Stand Up Comedians

"3 Million for the funeral of Margaret Thatcher? For 3 Million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person."

"I do think that getting a dog says something about you, it says; I'm so lonely that I could pick up shit."

"Before I go, I want to leave you with this: Conservative voters, you have destroyed this country. We’re about to birth the first generation of babies that will be regularly woken by the nocturnal screams of their parents. And you did this. With your affordable four-wheel drives, your Coldplay albums, your canvas trousers, your NutriBullet, your rape pornography. Your James Corden, your Sky Atlantic, your mistress, your numb smile, your diazepam, your wanking glove, your weight gain, your constant googling "does this dream make me gay?". Your fear of buttons, your Amazon Prime, your unrealistic goals, your friend with terrible spinal injuries, your secret jealousy of all the attention he gets. Your constant fear of cancer, your dream of swimming with a dolphin who will at best feel complete indifference towards you. Your tutting at the news, your Gucci belt, the books you have pretended to read, your love of cock, your cock of love. Your daughter’s wedding, your first bike. Your suicide."

"There is a vegetarian option: you can fuck off."

"(Speaking about Ricky Gervais' joke about trans women) Now, I've got nothing but love for trans women, I've got nothing but love and support for trans folk in general. But they themselves would admit it's a very contentious issue that people try not to talk about, and Ricky Gervais obviously is a very powerful guy in show business. So nobody, really, who had the best years of their careers ahead of them... would tell you what they thought of that routine. Ricky Gervais, he does maybe fifteen minutes where he goes "well if a trans woman can say that they are a woman, I can say that I'm a chimpanzee, I'm a chimpanzee!" And my genuine reaction was; it's not that much weirder than Ricky Gervais saying that he's a stand-up comedian. I mean look, we know Ricky Gervais, he's a brilliant actor, he's a brilliant writer, he's not a fucking stand-up comedian! Just because Ricky Gervais self-identifies as a stand-up comedian, am I supposed to say he is one? It's fucking political correctness gone mad! Also, loving animals - brilliant, wonderful. Going on about loving animals? Suspect."

"When I was about 8 or 9, I was a massive Michael Jackson fan and I wish I had known at the time that I was his type."

"(Speaking about jokes he made about the 2012 Summer Paralympics Opening Ceremony) The one that papers hated the most was "The Saudi Arabian Paralympic team are mainly thieves.""

"I don't like people who lash out at jokes - at the same time, I don't like people who lash out at political correctness. I think it's lazy, and I think it sometimes encourages people to dismantle stuff that protects them. So I'll give you an example; there's a guy I talk to a lot in Glasgow, he's a homeless guy and he was an alcoholic - I suppose that's why I talk to him, because I was an alcoholic. (...) So I was talking to this guy the last time I saw him and I went "What would you say is your biggest problem in life at the minute?" and he went "Do you know what's my biggest problem, Frankie? It's all these fucking snowflakes in the media!" It can't be! It just literally fucking cannot be! You're sleeping rough in the streets of Glasgow, your biggest problem is actual flakes of fucking snow!"

"At least Theresa May went, she had to go didn't she? Towards the end she had all the authority of the "Do Not Tumble-dry" label. She always had the charm of a fucking war crime. Towards the end her body language had gone; I didn't realise it was possible to limp with both legs. So now we've got Boris Johnson; an evolutionary dead-end of the Honey Monster. A bin bag of albino body parts. A cross between the Incredible Hulk and a Haribo fried egg... is the fucking prime minister! The Prime Minister! It's not just that he's the worst person for the job, he might be the worst mammal! And let's not forget how they create these people; they're created in the public school system, that's where they lose their empathy. They're forged in the crucible of hierarchical sodomy. That's why they can't get along, the last time the cabinet saw eye-to-eye it was over the back of a weeping first year. Incidentally, I'm not one of those people who thinks there's a paedophile ring in Westminster, I think it's probably more of a queue."

"I've had a few medical problems this year: I'm now so old, that my pussy is haunted.(series 4, episode 1; What the Queen didn't say in her Christmas message)"

"You get these people, and they'll probably always be with us, who get offended by comedy. And I used to not mind until it occurred to me one day; most people who get offended at jokes watch porn! Like, pretty much all of them! There's someone right now watching torture porn going (mimicking someone masturbating) "I hope nobody makes a joke about a fuckin' swimmer's nose!" And then you get these people who defend comedy and say "oh this is a free speech issue", it's not a free speech issue; it's an artistic license issue. You're allowed to talk about it because it's not real on some level, right? There will always be people who won't get it, there's always those people who go "I think you'll find that if two blokes actually took a crocodile into a pub, there would be fucking carnage." But it's not real, so we get to joke about it. I think people sometimes get confused with how they use humour in their own life with what this is. So most people use humour as a form of politeness, as an ice breaker - this isn't that. This is sentences that end in a very surprising way."

"Hello you cunts, black power!"

"American foreign policy is horrendous 'cause not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse, I think, is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad. Oh, boo hoo hoo. Americans making a movie about what Vietnam did to their soldiers is like a serial killer telling you what stopping suddenly for hitchhikers did to his clutch."

"People get the wrong idea about me, they think I'm depressed or something - I'm not depressed. I don't wish that I was dead, I wish... that you were all dead."

"Comic relief raised £8 million last year. Britain sold hundreds of millions worth of weapons last year to Africa. So next year, one country in Africa will get blown to smithereens, and the next country along will get a visit from Lenny Henry. And both will feel bitterly jealous of each other."

"(Speaking about Pope Benedict XVI's resignation) The Pope must have done something that even the Catholic church found unacceptable. My theory is that he fucked an adult woman."

"(Speaking about French and Italian tabloids printing naked topless photos of Kate Middleton) A family of billionaire perverts [the Royal Family] going nuts about a picture of a pair of tits. The hypocrisy of the British press, [mimicking British press] “oh we wouldn’t print these pictures of tits”. I had to go past pictures of tits to read about how you wouldn’t print pictures of tits. I went past good pictures of tits to read about some shit tits. The only reason Kate Middleton is pregnant is because her tits aren’t worth finishing on."

"(Speaking about Comic Relief and charity) Look, there's a colonial side to British charity, it's true; look at Yemen, right? We're the number one provider of weapons and bombs and expertise to Saudi Arabia that they use to bomb Yemen, to engineer a famine in Yemen. At the same time, we're the number two provide of aid to Yemen - and why not? Life gives you Yemen, you give Yemen aid."

"Dear points of view, watching "Queer eye for the straight guy" made me think that if I made gay friends, they'd give me fashion tips. Actually, they fucked me."

"I wish the Queen had died the night before the Royal Jubilee – I wish she’d just fucking died. But they wouldn’t have been able to tell us that she’d died. They would have had to hollow out her body and get that guy who plays Gollum to wear it."

"You've got a blank face there pal, if you hold that expression for long enough in a hospital you'd get fucking switched off."

"There's two empty seats right middle - this is supposed to be sold out, where are they? I hope they're dead in a fucking car crash!"

"Religion's just what we thought before we understood what mental illness was. "A bush talked to me!" "Brilliant, what did it say? What did the bush say? Let's live our lives by what the bush said!" You stupid fucking cunts."

"Apparently they're going to bring in 'Super Asbos'. But 'Asbos' already sound too cool. Teenagers see them as a badge of honour. They should call them 'Gaybos' or 'Bender Badges'."

"The Americans want to build a big tower on the site of September the 11th. Freedom Tower they're going to call it but now apparently they're worried and they're looking at ways to try and make it terrorist proof. I think they should have just build a giant fucking mosque. No one is going to fly into that are they?! Or even better, a runway."

"I watched the footage of Saddam being executed, and it really made me think…is there nothing on the internet that I won’t masturbate to?"

"TV's a fantasy, right? It's a middle class, bourgeois fantasy. You look at daytime TV and how aspirational it is, then ask yourself "who's watching daytime TV?" Benefit cheats, and prisoners. They don't buy and sell antiques. They don't renovate houses to sell them on. They don't have stuff in their attic and if they did have stuff in their attic, it'd be fucking Shannon Matthews."

"There's a place for McCanns jokes, it's probably here. It's probably not on Dictionary Corner on Countdown. "And as we go into the break, we'd like to remind you that MADDIE is an anagram of I'M DEAD.""

"Nobody thought Mel Gibson could play a Scot but look at him now; an alcoholic racist!"

"They say that the Olympics is going to rekindle English national pride. I mean, for £9.2 billion they could have written “Fuck off Germany” onto the moon."

"(on his previous "department of nigger-bombing" joke) That actually comes from a quote by Lloyd George. Lloyd George, when he was British Prime Minister, said "Britain reserves its right to bomb niggers". And that's an important quote, because once you hear that, you realise that Britain has always been racist from the top down. I thought it's worth using that in a joke for, it's worth using that word for. Guy came up to me after a gig in Glasgow, a white guy, and he said "I don't think that you should ever use the word nigger, in any context." And I said, "Well, you've just used it." And do you know what he said? He said what I kind of hope I would say in the same circumstances. He went "No, I didn't." See, you can't really ban words, right? Ricky Gervais got in trouble for saying "mong", I don't know why he did it, he didn't seem to be able to make it very funny. You can't ban a word! Even a horrible word like that. That's like saying, "Let's just burn one book. Let's just burn Mein Kampf. It's a horrible book, nobody likes it. At the point you burn Mein Kampf, you're a fucking fascist society. And you're not even a proper fascist society, because you've burnt the fucking guide book! You're on marching about in peach military uniforms, invading Poundland. (adopts German accent) "Why did you burn the guide book? Why did you burn the guide book, you fucking spastic?!" "You can't call me that, Herr Groppenführer. That word has been banned. You must call me der Nincompoop!""

"Apparently Jordan and Peter Andre are fighting each other over custody of Harvey, well eventually one of them’ll lose and have to keep him. I have a theory that Jordan married a cage fighter cause she needed someone strong enough to stop Harvey from fucking her."

"I thought it was sad, you know, that they had that pop concert to commemorate Diana. I mean, she didn't have much to do with pop music, did she? They should've done something that celebrated what was really great about her life: By staging a gangbang in a minefield."

"Ministry of Defence? At least in the old days we were honest, called it the Ministry of War. "Hello, Ministry of War, department of nigger-bombing. How can I help?""

"I watched Hannah Gadsby's show Nanette. Now, it's a really great show, you should watch it if you get the chance. She talks a lot in it about comedy and her main point is that she feels that, herself as an oppressed person, she's often used her comedy to let the audience off too lightly - she makes a lot of good points. I think the problem with stand-up comedy is it simplifies stuff. It's hard to get at the truth when you've got to get a lot of regular laughs. And sometimes I think, am I trying to get to the truth here or am I just trying to tell funnier lies? So for example, I think she simplifies some stuff in her show. She says, stand-up comedy works by creating a tension in the audience, that's then punctured with a punch line. I don't think mine works like that, I think for me the tension arrives in the punchline. My uncle always said "do something you love, and you never have to work a day in your life" - he did heroin. (laughter) The tension arrives in the punchline and the setup line is almost supposed to be soothing, really. People say, don't they, that you only regret the things in your life that you don't do. I don't know who said that first, but it's someone who's never broken two corkscrews trying to get an unlubricated parsnip out of their arse. (laughter) The tension arrives... in the punchline."

"Israel is the Jimmy Saville of nation states."

"[On Jeremy Corbyn] I'm very excited by Jeremy's rise [...] Although you can see all the forces of evil and their lies being deployed against him. People say he's brought 1970s-style socialism back, but those left-wingers were dicks. I was never very keen on Tony Benn, a pompous, self-important man. And Derek Hatton and Eric Heffer – awful, vile people. Jeremy is nothing like them. He's ascetic and morally incorruptible. The propaganda that's thrown against him is disgraceful. Until he appeared, you had to vote for one kind of Oxbridge twat or another, people who all go to the same dinner parties, people like the Ed Ballses and George Osbornes. Jeremy has shown that, within a democratic tradition, other things are possible."

"[On Jeremy Corbyn] It is extraordinary. It is an amazing thing to have someone leading a major party who is personally a decent person. I know him a bit as we are both patrons of Palestinian solidarity campaigns. I have known him over the years and the forces that have coalesced around Jeremy are forces of good."

"[On his early "comic persona of an angry man in a too tight suit"] I do feel very proud of that, as we did banish racism and sexism from light entertainment."

"To me history as taught at school was like all those memories of galleries, castles and historic monuments that I didn't have. There was the same sense that if there was only some matrix, some philosophical framework to which I could attach all these facts then they would all make sense and they would all stay with me. And then halfway through Marx's Wages, Prices and Profits I suddenly thought to myself, 'Fuck me! This shit is actually true.' ... Once you understood Marx all the apparent chaos of human existence resolved itself into a coherent and comprehensive pattern. People fought not because they differed about how to wear a shirt but because they represented economic classes whose interests conflicted. The Cavaliers were landed aristocrats and their allies who wanted to hang on to a way of life being superseded by Cromwell's merchant class. Slavery was abolished not out of some idea 'niceness' in the Northern states but because the industrial factory owners of Chicago and Detroit wanted the blacks to work in their factories, to be 'wage slaves' rather than actual slaves, though often the improvement in their physical conditions was marginal. The British Empire wasn't some project designed to bring enlightenment to ignorant savages, but rather a brutal and rapacious exploitation of peoples who were often more humane than us. You can imagine, armed with this philosophy, how full of myself I now became. Even when I hadn't had the secret of human history in my grasp I had been a mouthy little bastard in class. Now I was unstoppable."

"The comedian Alexei Sayle's 24 July 2014 interview on BBC Radio Two [with Jeremy Vine] was a strong example of the demonisation of those expressing concern at antisemitism: in this case, directed against Emma Barnett of The Daily Telegraph who had written a heartfelt article expressing her sincere fears. Sayle and Barnett [also interviewed by Vine] are both Jewish. Sayle called Barnett a "pro-Israel propagandist" who was using antisemitism "to discredit the entire Palestinian cause." After interventions he did acknowledge "there are idiots out there who will be antisemitic," before then saying "I hate Jihadists ... Muslim fundamentalism ... Israeli fundamentalism. And that's what Emma Barnett is supporting ... the murder of children. The murder of women. That's what she’s supporting. From a fascist, Zionist ideology. And that’s what this article is. It's just propaganda." Barnett ended by telling Sayle to get a lawyer and thanked him "for proving my exact point.""

"[On David Cameron] When I heard this inherited multi-million ex-Etonian talking about a culture of entitlement, well, I'm sorry, but my irony meter went through the red and then exploded in a gale of bitter laughter. It actually went "HAA!" I was furious, because I've only just had a new irony meter installed after Rebekah Brooks complained about how she had been unfairly reported by the British press."

"All big cities are the same now. It used to be easier at weekends. Not anymore, you get the white stretch limos everywhere. You see them at first, you think, "Is it a celebrity or a foreign dignitary?" No, its some slags. No one's sure how many slags, cause the windows are tinted. All you can say with any real degree of accuracy is that there is an indescriminate number of slags in said vehicle. There's at least two poking out the sunroof."

"If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

"We humans who art on Earth, humanity is special, our kingdom has come. Do what we innately know to be right, on Earth because that's all there is. Share the bread we have, try not to screw up. When others screw up, understand. We can't have everything that tempts us (Unless we work in international finance). Deliver ourselves from evil because this is it. The Earth, the power to do right, and the glory that will come if we do is ours, now and forever. Hu-man."

"Would you like the oldest, most historically significant athletic competition the world has ever known, attracting athletes from every known nation on the face of the planet to come here and perform at the peak of their abilities, in the very city where you live? Most British people go, "Where will we park?!""

"[on global warming] There's a group of people who, a little while ago, were saying, "It's not happening." That same group of people are now saying, "Alright, it is happening, but it's not our fault." That's a very dodgy position to be in. That's like saying, "I'm not having an affair, and, anyway, she seduced me"."

"I don't like David Blaine, he is the ultimate git wizard."

"My little sister, she got me on Facebook because I was on MySpace: "No, no, no. You don't want to be on MySpace, you want to be on Facebook!" So I joined both. But I keep muddling them up, so I keep asking people to come on MyFace. Still, eighty thousand friends!"

"I'm actually going on holiday to India next month, and I wanted to know what the weather was gonna be like there, so I phoned my bank."