Arsenio Hall Quotes

“Arsenio found himself trusting his heart more than once during the brief but intense Persian Gulf War in 1990–1991.

ARSENIO HALL: "I was going to do a joke about what Saddam Hussein would say to his wife on the morning of January fifteenth, 1991 [the start of the campaign]. When he was going to work I wondered out loud if he would say, ‘Honey, don’t wait up!' "

On Monday he decided not to use the gag. Then on Tuesday, when the staff talked about it, he mulled over the idea again.

ARSENIO HALL: “I put a little extra thought into it. Much as I wanted to try to make people laugh in a world that was not always funny, I knew I was doing a joke about war, and that the potential result of war is loss of life — so I’m real, real careful.”

Then that night on the show, his guest, Farrah Fawcett, told him that she thought if women ran the world, there wouldn’t be any wars.
Eventually, ”I chickened out on [the joke],“ Arsenio said. ”As much as I believe our country should function from a position of strength, what’s going on now is not worth bloodshed. I place a lot of value on life.”
― Norman King, Arsenio Hall