An issue or two ago, Rolling Stone came out with a comedy issue. Did you read it? Well, now you don’t have to. We read it for you. Here are some of the best quotes and parts of the issue in part One of Three. We’ll call it, “The Best Quotes From The Rolling Stone Comedy Issue.” Enjoy.
Best Quotes from Comics on When They Knew They Wanted To Be Funny:
“When I was three, my dad thought it would be hilarious to teach me swear words, then have me say them to his friends. They would laugh and laugh. I realize now the laugh was pure shock value, but it felt really good, and I’ve been chasing it ever since.” – Sarah Silverman
“I got in touch with it in high school. We called it jonesing, snapping on each other. I had me, myy boy Leroy and my boy Stubbs, and we’d jones on each other, and half the school would cut class to hear us tell these jokes. That’s the first time I realized, ‘Wait a minute, this is cool. And I can get girls doing this, too.’ You make the girls laugh, you get laid, dude.” – Tracy Morgan
“I didn’t think about making a living at it until I was actually doing it. One weekend I had six spots, and they were paying me $40 a spot. So I made more that weekend than I would have made at Red Lobster for the whole week. It was like, ‘Oh, boy, if I quit Red Lobster, I could probably make more!’” – Chris Rock
“In junior high, there were a lot of really ugly guys who were popular because they made people laugh. I was like, ‘Wow, comedy is the great freer of hideous people.’ It was an incredibly liberating thing. If you ask a girl, ‘What do you want in a guy?’ 99 percent are like, ‘I just want him to be funny.’ I thought, ‘If that applies to women, I’m set.’” – Mindy Kaling
“For me, it was never really thinking, ‘This can really go somewhere.’ It was thinking, ‘This is something I’ll try because there’s nothing else I can do other than maybe drive a cab or be a mailman.’” – Larry David
Best Quotes from Comics on What They Think is the Funniest Movie Ever:
“Most comedies today are not visions, they’re a consensus. You get all these jokes from 12 different writers and they don’t feel cohesive.” – Chris Rock
“Recently, I saw Borat. I thought it was tasteless.” – Phyllis Diller
“The Graduate. It doesn’t have a joke in it and yet it makes me laugh all the way through.” – Bill Maher
A lot of different comedians named their favorite movies. Only two movies were mentioned more than once. Those would be Young Frankenstein (by Tracy Morgan and Craig Ferguson) and Withnail and I (by Zach Galifianakis and Margaret Cho).
Best Quotes from Comics About the Internet:
“The influence of the Internet on comedy is what television was to radio when it first emerged. It’s the most important tool any comedian can implement into their career. The thought that I can post a new routine and, potentially, millions of people can hear it moments later, react and share it – no more waiting for calls to appear on late-night talk shows, no more head honchos of a network plucking you out of a nightclub circuit. No more waiting: If you want to entertain people, you can. It’s up to you to gather your fans for your own personal programming. That’s powerful.” – Dane Cook
“I think it’s been wonderful for comedy – a gold rush. It happened with the comedy clubs of the Eighties and Nineties, and it’s happened again now with the Internet. Whoever thinks differently is looking at it the wrong way.” – Katt Williams
“I think it’s actually bad for performers who are starting out. They’re not getting a chance to fail in private. What I used to do in front of a mirror, kids will now do in front of the computer and put it up on YouTube. Instead of looking like a douche bag in your bedroom, you look like a douche bag where everybody can see it. You don’t get a chance to fail. I would say to any young performer starting out, ‘Be very careful about what you fucking post there, because you’re better off failing in a comedy club, where you can learn shit.’ “– Craig Ferguson
“It’s weird, because there’s a real love of homemade things right now on the Internet – found comedy, things that are not funny on purpose. It will be interesting to see if it swings back around the other way – in a thousand years – to things that are funny on purpose. When people are just as happy to go on their computer and put a caption on a picture of a fat lady as they are to watch a coherent story, then I don’t know.” – Tina Fey
“Look at all the places people can go for a laugh on the Internet. We used to have Dial-a-Joke. You’d pick up a phone, and for 50 cents you’d hear Don Rickles go, ‘What, are you lonely, hockey puck?’ Now you have all these lonely hockey pucks putting stuff on the Internet, and you don’t feel lonely anymore.” – Billy Crystal
“The little bit of success I have is due to the Internet. It has nothing to do with me guest-starring or being on a sitcom at all. People don’t know me from ‘Must See TV.’ They know me ‘cause they’re bored at their office or failing out of community college and looking up comedy online.” – Zach Galifianakis
“I think the Internet is slowly going to take down all creativity. Great art of any kind needs a gestation period. It needs a period where people keep their opinion to their fucking selves. You take any artist in the history of the world, from Michelangelo to Bozo the Clown – and if you can have widespread opinion on their frist time out, you can kill the great spark that makes them who they are. That is what the Internet is allowing. It’s a llowing a million opinions on Day One… Large amounts of opinion too early in an artist’s life is like a cancer.” – Albert Brooks
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