Robert Mankoff Quotes

You have two choices, two paths to take as a comedian. You can tackle the difficult subjects and be harsh about it, be brash, be abrasive. But adding hatred to racism is not going to help everybody. So I like to have fun around it.

Comedy can always be taken the wrong way. If I do a bit that is meant to diffuse racism or sexism, I'm not going to avoid it on the chance that a small portion of the audience might take it the wrong way.

I need my comedy to offend. That's my personal views.

I want to write the reparations joke that makes people go, 'Yay! I'm so happy!' It's easy to go onstage and just make fun of all the 'isms' instead, but we can't all be Jeff Dunham. Although that pays very well... it pays way better to be Jeff Dunham than it ever paid to be George Carlin or Lenny Bruce.

Chris Rock is a very funny man.

I'm a comic, and I'm supposed to outrage and make people laugh, Part of makin' people laugh is to shake up their thinkin'. That's what I came here to do.

If you're not offending one group of people, you're not entertaining the other.

I think that 'Family Guy' is hysterical. It's edgy and hip - and they can do whatever they want to do because it's animated and they're not limited by budget.

The whole ability to look at the complexity of race and any sort of associated -ism and still find humor, that's a very interesting space.

People like to compare something to something that they know. Even with Chris Rock, they say he's like Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy.

You don't think that mean people can be funny, and Jane Lynch is the epitome of that. If there could be, like, a gay version of 'Mean Girls,' I'd totally be in it.

I think Chris Rock at the Oscars was a great example. I thought that was intellectually hilarious. The Gap starts a war with Banana Republic... That to me was funny.

I am edgy, raw, offensive, vulgar, untruthful, but intelligent. My jokes are always realistic. I do not make fun of children or people who cannot fight back. That is my limitation.

In the 1990s, it's OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It's acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke... about gays. The gay community is the last sacred cow in this society.

If you make comedy, if you try and make comedy where no one gets upset or offended, you're going to fail.

I love the satire and skewering of comedy writing.

It was exactly the same on the South Park movie really too. There's lots of violence in that too, but it always came down to anything sexual... They don't care about anything else.

Stand-up comics reflect less of a visual humor and more of a commentary.

I like Chris Rock. He's dangerous.

I love astute observations and really great wordplay. I love the way that Louis C.K. observes life, and I love the way Patton Oswalt talks about it.

I would say Politically Incorrect is my favourite right now.

My dream part would be to play Mitt Romney's sarcastic black maid. We could call it 'Mammy & Me.'

I have a theory, which is that the idea of a roast is to go to this forbidden, uncomfortable, almost performance-art-level shock place, but because we're so regularly shocked and offended today, the idea of an hour and a half of unbridled negativity is just so unappealing.

I think 'Dear White People,' the show, is a tremendous artistic achievement. It's always hinting that there is something beyond the pleading and wokeness, something that the show's more militant characters can't see.

I used to hear on the radio people like Jack Benny or Bob Hope, but I never had any interest in their type of humor. I thought that I could do something more substantially meaningful with significant, thoughtful, analytical reflections on real life situations.