Satirists From The United States

"In the store, Bill is buying some pants."

"Bill and his brother-in-law had shot a deer and drove it in to get processed. At a rest stop, a woman stops at the truck"

"Engvall and his buddy get off a boat with a big string of bass."

"Engvall has an elk hung on the wall."

"Engvall pulls his car into a gas station after his tire goes flat."

"Tow truck is pulling Bill's car out of his driveway"

"On the phone with his wife when the plane he was on stopped after hitting a deer."

"Truck driver gets his truck stuck under an overpass, with Engvall watching."

"Engvall is waiting for an elevator. A man walks up"

"[having been recognized by a woman in a diner]"

"I thought "RV" stood for "Recreational Vehicle." No! It stands for "Ruins Vacations.""

"[taking a vacation with his family in Costa Rica]"

"[after watching a spitting cobra spit at Steve Irwin]"

"[about how he and his wife can't go out on a date, since they're married]"

"[playing Pictionary with his wife and some friends]"

"His explanation for the "signs""

"This may be why New Yorkers instinctively avoid making eye contact with each other in crowded places, why they "look right through you," as dismayed visitors often complain. They are not looking right through you at all; they are discreetly avoiding an intrusion into your space. They sense the danger in a place where a one-degree temperature rise can mean an explosion."

"Early in life, most of us probably observe an unhappy relationship between labor and wealth — to wit, the heavier the labor, the less the wealth. The man doing heavy manual work makes less than the man who makes a machine work for him, and this man makes less than the man sitting at a desk. The really rich people, the kind who go around on yachts and collect old books and new wives, do no labor at all. The economic reasons for dividing the money this way are clear enough. One, it has always been done that way; and two, it's too hard to change at this late date. But the puzzling question is why, since the money is parceled out on this principle, young people are constantly being pummeled to take up a life of labor. In any sensible world, the young would be told they could labor if they wanted to, but warned that if they did so it would cost them."

"The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep."

"I am unclear what a "role model" is, but those who used the term seemed to be saying that teachers are people children tend to emulate. In any event, many Miamians must have thought their children would become homosexual if subjected to homosexual teachers. That prompted me to ponder teachers I haven't seen, and scarcely thought about, for decades, and for the first time I reflected on how their sex lives had affected my own. My first thought was that it was curious, perhaps perverse, that I have not turned out to be a spinster."

"A half a Vicodin and a Bahama Mama...makes for a bitchin' day!"

"We could walk into a Chinese restaurant right here in Chicago. And the waiter could have been born here, raised here, went to college here, he has never left the city limits. I'm the idiot that walks in that restaurant and goes [in exaggerated Chinese] "Uh, yes. I'll have fried rice. Egg roll..." And you can see him go "I am so going to spit in your food, I swear to God." And it drives my daughter crazy. 'Cause she goes "why do you do that? That is so insulting to them!""

"The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth."

"Engvall is in the park flying a kite with his son."

"Bill is at the pet store, buying a big bag of cat litter"

"While it is very sturdy of comfortable men to point out that life is unfair, the people it is unfair to are not apt to be morally or philosophically elevated by the announcement. If you are going to preach that unfairness is inescapable for some, good sense suggests that you also accept the inevitability of beastly behavior by people who have to carry the burden."

"Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history.""

"Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way."

"Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty."

"Engvall and his wife are packing up their stuff to move, with a U-Haul sitting in their driveway."

"Can't-do guys do all right in Washington, perhaps because lobbying is the one thing that can't-do guys almost always can do, and magnificently. Detroit may not be able to dispose of exhaust very neatly, but it can build a beautiful lobbying machine for selling Government the story of its own inadequacy. What is it in the Washington air that restores the energies of these once dynamic American manufacturers? Something there is that brings out all the latent half-forgotten ingenuity that seems to have abandoned them back in the home plant."

"[Talking about the difference between the first and twentieth year of marriage] Remember that first year of marriage, you used to argue just so you could make up and have sex? Twenty years later, you're arguing just so they'll sleep in the other room."

"[about his daughter Emily, who scored 1390 on her SATs]"

"in the lost luggage office in Buffalo"

"Long words, fat talk — they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?"

"The odd thing is not that we are in the business of overthrowing other people's governments, but that we can still be surprised when somebody reminds us of it. In Asia, in Latin America, Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East we have been propping up and knocking down governments more or less openly for the past twenty-five years. It is an established policy. Everybody knows it. It is supposed to be done covertly, which is only sensible if you hope to succeed since publicity in matters of this sort can only make the natives restless and defeat the project. Imagine the chauvinistic rallying around President Nixon that would have occurred if Canada, say, had announced that her agents were going to destabilize United States society so that discontented Americans could heave the Nixon Administration out of office."

"Men have three basic needs: Eating, sleeping, sex. That's it."

"A friend bought two cakes for his wife's birthday, with a "3" on one and an "8" on the other."

"Watching NASCAR with my wife is like taking a test. Every single turn, she has a question. Now, here's the problem: Sometimes her questions actually make sense, I don't have an answer for them. So, I have to do that guy thing and go Pfft! You ever hear your man do that, ladies? That means he doesn't know the answer, but he's thinking."

"Old people at the supermarket make you wonder about all those middle-aged people you see jogging the streets to preserve their vascular systems for another fifty years. And about all the people of all ages all over the country who are eating less, drinking less, smoking less, driving safer and in general looking for a death-proof safety suit to get them over the peak years and down into the valley of old age fit to enjoy the fruits of their abstention and labor. Will anybody care when they get there? Will they be able to afford an orange?"

"And we have a German shepherd we found on the side of the road; that dog's psycho, now I know why she was on the side of the road. Yeah, "nothing's free." But I love that dog. That dog saved my hind end one night. My wife and I are about to go to bed, her wiener dog's jumping on the bed after I just talked to it. [Audience laughs] So just grabbed my wife's wiener dog and put her in the backyard. At about 2 in the morning, I'm woken up by this loud squealing coming from my backyard. My God, I ran out of bed in my underwear, put on my headlight house shoes, go out to my backyard, and a coyote had jumped the fence. Yes, and had my wife's wiener dog pinned down on the ground. I was like, "Aw, hell...appreciate what you're doing, just do it a little more quieter, couldn't you?" About that time, I felt this "WOOSH" right by my leg. That German shepherd ran into the backyard, hit that coyote broadside, that coyote did three flips and jumped the fence. I turned to the German shepherd and I said, "C'mon, you're sleeping in the bed." And the funny thing was, for about a week after, my wife and I would be sitting at the table having breakfast, and there would be about 2-3 coyotes across the road looking at our backyard, and you know the conversation was going like this: "...What? Naw, hell no. Don't go in there, that little dog's a setup. I ain't lying; ask Joe what happened to him!""

"My son is 12 now, and is really getting into girls. A lot. But the thing about twelve year old boys is that they don't possess what I like to call that . . . discretionary gene yet. We were walking home from the ballfield the other day and there was a woman walking towards us who was . . . gifted. I saw them, and I saw him see them. But she was too close for me to go, "Dude, shut up." She hadn't walked two feet behind us and he goes "God dang, did you see the SIZE of those things?" And all I could say was "Yeah, I did!""

"[on being condescended to by a flight attendant] Ma'am, when I got up this morning, I didn't wanna be a jackass...you just pushed my jackass button."

"Marital sex is kinda like ordering a Civil War chess set through the mail. You get one piece every four to six weeks, you don't know what kind of shape that piece is gonna be in when you get it, but you still gotta pay the handling charges."

"[about trampolines]"

"Because we've become so ecologically minded now, they have developed a product called "Rapidly Dissolving Toilet Paper." Just how "rapidly" are we talking? 'Cause I don't want to have to play "Beat the Clock" in the thicket."

"You could take Vicodin, step out of the house, onto a freeway, have a truck hit you, and you'd say "My bad!"."

"[after watching the food teasing scene in "9 1/2 Weeks"]"

"Jeff's, Larry's, and Ron's Heres Your Sign."

"Who applies for that job? Who says "I want to work in lost luggage"? You don't have a good day. That's like having a job emptying port-a-potties. You're just going to catch crap all day long."