Humorists From The United States

"There's all this possibility out there, and it's gotta make you wonder, what's wrong with you? That time that God spoke to you and showed you the way, clear as day, and you were like "No way; too much work; I'm busy; I'm too tired; I don't even believe in you anyway; what's in it for me?" Well, you fucked up, didn't you? You sell your soul to the devil, you get like four dollars, but if you had come when God called, you would have gotten whatever you want—a nose job, a fifty-inch TV set, a waterbed filled with Calista Flockhart's urine, whatever you want. But you said no to God, and now you'll never get to go out with Christina Ricci. You'll never get a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car that can float and fly. You'll never get to visit Mars, or the future, or Marrakesh."

"If I work hard and am rewarded, then I haven't really gained anything. It has been a trade: I've put in, and I've gotten back. Only if I am rewarded without having done anything have I actually come out ahead. The best way to gain the most is to do nothing."

"Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and fuck the Congress for sucking your dick, and fuck everybody who puts up with it—including me. Fuck me for not killing you. Fuck everybody who's come within fifteen fucking feet of you and hasn't fucking tried. But fuck murder, fuck rotting in jail, fuck you and fuck you and fuck—you don't even deserve to be executed. Just die a slow fucking painful fucking death, you illiterate shit scumbag scumbag motherfucking shit-eating scumbag scumbag. You fucking, you fuck, fuck, fuck you."

"I've done bad things with relish, and good things with pickles."

"I'm a vegetarian now, but I'm willing to make an exception in the event I'm presented with people. Because I've always been fairly standoffish; I have this tendency not to get to know people very well. And I don't think there is any better way to get to know humanity than to ingest it."

"A lot of people have said Giuliani did a great job with the crisis, and I—I don't know, and a lot of people are saying that Bush is doing a good job, and I really don't think so, but in all this discussion, no one has stepped forward to say what a truly remarkable job Jennifer Love Hewitt has been doing. She has shown unbelievable restraint during this entire crisis. I haven't heard her say a single irresponsible word. So many people have rushed to get on the television and say stupid, fucked-up, crazy shit, but not JLH."

"You are responsible for all of your successes, and the lack thereof. And that is the essential point that failure, your ever-faithful friend, wants to make: that your failure could not exist without you—without your stupidity, without your lies, without your mistakes, your uselessness, your lack of faith, your ineptitude, your unjustifiable confidence in your alleged abilities, you stupid loser—failure is your only friend. Failure is your only lover. Failure is your only hope."

"See, look, uh, I—I know I'm homophobic, but not about gay guys. They don't bother me at all. It's straight guys who don't know they're gay. They fuck my shit right up. Like a guy calls me up and says, "A bunch of us guys are gonna sit around in our underwear and watch the football game and drink beer and eat chips and, you know, maybe wrestle with each other a little—you know, just us guys. You wanna come over?" And I'm like, "No.""

"[M]y father was a really great man. I'll never forget the last thing he ever said to me. Nor will I ever repeat it."

"Look. I'd be the first to admit that I don't have an ounce of common sense, but I think people should be fucking in the streets. Assfucking. Especially women fucking men in the ass with dildos. What this country needs is a lot more sodomy. Because there are a lot of crises a-coming: global warming as we rape Alaska for oil, the return of coathanger abortions, downward economic spirals, nuclear terrorism, the reemergence of "Burn the motherfucker down," "Fuck the police," "Blow it all up and let's start all over again"—it will be a dark and frightening time. And our retarded president will offer little solace or hope. If you think things cannot get any worse, you have no imagination and no sense of history."

"Ed walked away from the program feeling fortified and stapled. His brain was buzzing, the way it always did just after Jeopardy! He loaded up the microbus with Atlases and poseidons and headed for Pope County. "I've had it," he sang. "I've had it with puns, alliteration, Russian literature, Italian neorealism, meaningless cross-references, and laundry lists of nonsense. I shall drive without a license, without clothing, without direction, and if I make it to Arkansas, fine, and if I'm running late, if I'm running a numbers game, it doesn't matter, I shall keep on running. Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it's better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this.""

"In a way, I suppose you could say my experience is quite limited. For example, I never locked Oliver Cromwell in a broom closet while singing "Waltzing Matilda." I never sawed a television in half, although I once saw Wendy O. Williams saw a guitar. I never played a decent game of jacks. I never played poker with a toothless one-eyed pirate who kept picking his teeth with a Bowie knife to distract me, while his parrot looked over my shoulder and told him what cards I had by using an elaborate code involving vomiting, chirping, and sea chanteys."

"A tree does not try to be a koala bear. A dog does not try to be a bird. A stone does not pretend it is alive. Why should I pretend I am intelligent, or good-looking, or successful?"

"...I wanna know about the commercial I saw on TV: An Irish guy walking through a field of green, whistling one of those Irish jigs, and a woman walks up and says, "Manly, yes, but I like it too." Then the guy pulls out a huge knife and cuts off his first two fingers and somehow catches them in what's left of his left hand and hands them to the woman. Did I mention they're both dressed in green? They they both sing this song together: "Are ya icky? Are ya sticky? Are ya hot as anything? Hey! Cut off two of your fingers, and stab yourself in the eye!" Then he stabs himself in the eye and hands her the knife, and she stabs herself in the eye, okay? Okay? So what about that?"

"People sometimes tell me I should get it permanently attached, but I don't know. Even though sometimes it's a pain in the ass, I like having a detachable penis."

"I think it's time we so-called "sensitive men" stopped kidding ourselves with all this crap about how guys in the Marines and garage mechanics and just generally, you know, macho guys—about how they're insecure about their masculinity because they have little dicks, because that's crap, and we know it. Guys in the military, construction workers, football players, they all have bigger dicks than you and I, and we might as well just accept it. Because it's stupid and dishonest for us to go around implying that us literary, intellectual, politically aware, feminist-type men are actually more confident than the insensitive, sexist, brute-type men because size doesn't matter, and even if it did, we have the bigger dicks, because this is bullshit. I think it's high time we all took a good hard look at our dicks and faced the music."

"I'm talking about a spiritual sexual revolution, and I don't care if you're a heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, monogamous, polygamous, polymorphously perverse, fetishistic, submissive, dominant, watersports, madonna-or-whore, old, fat, ugly, handicapped, repressed, frightened, ashamed, or even a proud white American jerkoff fuckface who irresponsibly and thoughtlessly makes matters worse by talking stupid shit and voting like shit-for-brains: We must fuck our way out of this. All of us. We are responsible for our recovery, for our salvation. We must fuck our way out of this."

"Tonight, I should watch the sun set, and think of the impending darkness as a metaphor for my wasted life: once it was bright, and full of potential, and now it is dark and hopeless and bleak. I should not make the mistake of thinking that the moon and the stars represent slim glimmers of hope, or evidence that there is light on the other side. Even if there is light somewhere I will never walk in it again."

"Gary and Melissa loved to make love, loved to make love, loved to make love to each other over and over and over again. For the first few weeks of their relationship, they made love four or five times a night. They were really turned on for a while. Then, to heighten their passion, they bought sex books: The Joy of Sex, The Sensuous Couple, The Joy of Sex Part Two, The Kama Sutra, Even Yet Still More Joy of Sex, Popular Mechanics, Betty Crocker, anything."

"Jesus was way cool. He told people to eat his body and drink his blood. That's so cool. Jesus was so cool. But then some people got jealous of how cool he was, so they killed him. But then he rose from the dead! He rose from the dead, danced around, and went up to heaven. I mean, that's so cool. Jesus was way cool. No wonder there are so many Christians."

"If most of us were wind up-toys, could we trust the few of us that weren't to wind us up when necessary? I think not. We would be a separate oppressed minority. Even if we were in the majority, it would still be that way. The ones that weren't wind-up toys would have the upper hand, and we would have to look out for each other, because they wouldn't."

"Whenever the circus would come to town, I would tell Ethan all kinds of kinky clown domination stories involving the leather clown, like the time she forced me to have sex with her in the little car, or the time she kept spraying me with the seltzer bottle until I obeyed her every command. Ethan and I would laugh and laugh at these tall tales, but I could tell deep down, he was wondering whether the leather clown was really real or not. And I would let him wonder."

"My heart is a flower, budding, blooming, dripping dew, dropping petals all over the place, making a big hopeless mess, stinking things up, waiting for someone to come flying over and suck the pollen out of me. Suck me dry. 'Til I wilt. 'Til I am nothing. 'Til next spring."

"I am a sensitive artist. Nobody understands me because I am so deep. In my work, I make allusions to books that nobody else has read, music that nobody else has heard, and art that nobody else has seen. I can't help it, because I am so much more intelligent and well-rounded than everyone who surrounds me."

"I was a teenage wuss. In junior high school, I had oily, stringy hair and lots of pimples. I wore really wussy clothes. Most of the kids called me a faggot. Even some of the other wusses called me a faggot. There was maybe five kids in the whole school who were wussier than I was. I was really wussed out. I was afraid of girls, and guys scared the shit out of me."

"I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like. I want to be just like all the different people. I have no further interest in being the same, because I have seen difference all around, and now I know that that's what I want. I don't want to blend in and be indistinguishable. I want to be part of the different crowd, and assert my individuality along with others who are different like me."

"Today, for five minutes, I will sit quietly and meditate and think pleasant thoughts and I will recite gentle positive messages to myself. Oh yeah, that really sounds like me. I'm sure I'm going to do that. Right."

"Life is so much easier today than it was a hundred years ago. People used to have to work on farms from sun-up to sun-down, and still their children would die, and there often wouldn't be enough to eat. I wouldn't have lasted three days under such conditions. I have no right to be alive."

"I woke up this morning with a bad hangover and my penis was missing again. This happens all the time; it's detachable."

"Many people talk as if they have all the answers, whereas I know I don't. That's probably why no one listens to me."

"I am not well suited to the tasks that are set before me today. Most of what I must do is either insulting to my intelligence, or far beyond my capabilities. This explains why I am so frustrated and full of rage most of the time."

"President Ford used humor a great deal."

"Did you ever figure to be living in a time when your check is good, but the bank bounces?"

"I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home."

"What bothers me about television is that it takes our minds off our minds."

"Successful salesman: someone who has found a cure for the common cold shoulder."

"Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away."

"If you can laugh together, you can work together."

"You wouldn't want Alan Greenspan to write the instructions for assembling a beach chair."

"Wall Street is where prophets tell us what will happen and profits tell us what did happen."

"The next time you feel like complaining, remember that your garbage disposal probably eats better than 30 percent of the people in the world."

"More than ever before, Americans are suffering from back problems: back taxes, back rent, back auto payments."

"A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success."

"There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs, there'd be no place to put it all."

"Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral."

"A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in."

"Noise pollution is a relative thing. In a city it's a jet plane taking off. In a monastery it's a pen that scratches."

"Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work."

"The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it."

"Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?"