hampden-sydney-college-alumni

"Shock Noms: Trump Picks Gaetz, Hegseth, Huckabee, Gabbard | Biden & Trump’s Cordial WH Meeting (Nov 13, 2024 on Youtube)"

"Over the weekend it sunk in that they’re killing off our show. But they made one mistake: They left me alive!"

"Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?: Go f-ck yourself."

"I can finally speak unvarnished truth to power and say what I really think about Donald Trump—starting right now. I don’t care for him. Doesn’t seem to have, like, the skillset to be President. Just not a good fit, you know?"

"It’s not a great look when you fly on the pedophile’s plane enough times to earn diamond pervert status."

"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition ... and then admit that we just don't want to do it."

"I was motivated to play Dungeons & Dragons. I mean highly, highly motivated to play it. Every day, if I could find someone to play with me. If I couldn't find someone to play with me, I would work on my player character."

"I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way. But, in sort of a James Bond-ian kind of explosives in the gas tank of his car kind of way."

"He's like a living wall of encyclopedias that like to drink beer."

"It's one thing for an asshole to play an asshole. But your basic decency can't be hidden."

"Part of the joy of being in character is being able to get away with things others cannot. Though a lot of that is that [he] is so high on Nyquil you never know what he's going to do."

"He's able to create a universe where something surreal happens on the program that seems ordinary, and all of a sudden the absurd appears not mundane but expected, organic... So he can have a conversation with Richard Holbrooke and Willie Nelson and it all makes perfect sense and yet it couldn't appear anywhere else without appearing burlesque. Somehow he has managed to create a fake world that has impacted and found standing in the real world."

"The thing about Colbert is he's fucking brilliant... He was always the smartest guy in the room, and he was always smart enough not to let you know he was the smartest guy in the room."

"His humor is an accumulation of the eccentricities, mannerisms and jokes of his ten older brothers and sisters, a medley that trickled down."

"Stephen used to play a manic conservative, and now, he plays a depressed liberal. That is range, ladies and gentlemen."

"President Bill Clinton Reconsiders His #MeToo Comments (Jun 6, 2018 on Youtube)"

"I didn't realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices as opposed to necessarily successful comedic choices."

"(on Alex Jones) He is a terrible person who lies for a living."

"Don't cry over spilled milk. By this time tomorrow, it'll be free yogurt."

"Such a proud moment of professionalism. You work for years crafting cogent satirical essays and the thing that everybody remembers is me making love to a Chiquita and bursting into laughter. What you can't see off camera is Jon started laughing first. And then I'm weak. As much as I want to make the audience laugh, I really want to make Jon laugh."

"My character is self-important, poorly informed, well-intentioned, but an idiot… So we said, "Let's give him a promotion.""

"Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?"

"I think of him as well intentioned, poorly informed, high status idiot."

"You said the war would pay for itself in fruit baskets. You said that our soldiers would march in the streets of Havana and people would shower them with bananas and cigars. That didn’t happen. Would you like to look into the camera and apologize to the American people?"

"Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes."

"But you have one thing that may save you, and that is your youth. This is your great strength. It is also why I hate and fear you. Hear me out. It has been said that children are our future. But does that not also mean that we are their past? You are here to replace us. I don't understand why we're here helping and honoring them. You do not see union workers holding benefits for robots."

"If I want to say he didn't that's my right, and now, thanks to Wikipedia — it's also a fact."

"Get your own entry in an encyclopedia... In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter."

"Well folks, it's October and you know what that means: only a few more weeks 'til Hallowe'en when my family traditionally puts up our Christmas decorations. People come from far and wide to visit our haunted manger. We make their kids stick their hands in a spoooky bowl of Frankincense!! It's actually just spaghetti."

"Language has always been important in politics, but language is incredibly important to the present political struggle. Because if you can establish an atmosphere in which information doesn't mean anything, then there is no objective reality. The first show we did, a year ago, was our thesis statement: What you wish to be true is all that matters, regardless of the facts. Of course, at the time, we thought we were being farcical."

"I have tender feelings for Nixon, because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted The Munsters... Nixon was the last liberal president. He supported women's rights, the environment, ending the draft, youth involvement, and now he's the boogeyman? Kerry couldn't even run on that today."

"We claim no respectability. There's no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don't have to defend anything."

"I don't perceive my role as a newsman at all. I'm a comedian from stem to stern. You can cut me open and count the rings of jokes. If people learn something about the news by watching the show, that is incidental to my goal."

"Answer honestly... Disabuse me of my ignorance. Don’t let me get away with anything. Don’t try to play my game. Be real. Be passionate. Hold your ideas. Give me resistance. Give me traction I can work against. The friction between reality, or the truly held concerns of the person, and the farcical concerns that I have, or my need to seem important, as opposed to actually understanding what’s true... Where those two things meet is where the comedy happens. So be real. That's the best thing you can do. And call me on my bullshit."

"I would say laughter is the best medicine. But it’s more than that. It’s an entire regime of antibiotics and steroids. Laughter brings the swelling down on our national psyche, and then applies an antibiotic cream... Obviously, it’s a challenge to make light of the darkness but, um, it’s better than crying about it."

"I'm surprised at the reaction it got. I went down there and did exactly what I wanted. I didn't expect it to be some sort of cultural-political line in the sand. I did the style of jokes I'd been doing for six months. The fact that anybody found it surprising or alarming that I would do that was educational to me."

"At Pottery Barn, if you knock over a lamp, you have to glue it back together, even if when you're done it looks terrible and it doesn't work. Oh, and you have to stay in the store forever. Oh, and it's an exploding lamp."

"We decided that my character had a pre-show tradition, like a ritual, which was to sing the lyrics to "I Want You To Want Me" by Cheap Trick into the mirror. Because, more than anything else, as much as he says he's bringing the truth, he just wants to be liked."

"Not living in fear is a great gift, because certainly these days we do it so much. And do you know what I like about comedy? You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time—of anything. If you're laughing, I defy you to be afraid."

"After acting for so many years, do you know who you are anymore? Because actors are liars basically, you lie about who you are to an audience."

"We worked very hard to keep him from being a jerk by keeping in mind he's well intentioned. Just poorly informed. He wants to do the right thing but has none of the tools to achieve it. Because he has no curiosity, he doesn't like to read and he won't listen anybody, except the voices in his head."

"Winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace."

"While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad."

"Well, I thought it was funny."

"I teach Sunday School, motherfucker."

"It would be a very short pint. It would be gummy bears and matzah, and be called Chewy Jewy."

"Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a sub-prime fish loan and you're in business, buddy."

"The market is not finished. The market still has over nine thousand points to drop. We'll get to Christmas at least."

"If you don't give power to the words that people throw at you to hurt you, they don't hurt you anymore — and you actually have power over those people. … So, if you can, realize that the things that people say about you — they don't really matter — it's who you are. And the older you get, the more you'll understand that — because it gets better. And people get nicer too."

"Accountability is meaningless unless it's for everybody, whether it's the leader of the network or the leader of the free world."