Comedy Book Quotes

“turn-of-the-twentieth-century rich dicks sought to elevate certain cultural products out of the grasp of the common man.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“There is this idea in the general population that all comedians are sad clowns with traumatic childhoods. Based on my experience, that’s not exactly correct. What is, for the most part, true is that all comedians have a compulsion to perform comedy. This is notable because, especially starting out, performing comedy—be it improv, sketch, or especially stand-up—is stupid hard. Multiple times a night, every night of the week, you have to do it poorly in front of people. And you have to do this for years before you bomb* only some of the time. If you want to go through this long, exhausting, disenchanting journey, then comedy must fill a deep need for you. For every comedian the source of that need is different, be it nature or nurture, but there is a reason almost everyone who eventually makes it describes that first laugh as feeling like a high they were chasing.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“Comics like to say people who are offended just want attention, just want power, and it’s like, duh, because they don’t have either, but the comics can’t understand that because they have both. It would be one thing if comedians combated humorlessness with humor, but instead their reaction is more humorlessness”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“Because, today, the people who say they can’t say anything anymore are often found saying it during a performance they earned tens of thousands of dollars for, on their podcast they make hundreds of thousands a year on, or the special they got paid millions for.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“However, sometimes I feel that those who fight to protect it do so less like warriors and more like helicopter parents so worried about comedy getting hurt and comedy moving beyond them that they stunt its development. To openly allow for critique is to take comedy seriously, and taking it seriously will allow it to evolve and mature.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“Fearless” is often used to describe comics unafraid of hurting people, when it should apply to the comedians afraid of being hurt by people and persisting anyway.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“This raises some very basic, very deep questions about how comedy (if not all of culture) continues, if the levels of trust and context they once depended on are impossible to restore.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“While all these technologies claim to be a step forward for communication, removing comedy from its context and turning comedians back to anonymous contributors to the great American joke book is a step backward for the art form.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“Does political correctness make comedy harder to do? Sure, in the sense that it would be easier to run for a touchdown if you didn’t have to worry about holding the ball, but that’s the game.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“If you are saying supposedly offensive things and the audience is instantly all on board, it is not a comedy show, it’s a rally.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“no artist is creating work just to provide the audience with the facts and figures of their life; they are hoping to do the impossible by trying to make the audience really feel how their reality really feels.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“the isolation of the pandemic mirrored the self-imposed isolation of living online. The disassociation I was feeling in this moment was what a lot of people who grew up knowing only digital existence had been feeling their whole lives.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“I never really thought of myself as depressed though, as much as [gets ironically wistful] paralyzed by hope”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“our “memories” are more of a reflection of our present interpretation of the past than what actually happened.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“Truth, as discussed in chapter 5, is fundamental in comedy, but veracity is not.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“We’ve got to process this collectively and it’s going to go through me, the way I do it.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“you have to focus on how it tries to achieve its funny and what it is trying to communicate, instead of debating if something is funny at all. If you find something funny, there is fun and insight to be had in trying to explain why, but if someone else finds something funny that you don’t, there is nothing you can say that can make the person revoke their laugh.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“More than a reference, it reflects a true cultural fluency.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“While critics are literally paid to seem smart and the rest of us are just doing it because of social pressure, all of us would benefit from having our stupid sides appealed to.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“We can intellectualize as much as we want to,” Richardson told me, “but the idea of this brown thing that comes out of your butt and stinks and you have to deal with it and you’re ashamed of it, there’s nothing funnier in the world.”27 He added, “And it makes a sound when it comes out and sometimes the sound is just a sound, but it reminds you of a thing and this thing stinks like the poop—like, it’s just objectively funny.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“What matters is understanding all of these as intentional formal decisions rooted in specific artistic perspectives.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“Do you know the story of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”?24 The pop music supercomputers Max Martin and Dr. Luke were listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“Rooted in the highbrow denial of death is a lowbrow denial of life.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“these are not the boos of bombing, but boos of discomfort that come from getting too close to saying the unsaid.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“working on his act collecting information, processing it, and making sure he was able to communicate himself in a way that people would best comprehend”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work

“laughter is a tool to facilitate nonaggressive play.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work