Comedians From The United States

"I do remember doing shows strictly in black and white, too."

"His faith in humanity began from an acknowledgement of limitation, not an illusion about perfectibility. He knew that joy flowed from honesty, rather than around it—sound familiar? In a similar way, Christians, whose identity is found apart from our ever-changing and often hopeless abilities and attributes, are free to laugh at ourselves. This is part and parcel of Christian joy."

"There's not much to the Kermit puppet—it's practically a sock. But when it was on Jim's hand, there was another creature in the room."

"It's a rather dark vision, actually."

"I've never felt any sense of competition with anybody, and we're all friends. We're all good friends."

"Jim giggled when he laughed. His sense of humor could be sly and wicked."

"My humor was never cruel or cynical. I just took life and poked fun at it. We made it so it could be understood the world over, without language barriers. We seem to have conquered the time barrier, too."

"I used old comic clothes stuff in the early days. I had the big shoes, I had the tight clothes, in fact I played several different characters. I played one called Willie Work; he used to have wide shoulders, a little cat mustache, a high hat. Another one was called Lonesome Luke, and his clothes were tight with a little funny hat; he had a funny little mustache. But when I adopted the glasses, it more or less put me in a different category because I became a human being. He was a kid that you would meet next door, across the street, but at the same time I could still do all the crazy things that we did before, but you believed them. They were natural and the romance could be believable."

"I love competition. I'd rather have to fight and worry than be peaceful and secure, any day. I've found that I'm a peaceful, easy-going sort of a fellow about all the small things in life. But when a big issue comes along and when I feel I'm right about it—well, I guess I'm pretty stubborn. Even nasty. I've taken up golf. I'm crazy about it. Doug Fairbanks and I play every day that we can get away from work. I not only like the game a lot, but I want to master it. I'm not satisfied just to play golf. I want to be good at it. That's the way I've come to feel about everything."

"I find that I have great faith in human nature. I believe that people are good. I believe they are to be trusted. So far as I know, no one has ever betrayed my faith, in any way. If they ever have, I've been spared the knowledge of it. If I couldn't have faith in human nature, I wouldn't want to live. It is the one thing that could destroy for me the joy of living. I've come to believe that life, under almost any conditions, is worth while. I found that out when I had my accident some years ago, and was in the hospital. I thought, for a couple of weeks, that I would be blind for life. I thought I would surely be so disabled that I would never be able to work again. I didn't suppose that I would have one five-hundredth of what I have now. Still I thought, 'Life is worth while. Just to be alive. I still think so."

"I find that I would like now, best of all, to be a good conversationalist. I know I'm not one at present. Oh, I can sit and talk a little of this and that, but I realize that I haven't any definite or profound knowledge. I won't be satisfied with just a patter, a surface glaze of information. I don't want short-cuts to learning. I want to know all about the thing I study. I'd like to be able to hold my own, to meet on a common ground, with scientists, inventors, clerics, doctors, athletes, authors. The most worthwhile thing in life is to store your mind with knowledge. I wish now that I had been able to go to college, if only so that I might have had appreciations earlier in the game. People often say to me now that I have my home, my career, fame (if you call it that), there must be nothing left for me to live for. But there is everything left to live for. All the things I don't know about, all the things I want to know about. Pictures, I've discovered, were practically all I did know about up to very recently. I've had to work so hard, to concentrate so closely, that I never have had time to read or to travel or to think about other things. I'm just at the beginning of living..."

"Love is the closest thing to laughter and the closest thing to tears. Love is the motive power of everything in the universe that has beauty in it. Love is the reason for everything and the reward for everything. It’s always seemed strange to me that we have to use the word love for so many things. And yet when you come to think of it, that’s all right, too, because love is in everything in some form or another. Without it, I imagine the flowers would stop blooming and the sun would stop shining and people would stop laughing, and even the rain wouldn’t fall. So love is always growth. I think if I could have just one word for love—it would be understanding. Love must always be unselfish, and strangely enough, love is the only thing in the world that ever is unselfish. And if it isn’t unselfish, it’s only a counterfeit of love."

"I give so much pleasure to so many people. Why can I not get some pleasure for myself?"

"It's all false pressure; you put the heat on yourself, you get it from the networks and record companies and movie studios. You put more pressure on yourself to make everything that much harder. You say, 'Well, I'll get all screwed up and then it'll be a real challenge again.' So stupid—I've often wondered why people do these things. You're so much happier if you don't, but I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time."

"I owe it all to little chocolate donuts."

"I just love cocaine."

"I don't know if there is a gene for comedy, but my dad was a very funny man. ... He just didn't know it. He was a naturally funny character, and when my brother and I would laugh at things he said and did, he would say, 'What do you think is so funny?'"

"The media was capitalizing my brother's death. My family and my life were falling apart, and I couldn't stop the downward spiral. I made one bad decision after another. One of those guys they quote for T-shirts once said, "Heroes aren't born, they're cornered." Oh, I was cornered. And I found out that I was no hero."

"People are always coming up to me and saying, 'I love you, love your work.' And then the next sentence is, 'I loved your brother.' John made people laugh, and laughter is a powerful thing,"

"I am more creative when I don't have sex."

"We are finite creatures. Our lives are small and can only scientifically consider a small part of reality. What's common for us is just a sliver of what's available. We can only see so much of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can only delve so deep into extensions of space. Common sense applies to that which we can access. But common sense is just that- common. If total sense is what we want, we should be prepared to accept that we shouldn't call infinity weird or strange. The results we've arrived at by accepting it are valid, true within the system we use to understand, measure, predict and order the universe. Perhaps the system still needs perfecting, but at the end of the day, history continues to show us that the universe isn't strange. We are."

"What I'm trying to say is... I'm not going to say, "I hate" anything I ever made — but I will say this: My mother is much more proud of what I do now than all of the fart-joke videos I did in the past."

"It's a truly eerie experience — because you can find the permanent location for any 3200-character text. You can find in this library the description of your birth, every possible description of your death, every poem, every joke, every lie — everything that could be said, can be found on this site. This … thing … blurs the line between invention and discovery; did you really discover or invent that thing, if it's description already existed? 105000 different pages are offered by the Library of Babel. In comparison, there are only 1080atoms in the observable universe. I searched for what I just said, and sure enough, in this hexagon, in this wall, in this shelf, in this volume, on this page, it's there. Hello. But deep down, we feel like there's a difference between this program, permuting something unknowingly and a person actually meaning it, intending it, saying it because they wanted to, with agency. We use a finite number of symbols to say things. For that reason, a library of every finite combination of those symbols can be made. But just because it can be made doesn't mean it has been said. That is the power we have. Perhaps you and I were born too late to explore the world and too early in history to explore the stars, but we were born at just the right time, which is pretty much all times ever — to explore language — to explore what can be said. What should be said? What should we send out to space? What, that can be said, will you be the first to say?"

"Skeletons are scary and spooky, but you know what else is? Teenagers."

"Hey Vsauce, Michael here."

"And as always, thanks for watching."

"The pyramids of Giza were as old to the ancient Romans as the ancient Romans are to us."

"Compared to what human life has mainly been like here on earth, our current societies are WEIRD."

"You got to control your own destiny. You got to keep writin' different stuff. Keep switchin' up and never do the same thing too many times."

"Lazy technology: the electric toothbrush—that always made me laugh. The electric toothbrush—what, is brushing your teeth too strenuous an exercise? For some people? You got people goin' [imitates fast, strenuous brushing of teeth]. "Man, I am really feeling the burn here. Wish this thing had a motor on it." Why don't you just have electric deodorant? [imitates use of electric deodorant]"

"Y'all ever seen these commercials for these pills, this medication you take? It's like one pill for one thing, but they list, like, a hundred side effects? It's just like they're just scrolling for a minute. And you're thinkin, "Is that really a good trade? That can't be a good trade." You got people going, "Well, I can take the headaches, nausea, and vomiting, if it'll make my elbow feel better. It's really worth it—it is. I mean I've been taking it—Oh, oww! Owww! I can move it around, play with the kids, and—[pretends to vomit]. I've got full range of motion here.""

"When you get to a certain age, it's kind of the same thing. There's no new school to go to, no new teachers. There's some comfort in that."

"A great director is someone who makes you feel like you're moving forward."

"I'd hate to be a teetotaller. Imagine getting up in the morning and knowing that's as good as you're going to feel all day."

"When Michael O’Donoghue got fired, he left this amazing note: “I was fired by Dick Ebersol. I did not leave the show, and if he should claim otherwise, he is, to steal a phrase from Louisa May Alcott, a lying cunt.” It’s very Michael."

"I’ve seen this attributed to John Lennon, but I know Michael O’Donoghue said it, because I was there when we heard Elvis died. My secretary came in and she said, “Elvis is dead,” and Michael O’Donoghue said, “Good career move.”"

"Nothing important has ever come out of San Francisco, Rice-A-Roni aside."

"After a number of meetings, including one at the show’s, barren office space at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, [Lorne] Michaels asked O’Donoghue and Beatts to join Saturday Night. At first Beatts refused, citing her book deal and the amount of work that was needed to finish it on deadline [...] O’Donoghue, on the other hand, offered no resistance: He needed the work and he saw television as a step above the drudgery of magazines. After all, he had always been attracted to “hotter” forms and was in no way contemptuous of show business — so long as he could make it his own."

"Any time a whole bunch of kids like something, they find a reason to ban it. If kids suddenly started stuffing napkins into their pockets and really liked doing that, they'd find a reason to forbid it."

"The key to a successful restaurant is dressing girls in degrading clothes."

"Late April, early May, Lorne started laying out the cast. One day he’s got this really bizarre guy with smoked glasses, Michael O'Donoghue, and I’m thinking, “Oh God, what have we gotten into here?”"

"I truly think you can say that without Michael O’Donoghue, there wouldn't have been a Saturday Night Live, and I think it’s important to remember that. I think Lorne would probably be generous enough to acknowledge that."

"Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy."

"I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines."

"You're such a nice boy, what do you want to go off and get killed in the War for?"

"A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it."

"The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people."

"How My Egoism Died"

"The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and, later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status."

"A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God's incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands."