but as a catalyst for growth, it worked more like castration."

"Ever since I can remember, my thoughts have been plagued by a sense that I was a little out of whack, as if belonging was beyond me."

"if you want to change the conversation, you really do have to step into the murky waters, don’t you?"

"everyone around the world has a humor"

"I do think conversations are at a point where we’re not listening to people with lived experience anymore. We’re listening to people who have really hostile reactive views, and that it’s caught up in a moral panic, which also has a very, very strong right-wing online presence that is stirring up the debate, and it’s fairly unacknowledged. I want to come from a more constructive point of view, like I am genderqueer. I have a life, and it doesn’t revolve around trying to justify my existence."

"I think there’s something also quite political about a genderqueer performer expressing joy on stage."

"I don’t want to circle the drain of trauma. I don’t want to be a one note comic. I want to have freedom of expression, and in order to do that, I need to train my audiences to not expect stuff from me."

"My mother doesn't like sex. She doesn't like the word, she doesn't like act, and I'm not entirely sure she's too impressed with the results. Ah well, you get out what you put in."

"...You shouldn't clap, that [was] a lie... I like to tell lies. According to Shakira, hips don't lie. Which makes me a bundle of contradictions."

"Tasmania is famous for its shape, which is the same shape as the pubic hair region on a woman's body, which I personally don't identify with. Mine's more like a map of the former Soviet Union. Not to scale."

"(You spend time in the new special responding to your online trolls. Why not just ignore them? Isn’t devoting time to them a way of giving them power?) These people are actually humans. They live and they say things and they mean it, and I can’t believe that in all aspects of their life they’re that crazy. I don’t want to live in a vacuum where I’m like, There are those people with dumb ideas. I want them to know their ideas are dumb but they’re not dumb."

"Autism is not a prison. It’s not something that should be terrifying. It is not a disability except that the world makes it incredibly difficult for us to function — and no one is asking what people with autism think."

"There’s a lot about me that people are like, ‘‘Ah, look, lesbian,’’ and really it’s about me not wanting to think about my physical self so I can just get on with things."

"I think a helpful way for everybody to think about it is that I’m not on the spectrum: Everybody is on a spectrum. The human brain is on a spectrum, just as gender is."

"I couldn’t have written ‘‘Nanette’’ without understanding that I had autism. I don’t read the world the way other people read it."

"Everyone's got the same insecurities as you Everyone's got the same insecurities as you Believe me it is true You are not alone There's no need to feel blue Everyone's got the same insecurities as you Believe me it is true Do not be afraid To show people the real you."

"At one point we got some German sausages for dinner, and my girl Anna was working the communal tomato sauce pump and she whacked it and it all squirted over my pants, and suddenly there was silence, and I realised that Muse had stopped playing, and the entire 20 odd thousand punters were looking at me, and suddenly I just threw my hands up and said ‘anyone for sauce?’ and everyone just burst into laughter and suddenly Peaches was there and she said ‘you’re alright kid’ and we high fived and then I crowd surfed all the way onto stage and Muse let me play the guitar solo for one of their songs and even though I’d never heard it I just winged it and it was awesome."

"Have you ever done those Coca-Cola burps that come out of your nose and eyeballs? You think a burp looks bad! Someone's just thinking "Shit what's wrong with his head.""

"I'll never forget the day my mum said "Carl when I was your age I used to go to the movies with a bottle of water and some Sao's." I was thinking "Shit. Mum's a loser." Imagine trying to crack onto someone at the movies. "G'day darl. Got a packet of Sao's. Wash it down with a bottle of water.""

"I hate dates. I sit at home all day, and I don't fart once. I go on a date and I've got twenty in the bank straight away."

"Sometimes you're talkin' and a little bit of spit flies out. You see it floating in the sky and land on 'em. You both see it happen and you go "Ooooh" you're thinkin' "Woops I got him!" He's thinking "Woops he got me!" But no one says anything. Because it's a secret. If his spit lands on me I don't do anything, I don't wipe it straight away, because I don't wanna embarass them. Hey, I've got his spit on my face and I'm worried about his feelings. You go "Sorry Carl" and I go "Nah, nah it's alright, I love being spat on.""

"I love tea. Mmmm. I know I'm getting old because I'm startin' get excited about tea. Just sitting in the loungeroom bored ya no. Somebody goes "You want a cup of tea?" and I go "Oar he hor." Start feeling a little bit depressed when it gets to the bottom, I think to myself I'll just make myself another cup, I can feel happy again."

"You know those people who let their yawn out and they keep talkin'. "Yeah Tuesday would be pretty good (continues talking while yawning)" "Yeah no worries.""

"I saw a bloke the other day talking to himself. So I tried to listen but I couldn't hear him. But the weird part is while I was watching him I was going "That bloke's bloody talkin' to himself over there." There's another bloke looking at me going "That bloke's bloody talkin' to himself over there.""

"My dad was proud of himself when he farted. He sounds like he's strangling a chicken when he farts."

"My friends like to tell me before they fart like it's important. They get really excited, like I wanna know about it. "Jeez I'm gonna fart." "Don't do it in here ya dickhead there's no windows." Or they tell you after they've done it. "I just farted." But nobody ever tell's you while their doing it. That'd be a bit weird going "I'm farting! (Pause) Still goin'!""

"Do you do those secret farts at the supermarket. Quickly piss off to another aisle."

"I only work every couple of years. I go into retirement between films."

"He would have been a handful in any society. He is a misfit and fully conscious of it. The punctilio of his old-world manners, the dandified scrupulosity of his Savile Row suits, are compelled by an unsleeping awareness that he has no more business among ordinary human beings than a Venusian."