Quotes by Harry Shearer - Page 2

In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Cameras
Cutting
Mike
Snl
Years
Good Anything Never
According
Ad
Director
Camera
Good Never Anything
Good Reason
Lib
Script
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Well Washington DC what are you going to do. They think the capitol steps are the state of the art in comedy. You try to drag them into the 20th century let alone the 21st and they refuse to come with you.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Art
Capitol
Drag
Steps
Thinking
Trying
Washington Dc
Washington
Dc
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Anybody who says that having the public recognize them and relate to the work they do is irritating should get into another line of work. You're in this business for people to know what you do and like it.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Irritating
Lines
People
Should
Work Business People
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People don't play music in New Orleans for the reasons they do in Nashville or L.A. - to become stars or to get rich - they play because they've got to. It's in the streets, in their family, in their blood.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Nashville
New Orleans
Streets
Orleans
Play Music
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I would come back to public school for usually about half the year. It was actually better for me to be out of school a lot, because I was two years younger than everybody, which is a bad situation, socially.
Harry Shearer / Actor
School
Two
Years
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You know, radio was a really easy way to do the shows. You'd come in, do a read-through, there'd be a few rehearsals, then you'd come the night of the show and do it in front of the audience and then go home.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Home
Easy Way
Night
Radio
Rehearsal
Go Home
Rehearsals
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My parents didn't want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Childhood
Parent
Series
Stars
Time Childhood Me
From Time To Time
Normal Childhood
Working Actor
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Here's a guy [Richard Nixon] who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Awkward
Ease
Guy
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I'm at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show - so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Expertise
Loss
Beaver
Watched
Cast
Episode
Martian
Pilot
Regular
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Bush is a frat boy in the White House but we've had that before. But I wasn't one of those people that was threatening to leave the country. By the way none of those people have left the country. Alec Baldwin is still here.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Threatening
White House
Alec
People Way Country
Bush
Country People Way
None
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'Leave It To Beaver' is a fairly famous show in America, but I don't think it travelled. It was one of those typical '50s family comedies. I was in the pilot episode as sort of the dark presence: my character was called Eddie Haskill.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Typical
Fairly
Beaver
Comedies
Eddie
Episode
Pilot
Presence
Travelled
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Behind the ambitious, creative talent that is Hollywood lies a darker side of the entertainment industry little appreciated by the ordinary moviegoer. It's an opaque world of film financing, revenue accretion, and minimal profit share.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Ambitious
Appreciated
Entertainment Industry
Financing
Opaque
Ordinary
Profit
Revenue
Accretion
Darker
Minimal
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I always thought, as a kid, if you - and the reason that I sort of stayed away from doing one character on a sitcom is - if you're doing one thing all the time, the audience is going to come up to you and say the one thing all the time.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Sitcom
Stayed
The One Thing
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I believe London is the city New York wants to be when it grows up. I love the wealth of cultural resources that a city of that size can offer. I also believe I don't have to sacrifice all of my standards for human behavior to avail myself of them.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Grows
Human Behavior
Sacrifice
Standards
Love Myself Believe
Avail
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When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Character
Growing Up
White
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Democrats always like to brag that their guys are smarter than the opponents and Republicans always like to brag that their guys are more moral than the opponents. But if you're looking for morals in politics you're looking for bananas in the cheese department.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Politics
Bananas
Brag
Cheese
Cheesy
Guy
Opponents
Smarter
Democrats
Republicans
Morals
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I never wanted to do a regular sitcom, because I'd be incredibly bored doing the same character week in, week out. But the beauty of 'The Simpsons' is that it's 15, 16, 17 characters. It's the variety that keeps it interesting. And hey, they're all my children.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Bored
Hey
Sitcom
Variety
Simpsons
The Simpsons
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To me, the funniest American of the Twentieth Century is Richard Nixon because he had the most to hide, and he was so bad at hiding it. To me, that's what's really funny - people who think they're doing a great job of hiding stuff, and it just keeps leaking out.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Great Job
Twentieth Century
Funny Great Me
Funniest
Hide
Leaking
Nixon
Richard Nixon
Twentieth
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I think in most cases, if you're with good people, comedy creation happens faster in collaboration. That's how I can tell if it's a good collaboration: If it's faster than me by myself, then it works. If it's slower than me by myself, then I get out of the room.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Collaboration
People
Thinking
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Nixon's genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election - but he didn't tell us that then.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Running
War
Able
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A movie script more than anything else is a plan of action for the crew. Everybody in the crew looks at the script to see what they're going to do. It has to contain where you are, and how many people are there, and what they do, and what time of day it is, and what time of year it is.
Harry Shearer / Actor
People
Scripts
Years
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Even under the best of circumstances men are hard creatures to trap. Women who flatter themselves into thinking they've trapped one are like people who believe they can get rid of the cockroaches in their kitchen. They're in for a big surprise late one night when they turn on the light.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Men
Believe
Night
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As a kid, I really did want to hang out with the grownups, so it was hanging out with the hippest grownups in the world. This was the nicest bunch of people I've worked with in show business, with the exception of the people around 'A Mighty Wind.' It really was a wonderful eight years.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Kids
Eight
Years
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I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Merry Christmas
Night
White
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Perhaps not unusually for a popular film produced over three decades ago, there have been a dizzying parade of corporate characters trading rights to 'This Is Spinal Tap' through the years. Yet our requests for timely statements of the film's income have been met with a series of slammed doors.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Corporate
Decades
Doors
Income
Spinal Tap
Statements
Timely
Trading
Tap
Parade
Produced
Requests
Slammed
Spinal
Unusually
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One of the problems with 'SNL' is that, if you tried to adlib, the director would put you off camera and off the mic, so only you would know that you ever did it. The director always directed to the script; he wasn't listening to what you were doing. He was calling shots whilst looking at the page.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Shots
Snl
Directed
Mic
One Of The Problems
Whilst
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I just think everyone knows you go on those [political satire] shows if you're a politician to, "humanize yourself" - to show, "Hey, I can take a joke." Well, why should satire be in the service of humanizing these people who are supposed to be the target of our venom and vitriol? I think that's unseemly.
Harry Shearer / Actor
People
Political
Thinking
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[The word class has] been excised from the acceptable political vocabulary, except in the limited usage of right-wingers when they accuse liberals of inciting 'class warfare' - a charge that means it's okay for rich people to vote their economic interests but it's not all right to encourage poor people to do so.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Class
Mean
Vocabulary
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'Spinal Tap' began as a mock rock band that we four - Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and myself - developed for an appearance on a TV pilot at the end of the 1970s. On our own initiative, we wrote and recorded most of the songs and performed them live in several music clubs around L.A. before any cameras rolled.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Appearance
Cameras
Clubs
Initiative
Mock
Spinal Tap
Christopher
Tap
Rob
Guest
Performed
Pilot
Rock Band
Spinal
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My family was lower middle class, and my parents both worked, so we couldn't take proper vacations. We'd go for three days to Santa Barbara or to the desert, so my first real vacation came was when I was 12, when friends of my parents were taking their kids away. We went to Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Park in Arizona and Utah.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Arizona
Barbara
Class
Desert
Grand Canyon
Middle
Middle Class
Santa
Utah
Canyon
Grand
Lower
National
National Park
Park
Proper
Vacations
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I've been doing Nixon pretty much my whole professional life. I was in this comedy group called the Credibility Gap in Los Angeles when he was president. I was doing Nixon on the radio, and when we did live shows I physicalized him - if that's a word - for the first time. And then I did a Nixon sketch on a very short-lived NBC show called Sunday Best.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Nbc
President
Sunday
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I couldn't help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama's. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Air
Guy
Water
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Satire is an art best practiced behind the back of the intended target. I think inviting politicians on a satirical show becomes a very big trap. Because one of two things happen: Either you have to kind of unsharpen your fangs because you can't be quite as cruel to people to their face as you are behind their backs... Or you don't defang, and those guests get the word and they stop coming.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Art
Thinking
Two
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I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Country
Office
Thinking
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Because I don't do stand-up, radio has always been my equivalent, a place to stay in connection with the public and force myself to write every week and come up with new characters. Plus it's a medium that – having grown up with it and putting myself to sleep with a radio under my pillow [as a kid] – I love. No matter what picture you want to create in the listener's mind, a few minutes of work gets it done.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Kids
Sleep
Writing
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There were really funny characteristics about this guy [Richard Nixon], chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times - just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out.
Harry Shearer / Actor
Emotional
Guy
Would Be
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Harry Shearer Quotes - Page 2

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