Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One of the things that happened is I did a lot of shitty gigs. When you do a bunch of shitty bar gigs you have to get used to people yelling at you, you're used to thinking on the fly, to dealing with weird situations.
I wouldn't totally rule out doing Letterman or the Tonight Show if I had a set that I just happened to write that I thought was funny but was still appropriate for network censors. But I'm not going to go out of my way.
Phil Hartman was brilliant, and Dave Foley is a really funny guy. Phil Hartman was actually even funnier offstage than he was onstage because he would say nasty things. Dave Foley's very funny, very witty guy, very quick.
What people like are things to laugh at. Funny shows. It's all in the execution, the writing and the characters, not the setting. And the writing and the execution and the characters are GREAT on (Everybody Loves Raymond).
Although not considered a martial art, boxing is really a martial art. It's a very limited martial art as long as you agree to just box... but in an actual physical fight against someone who's just a wrestler, you're going to get killed.
You do what you're supposed to do, but you have to be honest about what they're doing. When you do a comedy show on a network the problem is there are going to be a bunch of people who aren't comedians that are going to tell you what's funny.
It's not necessarily a brave thing, people talk about what they think about. There's people out there who love to talk about politics or where they think the countries headed. I don't talk about that I talk about...things that are a little trippier.
The planet's spinning a thousand miles an hour around this gigantic nuclear explosion while these people roll these machines with rubber tires over this hard surface that we've laid down over the planet so that we can easily move ourselves back and forth.
I think there is more comedians now than ever, more venues now than ever. There are stand-ups who live in towns where they don't have many comedy clubs where they are organizing more comedy nights in bars. I just think this is a fantastic time for stand up.
I'm really happy that I've been able to make people laugh and distract them from their day to day bullshit at a comedy show or because they enjoyed one of my CDs or TV specials, but I don't know how many people have actually had life changing thoughts because of it.
When you're standing around for an hour doing stand up it's no big deal but when you're standing around watching a show for an hour - it's a big difference. It's annoying - your feet hurt, your back hurts - it's just not the most comfortable way to see stand-up comedy.
Like if you all were going to go out and one guy's like "you know what man I'm going to stay home I'm feeling kind of shitty," you go, "You faggot." That's what it means. It's about a guy wimping out, being a douchebag...it has nothing to do with your sexual orientation.
When you snatch little pieces of other people's lives and try to palm them off as your own, that's more disgusting than anything. Robin Williams is a huge thief. Denis Leary is a huge thief. His whole stand-up career is based on Bill Hicks, a brilliant guy who died years ago.
Cities are natural, that's why they're everywhere. It's not like there's only one city, and everybody's like 'What the f**k is this?' No, cities are all over the place. They're natural. You know what's not natural? You, in the middle of the mountains, in the middle of the winter.
If I could make the same amount of money doing standup it would be no contest. The problem is that if you do make that kind of money doing standup, it's not in clubs, it's in big auditoriums and large venues, and I really think something is lost when you do standup for a big crowd.
Peter Joseph is asking the questions and proposing the possible solutions that we should be demanding from the elected leaders of this crazy world. His brilliant analysis of this ridiculous system we're operating under is one of the most important voices for change in this generation.
What's interesting about science is that we're constantly discovering new things about the universe, about ourselves, about our bodies, about diseases, about the possibilities of the future. It's amazing. Science is one of the coolest things about being a human being - without a doubt.
If you attach your mind to any ideology, you're going to be on a road, and that road may or may not lead you in a good direction. But you're gonna stay on that road because you are attached to an ideology. It could be a terrible road, but you stick with it regardless of rational thinking.
Stand-up is still my favorite, but the podcast is a close second. It's so fun, and it's given me the opportunity to have three-hour conversations with people I wouldn't have otherwise been able to talk to. When I talked to Maynard Keenan from Tool, I almost couldn't believe it was happening.
Stand-up is still my favorite, but the podcast is a close second. It's so fun, and it's given me the oppor-tunity to have three-hour conversations with people I wouldn't have otherwise been able to talk to. When I talked to Maynard Keenan from Tool, I almost couldn't believe it was happening.
["Faggot"] is a great word! The whole thing about language is, it's supposed to be broadcasting your intentions. These are my intentions and these words broadcast my feelings. If all of a sudden you have forbidden words that doesn't make the intent any better. It's just appeasing sensitive people.
I love coming to D.C. I think it's a very unusual city. It's so fascinating that it's this weird place that everything thinks of as the capital of the country, there is so much international business, political stuff that is connected to that part of the country that it has a very charred atmosphere.
Despite all the advancements in science, and all things about religion that are disproved it still marches on. The bottom line is that the only real, absolutely provable answers about life and our place in the universe are provided by science, and religion has been holding down science since day one.
I think that one of the reasons why people look towards the end of humanity is that people are afraid to die alone. If you die alone, the people you love will miss you, or if they die, you miss them - the sorrow is inevitable. When you truly love someone, the thought of losing them forever is horrible.
No matter how civilized we are and how much society has curbed violent behavior. Human beings still have the same genes they had 10,000 years ago. Our bodies are designed to have a certain amount of physical stress and violence in them. We're designed to run from jaguars and fight to defend our territory.
The quicker we all realize that we've been taught how to live life by people that were operating on the momentum of an ignorant past the quicker we can move to a global ethic of community that doesn't value invented borders or the monopolization of natural resources, but rather the goal of a happier more loving humanity.
The number one reason why marijuana is illegal is because the Pharma Cartel does not want you to grow your own medicine. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. The first car ever made ran on hemp oil. Hemp seeds are also the healthiest food on the planet with the highest protein content out of any plant.
I always do that at the end of shows, like a Q&A session. First of all it lets people know that this isn't some preprogrammed, press-play show where I have to say the exact same words in the exact same order. That's part of the thing with live comedy is that people like the fun aspect of it and I enjoy the taking questions part.
You are one miniscule piece of a never-ending cycle. In fact, you're not even a piece. You're just a holder for billions and billions of other pieces. Whether that's organic components, living organisms inside your body, bacteria or whatever it is, you're just part of the soup of the universe, so just try to enjoy what's good about it.
We're constantly re-evaluating the potential for life. We're finding it where we didn't think it could exist, such as volcanic vents and other extreme conditions like under arctic ice. We're finding life in these incredibly harsh and dynamic conditions, so we're having to re-evaluate our own ideas of what's possible on this planet alone.
A comic, all they have to do is, if you do something funny in a comedy club and you put it up on you tube, it might get a million hits! All it needs to do is resonate with one person who sends it to their friends, who sends it to other people, and before you know it, it has spread virally and BOOM! All of a sudden that person has a name.
As a longtime practitioner of yoga and a person who's been involved in physical fitness my whole life, I can tell you, yoga helps you achieve altered states of consciousness. It is not just stretching. The only way you can say that it's stretching is if you haven't done it, or that you haven't done it rigorously for a long period of time.
You're sort of programmed a certain way because of your environment. That's all you know. But we don't have that anymore because of the internet. Because of the internet we're all communicating with each other all across the board, so you're getting information from people all around the world, hitting a much more diverse slice of culture.
I think comedy because of the Internet it has a bigger audience, a bigger fan base. It has fans that understand comedy more than any generation before because there is more guys like you, more guys like me, more guys like Louie CK who talks about it a lot. When you get a chance to see perspective that I don't think you ever got to see before.
I realized a long time ago that instead of being jealous you can be inspired and appreciative. It carries more energy to you... That can be an awesome motivating force that can improve your life if you choose to be inspired and not jealous. One (being jealous) has no benefit whatsoever, the other is an incredible resource for creating momentum and improvement.
Selling your life to sit in a box and work for a machine. An uncaring machine that demands productivity that doesn't understand you and doesn't want to understand you... There's no natural behaviour. Everyone is wearing clothes they don't want to wear. Everybody is showing up and doing something they don't want to do. They have no connection to it. That's the problem with our society.
I definitely had one guy come up to me and ask if I knew where to get DMT. He had a crewcut and he didn't look like he'd ever done a drug in his life. He didn't seem curious he seemed like he wanted to get me to do something. Like "You're the laziest narc ever dude. This is ridiculous. What, do you think I bring drugs around with me? Are you retarded? Why don't you go find gangsters?"
There's a very famous Miyamoto Musashi quote. "Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things." The idea is once you understand what excellence is all about, whether it's in painting, or carpentry or martial arts, that you see how that excellence manifests itself in any discipline. I think that all the different things that I do enhance all the other things that I do.
When you're jealous, especially of someone else's art or creations you automatically put up these selfish walls that reinforce your stupid ideas. It's hard to pull those walls down and look at what you're hiding. Look at your own weakness and realize that the jealousy came from knowing that you're intimidated by someone else's work, and that when you compare it to your own, you fall short.
It's a weird experience when you're just trying to talk openly about how you think psychedelic drugs and marijuana are beneficial, or a lot of different drugs, especially plant-based ones, can be beneficial. Especially those ones that have some connection to organic life, I feel like you can learn something from them, from mushrooms, from peyote, from marijuana. They can be used as a tool.
I have this thing built into my contract that the club has to put up a sign that says my act "contains the strongest language and material content imaginable," but, believe it or not, I still get complaints. People want you to be what they want you to be. If they see you on TV and that's what they like, they want you to be EXACTLY like that when they see you live. And if you're not, some of them get upset.
The beautiful thing about podcasting is it's just talking. It can be funny, or it can be terrifying. It can be sweet. It can be obnoxious. It almost has no definitive form. In that sense it's one of the best ways to explore an idea, and certainly much less limiting than trying to express the same idea in stand up comedy. For some ideas stand up is best, but it's really, really nice to have podcasts as well.
I brought something back from those experiences [with drugs] which made me softer, open to other ideas. And I've learned from listening to other people talk about their experiences, from listening to Bill Hicks or reading Terrence McKenna or Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. But there's always some dumb cop out there who says "We don't need another legal drug and there's psychological addiction and blah blah blah."
Comedy is a funny thing, and it's really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title. You would never go to a club just to see "Live music," you would go to a jazz club to see jazz, a blues club to see blues, etc. But when you go to see "standup comedy," if you don't know the performers material, you really don't have any idea what you're gonna get.
Now obviously popularity isn't everything when it comes to stand up comedy, but the art form itself is better today than it ever has before. I think there are more great comics. I think the standard is higher. The critical analysis is a little harsher, but that is also good. Maybe people have a higher standard than before, maybe they are a little more judgmental, a little more brutal, that makes people work harder. It makes the stand up better.
I was like, "This is a new thing that the gay people have decided? That's the gayest thing I've ever heard in my life." You can't do that. You can't decide that a word is forbidden now collectively amongst your group of human beings, that the word is a slanderous evil nasty word about homosexuals. It's not, the word doesn't mean that. And sometimes it's a good word to use in comedy. That's what your friend has to realize when he's at a bar just yelling out the word.
I don't know much about the music business, but for just general advice for someone trying to create things, as simple as this sounds, I think the best thing you can do is constantly try to improve upon your work. Always focus on that first and foremost, and leave everything else (marketing, image) completely secondary. Obviously, easier said than done when you're trying to make a living, but if you can move along those lines and earnestly try to make things that you really enjoy it can only benefit you in the long run.
For those that have said I seemed dickish to some of the nuttier guests on Joe Rogan Questions Everything - guilty as charged. As the season wore on I lost my patience with some of those folks unfortunately. I think I overdosed on ridiculous/likely fake stories. I certainly learned a lot about the kind of people that invest a large portion of their life on fringe subjects - they're all white. I think there's something interesting about the subjects, (UFOS, etc) but the study of them has often been overrun by silly thinking.
There's a lot of people that I disagree with that I think I could have interesting conversations with. What I don't want to get into is manufactured conflict. I would much rather talk to someone like Dr. Rhonda Patrick or Randall Carlson and be mesmerized by information. I guess in a way that's selfish, or maybe not objective of me. The older (and hopefully wiser) I get the less interested I am in conflict. I don't mind disagreeing with people in a civil way, but I definitely don't want to go out of my way to have an argument unless it's a really important subject.