Kevin Nealon Quotes

The name of my first comedy album was 'Raised by Cable.' Coming up and watching all of these weird movies on different channels was such an influence on me and an influence on how I do standup. It informs everything I do.

As I go on in standup, I keep being described as cleaner and cleaner as I do each hour, they're like, 'It's unbelievable how clean,' 'He's the cleanest person in the world.' And then I'll do shows and people will be like, 'You're supposed to be so clean, but you're talking about cancer.'

I had some jokes that were dirty. And some of it is when I started making appearances on Conan and Letterman back in the late '90s, I think. You had to remove the curse words, or you couldn't do some of the more explicit jokes.

I've always been criticised for how filthy my material is. Victoria Wood said to me once, 'I wish I was a bit ruder, like you,' and I said, 'Well, I wish I was a bit cleaner, like you.'

The film I do doesn't have to be a film that only my kids can watch. My kids will watch films, but I will decide what they watch and not. My aim is to play different characters and not be stuck in a mould. Just because you are a mom and a wife doesn't meant you have to play those roles, even in films.

My father was a minister and so rock music was banned in our house.

If you like standup and decide that it's overtaking your life and want to hate it, watch 1,000 standup comedians who are trying to get on a TV show.

I have a feeling I'm going to wake up one day and say 'I can't do dirty stuff anymore, I want to go all clean.' I'll do clean stuff too, I like to entertain people. Then they egged me on; we shot it at The Laugh Factory.

I think the comedy clubs tend to homogenize the acts a little bit, because they force them to be palatable in way too many environments.

I come from a time when people like Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby told stories that were devastatingly funny without being off-color.

I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.

People see me on the 'Daily Show' or 'About a Boy'. But the reality is that I only got into this business to do standup comedy.

Dad had a music store, and he'd often bring home comedy albums that I would listen to. I started listening to Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby, and developing taste. They really influenced my style of comedy.

People ask 'do you make a conscious effort not to swear?' - if you're doing silly stuff you're not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood, who were funny without swearing, were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway.

I don't want children cursing. I'm very strict on my nieces and my little brother. They have to listen to clean versions of music. Even my music.

Growing up, I never heard my parents curse, never. The first time I ever said a curse word was with my sister Kim.

I'm always fighting with profanity and Christian comedy. I'm telling you, it's always a fight. Because my father said to me, he said, 'Well, Kym, I feel like comics and people that use profanity, you have a lack of vocabulary, actually, a whole lot.'

It's still a soft R, but when I watch other people's standup, I'm dumbfounded that people call me dirty. That's only because I did family television.

There's no one on the road that I tried to pattern myself after. There's no one in history that I tried to pattern myself after. Because one thing I was told that in standup you want to develop your own voice.

If I am popular across the board, from teenagers to pensioners, it's not because I'm trying to be family-orientated, it's because my mum vets all my shows! I always get a critique from her and she's very harsh.

I never liked the glossiness of highly produced standup specials in general - I like it where it has more of a feel of the type of places I usually perform. It seems kind of weird when you do a special to go perform in a place unlike the place where you perform 95% of the time.

Nothing in my early childhood suggested to anyone - except maybe my father - that one day I would be standing here and be known simply as Judge Judy.

Everyone was doing alternative comedy. I thought I'd distinguish myself by just telling jokes, with differing degrees of success.

I did a lot of standup from ages 19 to 24 but then stopped to focus on sketch with Broken Lizard.

My father had a perfectly good drummer who he had an argument with. So one day, on a Tuesday, my father came in with a cheap pawn shop set of drums and said, 'Put your foot here, and you kick there, and you play this, and this is the high hat.' And Friday night, I was playing in a honky-tonk.