Comedians From The United States

"When I didn’t have a family, I was much more of a workaholic … I still like to work, but I also want to be home with them. As you get older, you realize you need balance. If it’s not fun, what’s the point?"

"People like to define you through what they’ve seen you do … There are aspects of my personality, I guess, that come through on-screen, but I don’t sit around thinking, I’ve been a bumbling suitor all my life."

"We covered "Hey Jude." My father panicked, misunderstanding the lyrics and thinking our lead singer was belting out "Hey, Jew" to a roomful of Holocaust survivors."

"There's an old saying in Hollywood: It's not the length of your film, it's how you use it."

"All those rumors about her being underweight are trash. She's gorgeous."

""You've gotta respect everyone’s beliefs." No, you don't. That's what gets us in trouble. Look, you have to acknowledge everyone's beliefs, and then you have to reserve the right to go: "That is fuckin' stupid. Are you kiddin' me?" I acknowledge that you believe that, that's great, but I'm not gonna respect it. I have an uncle that believes he saw Sasquatch. We do not believe him nor do we respect him!"

"When I was 25, all I did was just scream, "Sellout! Fucking sellouts. Corporate sellout. Industry bullshit. Meh-meh-meh." I look back on it and I realized, "oh, I was screaming 'sellout' because nobody wanted to buy what I was selling.""

"Hey Patton, looks like Paris Hilton's writing a book. And I go, "She's a cunt who should die of AIDS." They go, (nervously) "Ah ha ha, okay! Hey! All right... um, okay, follow-up question. She's also coming out with a line of handbags," "As long as she gets AIDS, that's fine with me, man. If she could get cancer of the AIDS of the leukemia of the eyes, that'd be awesome. If like, a biker could fuck that into her skull...""

"If another one of my Whole-Foods friends says my wife should have a home birth, I am going to punch all the soy on the planet."

"[on Barack Obama's election] Do you realize for the next four years America is gonna be a cool eighties cop flick? "Barack, get your ass in my office now! Did you balance the budget again?!" "Yeah, it was just sitting there, chief..." "You wrecked twenty cars! Senate's gonna have my ass for this." "Eh, whatever, chief." And he rides away in a Camaro on two wheels."

"[on KFC's Famous Bowls] I just want kind of a light brown hillock of glop. If you could put my lunch in a blender, and liquefy it, and then put it into a caulking gun and inject it right into my femoral artery, even better! But until you invent a lunch gun, I would like a failure pile in a sadness bowl!"

"The night we elected Obama, CNN had holograms. They had fuckin' holograms. We have Star Wars technology now. What if that means Barack is gonna to be the miracle he seems to be? What if this really is the dawning of an amazing age? He gets in there, fixes the economy, gets us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We've got Osama bin Laden and George Bush in dunking booths filled with urine. You can just throw apples at em all day. And then what if he starts slinging amazing future technology on us. You know suddenly we get hover boots and teleportation pills and there's floating cars everywhere. At that point, would there be like two remaining holdout racists left? Like the last two guys down in Arkansas, in their hover boots? Just going, "Yeah, there's that nigger that gave us anti-gravity. I'm gonna be late to the cross burning. My free government blowjob robot broke. Fuckin' bullshit. This guy's the worst president ever. Just like a black guy to give you a blowjob robot for free and it breaks after 6 years. This sucks.""

"I didn't realize how bad my outlook on life is until I went on a press tour for Ratatouille and had to talk to children's magazines and children's TV shows. And I wasn't interviewed by adults; I was interviewed by actual smiling children. And I didn't realize until that point how desperately I depend on negativity and cynicism just to communicate with the outside world. It's pathetic. The Oswalt family crest should just be a pair of eyes rolling off to the side, a bag of Cheetos, and then the word "fuck." That would be our shield that you'd see retreating from the great battles of history. "Fuck this. Bows and arrows? Nobody told me anything about bows and arrows. Goodbye.""

"I'm an atheist and I love religion. And I don't love religion in a snarky mean-spirited way; I unabashedly, sincerely love that we have religion because if we didn't, we wouldn't be here right now; being all postmodern and ironic. There'd be no civilization. If no one invented religion, we'd be fucked right now. Because at the dawn of man, civilization was the biggest and the strongest... and that's as far as we're gonna go. It was whoever was the biggest fucked, killed, ate anything they wanted. That was it! Civilization was a huge psychopath with a club goin', "I'm gonna have rape for dinner." That was it! That's as far as we were gonna go. And then one of my ancestors, some weakling, said, "Look there's no way I can beat that guy, but what if I trick him into thinking that if he doesn't kill and rape people while he's down here, when he dies there's a magic city in the clouds and he can go up and have all the cake he wants?" Now that's not a very well formed plan but he went and told the big psycho. And the psycho heard that and said, "Uhh, I like cake." "BOOM! There you go! That was the beginning of civilization. Now we can work on fire and writing and agriculture. That's religion. It's the ol' sky cake dodge; it worked! And by the way, things were great for a while. But then, what was happening then was that shit was going on all over the planet. They would just use different deserts. They would tell them about sky cookies, or sky pie, or sky baklava. So as each of these civilizations grew, they built ships; they'd go visit each other, and the one guy would walk off the boat and go, "Hey, did you hear the good news about the sky baklava?" and the first guy went, "It's CAKE, motherfucker! You're dead!"..."

"In the middle of Tom Cruise's speech, there's this sudden, dramatic pull-in to his face, and there's tears in his eyes, and he says, "we live in a cynical world," and that's when my brother went, "FUCK YOU!" at the top of his... oh, my God. That was... it was such a horrible, rude thing to yell, and I was laughing so hard. I could not get the air in to make the sound of laughter. People ask me, "what is your favorite comedy of all time?" Jerry Maguire, when my brother yells, "fuck you!" at Tom Cruise. It is a 90-minute setup to one punchline. It's like not jerking off for ten years, and then painting the garage! Oh, my God, I'm seeing dead kings!"

"I was thinking the other day about a time machine... and the first thing I thought of doing if I actually had a time machine, is that I would go back in time to about 1993 or '94, and kill George Lucas with a shovel."

"I don't give a shit where the stuff I love comes from! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE! Hey, do you like Angelina Jolie? Does she give you a big boner? Well, here's Jon Voight's ball sack!"

"I love the fact that I grew up in Sterling, I really do. Because when you're growing up in a nondescript, soulless, boring town, you've been given a present from God. And the present is: The Test of the Small Town. And you pass that test when you go, "I'm leaving before I kill everyone and then myself." That's when you pass. You have passed. You fail when you go, "I'll get a job at the Citgo and fill my truck up for free!" Oops, you fucked up. And the person who administers your test, year after year, until you can't take it any more until you can't take it and you leave, is the movie critic on the local news. That's the guy whose job it is to keep everything relevant and cool and important away from you. You have to get off your ass and go find it on your own initiative."

"...I send money to NPR [National Public Radio], I support them, I support them philosophically. But, it's UN-LISTENABLE RADIO! You understand me? I send them money, so I don't have to listen to them. When, when did conservatives steal rock and roll from us? When did that happen? All the AM stations, nothing but racist fascist douchebags, all their break music is this blasty-ass, gut-bucket rock and roll. Bill O'Reilly will play the White Stripes, for God's sakes! Then you turn it over to NPR and their break music is a sad, lonely saxophone echoing through a sewer pipe somewhere. When did that happen? So you turn it on, [imitates AM radio announcer] "Next on Bill O'Reilly, why black people smell different!" [imitates hard rock electric guitar]. [imitates NPR announcer] "Later on NPR, we'll talk to a woman who makes macrame belts out of old typewriter ribbons." [imitates sad lonely saxophone echoing through a sewer pipe]. Play some Zepplin, for God's sake. "It's our pledge drive here on NPR, and we have a 20-minute field recording of a tumluku which is a Bosnian instrument which can only be played when you have a pierced scrotum and three kids who have been killed by a land mine." [imitates tumluku]. "The Tybeshian practice of scream-singing rightfully died out in the 4th Century B.C., but two Berkeley trust fund students have revived it and here is a 40 minute sample." [screams incoherently]."

"Every time I'm on a TV show, and I have a [sexually explicit] line, they never say, "Don't say that! At all!" Because I wouldn't; I know you're not supposed to say that. Instead they say: "Can you find a cute, G-rated way to say that?" Okay. Cleaned-up, G-rated filth is way creepier than straight-up filth. Which is creepier: "I wanna shove my hard cock in your wet pussy" or "I'm gonna fill your hoo-hah with goof juice!" That line right there is completely G-rated. You can say that on TV. And that's fuckin' horrifying. ...Try saying that in bed, "I'm gonna fill your hoo-hah with goof juice," and prepare for the winter-y freshness of Mace."

"If the standard for being impeached is "getting a blowjob" or "covering up a burglary", then shouldn't Bush have been executed by now?"

"If they've really caught the #GoldenStateKiller, I hope I get to visit him. Not to gloat or gawk — to ask him the questions that @TrueCrimeDiary wanted answered in her “Letter To An Old Man” at the end of #IllBeGoneInTheDark."

"They had a class at my college called "Physics for Poets!" Hey there, theater fags and English queers! Put on some pantaloons and a scarf and take a bracing shot of absinthe and skip on down through a field of gilly-flowers to the Physics department, where we'll teach you about the music of the spheres! Without using any scaaary numbers! And you can ask questions like, "Is the red planet Mercury like the crimson eye of Cerberus?" Whatever, D'Artagnan, sit the fuck down. Let's just get you through this."

"The angry "@" tweets from my hammer toed followers opened my eyes. "Pedo-phobe" shaming hurts us all. I am a PROUD pedophile!"

"My dong is super-friendly and loves getting rubbed by children. #CareerEndingTwitterTypos"

"When I was a kid, I was into The New York Jets. And then I got into girls as I got older, and then I got back into the Jets because I'd realized there's times when the girl won't f**k you, but the Jets will always f**k you."

"I don't believe there is any finer mission on earth than just to make people laugh."

"No price is too high to pay for a good laugh."

"Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him … there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story which we all believe. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgement of fourteen men and women that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame."

"In this age of cynicism, bipartisanship and personal cowardice, it's refreshing to find a group of people willing to die for what they believe."

"This is unusual and upsetting but we got some news -- we got some news during the show that -- that Robin Williams has passed away. (some in the audience audibly gasp in disbelief) And by the time we air the -- we tape these shows a few hours early -- and by the time you see this now on TV I'm sure that you'll -- you'll know. I'm sorry to everyone in our studio audience that I'm breaking this news. This is absolutely shocking and -- and -- and horrifying and so upsetting on every level and we're at the end of the show and it just felt like we needed to just acknowledge. Obviously, we don't know much yet. We know that this has happened and we're absolutely stunned."

"I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay Leno wants to do it too."

"Now that this mess is almost behind me – I just have one last request: HBO, when you make the movie about this whole NBC late night fiasco, I’d like to be played by Academy-Award winning actress Tilda Swinton."

"Before we end this rodeo, a few things need to be said. There has been a lot of speculation in the press about what I legally can and can't say about NBC. To set the record straight, tonight I am allowed to say anything I want. And what I want to say is this: between my time at Saturday Night Live, the Late Night show, and my brief run here on The Tonight Show, I have worked with NBC for over twenty years. Yes, we have our differences right now and yes, we're going to go our separate ways. But this company has been my home for most of my adult life. I am enormously proud of the work we have done together, and I want to thank NBC for making it all possible. Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Making this choice has been enormously difficult. This is the best job in the world, I absolutely love doing it, and I have the best staff and crew in the history of the medium. But despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and, for seven months, I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I've had more good fortune than anyone I know and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-Eleven parking lot, we'll find a way to make it fun. And finally, I have to say something to our fans. The massive outpouring of support and passion from so many people has been overwhelming. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy, outrageous creativity on the Internet, and the fact that people have traveled long distances and camped out all night in the pouring rain to be in our audience, made a sad situation joyous and inspirational. To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I'll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism - it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. As proof, let’s make an amazing thing happen right now. Here to close out our show, are a few good friends, led by Mr. Will Ferrell…"

"Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it — I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying "That's the world." And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things."

"In the end, people have to learn to live together. That is what I didn't like about America — it is so homogeneous. I like places where there are people who are different culturally, physically, in every way. And I like to see how they succeed in living together."

"I like the Coen brothers. Their films are smart and disturbing. I am very impressed by what George Clooney is doing now. He is very political. I like the fact that he did Oceans Eleven and Oceans Twelve, made all that money and then leveraged the money and his success into interesting projects. Johnny Depp has also set up a production company and is showing an interest in risky projects that will not be easy. I am sorry that it is hard for the average person, and even for an above-average person, to see a film that is not a Hollywood production. You see those films only in the festivals. There are few people there. That is worrying. People don't think. My goal in work is to make them think. The media do the opposite."

"I went to university on a scholarship that was funded by a church. I was on the way to becoming a Presbyterian missionary. In the end I left school. The reason was that I used to tell jokes about God and the people around me did not like the jokes. I asked them, What kind of God is this who can't cope with my lousy jokes? What kind of God feels threatened by these jokes? So I left. And the truth is that this is exactly what I have to say about the present situation. Everything has become too political and it is ludicrous. I understand why they are upset, but it has reached an absurd pass and the Muslims are only hurting themselves."

"I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg — I don't usually admit this publicly — because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather simplistic. What I want to do is take whatever cinema is considered normal or successful at a particular time and play around with it — to use it as a way of luring audiences in."

"Nobody went to see Tideland! I was hoping people would get angry about it but those that saw it didn't want to talk about it. This is the world we're living in, people don't want to discuss things that are actually worth discussing."