comedians-from-canada

"I’ve always been a rebel, which means I question the hell out of things and yelling at me doesn’t do any good."

"By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves."

"If ants are such busy workers, how come they find time to go to all the picnics?"

"There is a vast difference between success at twenty-five and success at sixty. At sixty, nobody envies you. Instead, everybody rejoices generously, sincerely, in your good fortune."

"I was born serious and I have earned my bread making other people laugh."

"Love is not getting, but giving. It is sacrifice. And sacrifice is glorious! I have no patience with women who measure and weigh their love like a country doctor dispensing capsules. If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly."

"Fate cast me to play the role of an ugly duckling with no promise of swanning. Therefore, I sat down when a mere child—fully realizing just how utterly "mere" I was—and figured out my life early. Most people do it, but they do it too late. At any rate, from the beginning I have played my life as a comedy rather than the tragedy many would have made of it."

"... poor had no terror for me! It was pie for me! My whole life had been a fight!"

"It is well enough to be interested in one's profession, but to restrict one's leisure to association with the members of one's guild, so to speak, is to be doomed to artificiality and eventually to sterility. In order to represent life on the stage, we must rub elbows with life, live ourselves."

"A rut is like a grave – it's only a question of depth."

"Getting a laugh out of someone is such a empowering feeling."

"I’d love for us to reach a point where gender didn’t have to be the defining aspect of our identity, but we’re far from that."

"And being so confused, because I don’t feel like I want to go to the men’s changing room, and I don’t feel like I’m safe in the girl’s changing room."

"All the conversation is focused around pronouns and things like that, and I’m like, however you read me is fine. I know how I read myself."

"Yeah it’s the same old story of labels being important in terms of fighting for legal rights, but being so inadequate in terms of expressing nuances of existing. And as soon as you choose a label it ends up inflating that part of your identity above other parts that are just as important."

"It’s so frustrating that so much of identity is about comparison. I just feel like myself. I don’t even feel non-binary. I just wake up, have a coffee and go to work."

"Exercise is key for me to just stay connected to the ol’ bode. It’s tough. Even though we know how to feel better. We know all these things. We just don’t do them. Everyone knows if they were on their phone less they’d be happier and more fulfilled. But it’s hard. Everything is designed to keep us distracted."

"I crave nature. When I’m in it, I love it. But I’m not a good camper. I’m good for the day."

"They say that comedy and sausages are the two things that if you know how they're made they affect the appetite. I'm always creating and writing stuff so it's nice for me to be able to watch it as a fan."

"Fame is not creativity, it’s the industrial disease of creativity."

"Everything I do is autobiographical in some way. Wayne's World was me growing up in the suburbs of Toronto and listening to heavy metal, and Austin Powers was every bit of British culture that my father, who passed away in 1991, had forced me to watch and taught me to love. With the guru Pitka, after my father died, I went on a spiritual quest, and it's very hard when you're a comedian to go on a spiritual quest, because your natural instinct is to be cynical."

"Most comedians want to be the architect of their own embarrassment. They have horrible self-esteem issues. I would rather push myself into the mud. I don't want to be pushed into the mud. I think that is probably true. I think most people struggle with self-acceptance. But comedians get a chance to self externalize."

"I never thought of myself as courageous or adventurous, so moving out to California by myself pushed my comfort zone in a big way. Truly, there were only a handful of teachers that made a difference, but just pushing myself to do it was the most important part of that experience. I came back feeling brave, and I needed to feel brave to get into this business."

"I had no formal training as an actor so I had to feel my way into it. I didn’t make any intellectual choices when playing Olivia, what I liked the most was being able to feel my way into it and not having any preconceptions of how to play the role. I just used my actual feelings to create the character and her relationships."

"Why work alone if you don’t have to? It’s all give and take. It’s all about listening to others and contributing. Even if you didn’t want to act, improv classes are great, because they teach you about conversation."

"There’s a certain confidence, too, I think time can give you. It’s like if you have faith in God, you have the confidence of knowing I’m just one little speck. I am just one little thing on this earth, and I don’t have to be everything."

"I’m a Canadian Catholic woman, so I’m hardwired to apologize."

"I think everyone is born with humor, but your life can beat it out of you, sadly, or you can be lucky enough to grow up in it."

"There are plenty of people who won’t tune in because a woman’s voice bothers their eardrums. Their ear canals can’t handle the sound of my shrill voice talking at them about a subject. I guess I just don’t really care about those people."

"Oh my God, conservatives, make up your minds about poor babies. We thought you wanted them to be born. Why else would you oppose free contraception, wage jihad against Planned Parenthood, fight the FDA on Plan B, and make abortion as unattainable for poor women as a ticket to Hamilton. Well, like it or not, there are a lot of poor babies, and it seems all you got for them is the same useless advice you’re giving their mothers: Keep your legs crossed."

"As long as you want to keep playing whack-a-mole from hell, it is my solemn promise that I will keep picking up the metaphorical hammer to slam you back down and remind you that you have not yet done anything to earn our forgiveness. So take your millions of dollars and pay a therapist to care about how tough it’s been to get caught being an abuser because honestly, I don’t give a shit."

"There’s a lot of people sitting around in rooms discussing how to make it happen as opposed to just, like, doing it — asking: ‘Do you have any 45-year-old-woman friends who you think are really talented who could submit an application to us?’ ‘Do you have any black friends who are great writers who haven’t had a shot."

"Look, if you like the freedom to play violent video games, watch internet porn, and grow weed in your house without police using thermal energy to bust you, you owe a debt to Antonin Scalia. You also probably work on my staff. Whether you loved or hated his narrow literalism about a document written before machine guns and gay people were invented, Scalia was by all accounts a nice guy with a wicked sense of humor. People liked him. … Good people do have bad ideas."

"I'm sorry, remind me again, what is the point of encouraging little girls to dream big if any career puts them in the path of boob honkers? There's not a workplace on land or sea or even at the bottom of a big, deep hole in the ground where we're actually keeping women safe. Right now I'm actually picturing some guy saying, oh, what am I supposed to do, stop asking women out at work because it makes them uncomfortable? Yes."

"Peter makes me smile the moment he comes through the door. He is the real deal, talented, big-hearted, with a fabulous basement wall echoing laugh. I try constantly to evoke his rumbling larynx. We have been friends for eons. Though we don’t see each other a lot outside work, we appreciate the time we do spend together in the studio and working."

"I have met a lot and they’ve been varied. The experiences are extremely varied. Some emotional and with great depth and other ones just genuine gratitude, you know, and thanks. It’s all very humbling to me and I take it very seriously and I feel it quite to my core so but as I said they’re very different and they all combine that overall same feeling of we’re all connected on way or another, you know. The fan base is responsible for my reprisal and that’s something that I just cherish. There’s a connection because it’s something that I artistically … I look at this as an actor and I have to use the word artistic because it’s a creative process. It sounds a little fishy but still, they reacted to my creative concept and we’re bonded because of it. It was one of those wonderful things in life. You click and I certainly feel that with people that feel an affection for Prime."

"I was an atheist most of my life and now I am a God-fearing Catholic, because of the miracle of life. And I'm pro-life. Amongst my peers abortion is cool, it's like, empowering, and they make jokes about it. Some of my best friends go, "I accept that it's murder and I am pro-choice." That's the world I live in."

"I worked alongside McInnes at the start of Vice in 1994, becoming the magazine’s editor shortly after it moved from Montreal to New York in 1999. Though McInnes immediately struck me as someone to avoid outside of work, nothing then indicated he would hatch an organization as vitriolic and violence-prone as the street-brawling Proud Boys. He and I were never friends. Founding editor Suroosh Alvi—who remains at Vice Media with the title of founder—brought me on board as a writer at the same time as McInnes. And when I stepped down in early 2001, it was largely because of McInnes’s toxic attitude."

"It would be peevish and ungracious after being taken to such a lovely supper in this Temple of Food, I know, but I am desperate to ask the question that begs to be posed: Just how fucking good can olive oil get?"

"Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a live well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind."

"I am completely behind the #MeToo movement. You'd have to have Down Syndrome to not feel sorry for— #MeToo is what you want for your daughters and you want that to be the future world, of course""

"Every generation has believed they lived ins the End Time, @NellScovell. It is a product of Man's narcissism. Deeply, we believe that when we die, so then does the world. Which is true. Because when we die, we don't disappear, the world does."

"The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you're not careful, it's too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth."

"Roseanne was so broken up [after her show was canceled] that I got Louis to call her, even though Roseanne was very hard on Louis before that. But she was just so broken and just crying constantly. There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day. Of course, people will go, 'What about the victims?' But you know what? The victims didn' t have to go through that."

"My dad died, and my grandfather died, and my great-grandfather died. And the guy before him, I don't know. Probably died. … I come from a long line of death. That's my point. And so I fear it. I fear it a lot."

"Patton Oswalt, he told me, "I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy." And I disagreed. Yeah, I thought it was the raping."

"You know, with Hitler, the more I learn about that guy the more I don't care for him."

"Macdonald is currently 49, and looks worryingly like he'll be hailed as one of the greats only in retrospect. Watch him at your earliest convenience, and start making recommendations soon."

"I'm not gay, so I don't know much about Broadway musicals."

"I would love to stay at SNL forever. But you can't stay in the same place. People think you're a loser."