Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm of the opinion that if you step on stage and you're not a straight white male, you're automatically making a political statement whether you know it or not.
I think the need to go on stage speaks to some sort of a profound psychological deficit, but something that happened when you were a kid. Or something your parents did.
You can be as exclusive as you want to in your house, but once you walk outside your house, you have to realize that it's not your world anymore: it's all of our world.
Some things just strike me as funny. The way things play out just makes me laugh sometimes. It drives my wife crazy sometimes because I'll just be laughing for no reason.
If you say, 'I don't care if Muhammad Ali was a Muslim or not; he was just great,' what you're really saying is, 'I don't care about Muhammad Ali.' Same with Prince being black.
When I was starting out, I was just bringing a garbage bag of jokes onstage, pulling them out like, 'What about this? No? Alright.' I was just trying to be funny about anything.
If we're constantly giving every one of our allies the woke test instead of inviting them to be more woke, we're doomed. You can be the most woke person of all time and be alone.
In communities of color, such as Ferguson, it often feels like the police are protecting the white community from us instead of protecting our communities from the criminal element.
No state income tax, no snow, lots of golf courses, and ready-made gated communities make Florida an irresistible place for seniors - the ones who have the income level - to retire.
Throughout my career and my life, I talk a lot about racism in this country, and if you're going to talk about it, then you're going to eventually come to the chapter about the Klan.
This is a country that was founded on racism. It was built on racism. It still continues to thrive through wealth disparity, and housing disparity is all built on the backs of racism.
In most major cities, you can find stores for urban homesteaders. They sell everything you need so that you won't need anything. Sort of a 'Take This Civilization and Shove It' starter kit.
If we go the direction that many of the leaders of this country want and close the borders and discourage new immigrants, then we are ruining the possibility of new ideas and new experiences.
I feel like you can share as many jokes as you want to because no joke you do on Twitter is ever gonna be so big on Twitter, for the most part, that you can't say it on stage that same night.
My dad and stepmom live in Mobile, Ala., and spend their vacation time an hour's drive away in Orange Beach, Ala. This means that, throughout my life, I have regularly vacationed there as well.
The citizens of Puerto Rico pay taxes with no representation every day, because Puerto Rico is not a state. And the rules only became more confusing the more I looked into them during my time there.
What am I unbiased about? Let's see. I don't think about being unbiased, at all. With the entertainment industry, there was a point at which I felt like I had to be not only pro-myself but anti-others.
The Right doesn't usually threaten to leave the country. When the Right feels threatened, it just declares it is going to invent a time machine to take the country back so that America can be 'great again.'
A lot of comics claimed to be political comedians when George W. Bush was in office just by calling him an idiot. For me, Obama is actually more interesting comically, because not everybody can figure it out.
I never wanted to be in the late-night talk show wars, and I think somehow with 'Totally Biased,' I got caught up in all that. Suddenly, there are articles about how we finally have a black voice in late-night.
I was born in the Bay Area because my dad was a semi-professional photographer and poet who was really into John Coltrane. He's had many lives. My dad's a capitalist to his bone, but he's also a human to his bone.
One thing that people outside Chicago need to understand is that the city is not just one thing. It is one city, but it is huge and sprawling. And historically, it has been one of America's most segregated cities.
Donald Trump giving a speech on Islam is like me giving a speech titled, 'The Best Haircuts to Have If You Really Want to Succeed in Corporate America.' I could do it. But I'd mostly be making it up as I went along.
The size of the city and the nature of how independent the neighborhoods are means that not only do people who live outside Chicago not know what is going on there, Chicagoans often don't know what is going on there.
The best version of comedy is when you can get to an issue where, at some point, you're not firmly on one side or the other, and you can see both sides. The more we become about the issues, the more successful we are.
For some people, the definition of who is and who isn't an American defies logic, historical accuracy, common sense, decency, good manners, the milk of human kindness, enjoyment in the good things in life, and love of good food.
As a black person in this country, I am always frustrated by the lack of attention my people's issues get. But at least the news and politicians are talking about not talking about our issues. Native issues are basically ignored.
There is a linear way in which black comedians are expected to talk about race by all audiences - black people are like this, white people are like this - and it really is hard to break through that. I never was doing it that way.
As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.
When things aren't going well for black people, they blame the government. When things aren't going well for white people, they can't blame the government because the government is supposed to be for them. So they blame black people.
Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars?
The alt-right is working hard to cloak its desire to create chaos in the streets as free speech. They say they want to air their views, but it's about provoking violent reactions. We all can easily see that this is not about free speech.
I'm most biased about how white people have to learn to shut up when the conversation of racism comes up. White people have to learn to listen. Whether they agree with what they're hearing or not, they have to know to shut up and listen.
The jokes I was always attracted to, and that I would tell for the longest, were jokes where I cared about the subject. Whenever I wrote a joke where I didn't care, even if it was really funny, the third time I told it, it would lose steam.
When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.
I keep trying to write the crowd-pleasing slavery joke and the crowd-pleasing reparations joke, but any time you mention slavery or reparations in any detail, it seems to bum lots of people out. That's a challenge I keep putting in front of myself.
When I stand up in front of groups of people who agree with me, I know I have to really step my game up because I can't just sort of meet them where they're at; I have to take them somewhere else. They want you to challenge them and have good ideas.
I want President Obama to want to take your guns away. I don't trust you with your guns. I don't trust you to fire them safely. I don't trust you to store them safely. I don't trust your kids not to find them. I don't trust you not to get them stolen.
Stand-up comedians know how to walk into a room, even if you're not performing, just read the temperature of a room, and can easily sort of tell what's going on or what people are sort of feeling in the room, and it allows you to sort of approach people.
When we let cops talk about themselves as a separate community, then we are letting cops wall themselves off from the rest of us. We don't generally do that with any other jobs. We don't talk about the barista community or the Wal-Mart greeter community.
Cops should not be separate from the black community or any community. Their salaries are paid for by the communities they police. They should be working for the communities they police. But as we saw in Ferguson, Missouri, they are not always doing that.
I've been to the Bahamas. It's a beautiful country with truly excellent people. When I took a cruise that docked for a couple hours in Nassau, it mostly reminded me of a giant version of my grandmother's neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama... but with better accents.
We could do something set in the 21st century, where I travel around to lots of different places and we talk to different ethnicities and lots of different racial and religious minorities, so it's not just the black-and-white America; it hasn't been that since the '90s.
Knowing that more people associate Chicago with street violence than generosity is difficult for me because, despite all my proclamations of being from the Bay Area, I have spent much of my life in Chicago. So I have a deep love and a pretty good understanding of the city.
America loses so much of what defines it if you subtract the Chinese influence. I know this because I spent 12 years living in one of America's most popular tourist destinations: San Francisco. And it would not be one of America's top tourist destinations without Chinatown.
Portland is often trumpeted as being one of America's coolest, hippest cities. I've been to Portland many times, and I'm always like, "Yeah it's cool and hip, but also, where are all the black people? Why is this city so cool and hip, and also keeping the black people away?"
There's an elitism that comes out with the entertainment industry. I'll talk about some shows, but I'm not gonna say that you're dumb for watching one over the other. I just let it go. I don't have to declare a fatwa on any of these things. I've gotten over some of my elitism.
Growing up in the Midwest, Boston, and Alabama, I didn't know any Puerto Ricans... at least, I didn't know if I knew any Puerto Ricans. The only Puerto Rican that I had ever even heard of was Juan Epstein, one of the students from the classic 1970s sitcom 'Welcome Back, Kotter.'
Since its inception, the government has broken and coerced treaties with hundreds of Native American tribes. And this is even worse when you realize that the native peoples of this land are negotiating for land that is, by all common sense and elementary school logic, their land.
I'm happy that I know how to speak 'Southern.' I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. 'Y'all' is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented.