Tom Lehrer Quotes

Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense.

And realising that humour is the most powerful way to make a political statement and say the things that you want to say. And it's not used enough, at least not in the U.S.

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me With just a pocketful of soap.

I've always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy. And I guess I've always liked to channel some kind of personal element to that.

It's easy being a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you.

I don't really have funny things to say about politics. I wish I did, but I don't.

I was doing political cartoons and getting angry to the point where I felt I was going to have to start making and throwing bombs. I thought I was probably a better cartoonist than a bomb maker.

I've always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy.

I'm a great admirer of 'The Simpsons.' It's very surprising because it's backed by a right-wing television company in the U.S., and quite often it's poking fun at the people who would be its audience.

People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House.

I am a writer—a comic and satirical writer. I am much better at poking fun at politicians who screw up than I am of telling them what to do.

'Saturday Night Live' has always been, you know, non-partisan - whoever's in power should probably be challenged.

We have a lot of really boring, silly, stupid politics. We need people to point that out.

When it comes to politics, comedians read between the lines and see hypocrisies and half-truths. And we report those things to regular people who go, 'I noticed that, too!' or 'You're right, that doesn't make sense!'

People go, 'Oh, Trump must be good for comedy,' and I go, 'Ehhh.'

In the '60s, I did many satirical portraits of dictators.

Nothing is off-limits. There's just some things I cannot crack. Politics I can't do. When I start to talk about it, I just get really angry and super sincere. I have never found a way to craft all of that absurdity into funny.

Politics is a thing that is kind of the same over and over and over again. But we have to find new ways of poking fun at it and letting the air out of people and satirizing things that are worthy of satire.

In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around.

You can say the dirty words now, but there is no content - political satire is limited to small podiums and little soap boxes.

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.

People don't understand that we're not warriors in their cause. We're a group of people that really feel that they want to write jokes about the absurdity that we see in government and the world and all that, and that's it.

North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms has signed a deal with Random House to write his memoirs. Scholars will no doubt benefit from the reflections of a man who was wrong on every major issue for 40 years. Helms' aides say the proceeds from the book will be donated to the non-profit Jesse Helms Center where they apparently have more experience burning than publishing them.