John Selden Quotes

Some people thought we were presenting Archie as a false character. President Nixon thought we were making a fool out of a good man.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.

I'm not a bleeding-heart feminist, but I do like to call out that stuff in my act. It's nice when you find a perspective that no one has hit on.

The book says, 'Vanity Fair - a story without a hero.' Becky is effectively the protagonist, the hero we follow. But she is flawed. Becky is a subject of her own time.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

I tend to find comedy in dark places. I also tend to find comedy in taking on the status quo - which has always been something I find important.

Cartoons, if you ask me, are the most powerful weapon in today's politics. Balasaheb Thackeray has proved this.

When horror films are made in times of political strife, I think they're not made with an instinct to add to the chaos but to bring shape to it.

Whatever I'm writing has seemed to be about something I don't feel I could freely express in my everyday life, and stand-up is a really effective medium for getting people to hear exactly the things and viewpoints that they normally don't want listen to.

Satire is born of the cities it denounces.

In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.

Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet.

. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn't even know it because of all the jokes. It's like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids' brownies. Suckers!

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.

What I love about comedians is their instinct is always to go against the grain. Their whole existence is pointing out the elephant in the room. Already you can see audiences are pushing back, but we're the ones who really can take it more than anybody.

I mean people are sexist and racist and homophobic and violent. But I don't think of the rappers as being any more sexist or racist or homophobic than their parents. Certainly less, in all those cases, less homophobic or racist or sexist, and then less gangster than our government. It's stuff that people normally don't speak on, subjects they don't speak on, and ideas they kind of keep to themselves.

Through my satire I make little people so big that afterwards they are worthy objects of my satire and no one can reproach me any longer.

The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.

The way I look at a musical, you are commenting on the human condition no matter what you do. A musical may be light and frivolous, but by its very nature, it makes some kind of social comment.

A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and should make a due discrimination between those that are and those that are not the proper objects of it.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.