John Hancock Quotes

I love Bill Clinton. I think we should make him king. I'm talking the red robe, the turkey leg - everything.

It's an old Elizabethan idea. The fool is the only one who is allowed to make fun of the king because he is a fool. I can say whatever I want about anybody else because I'm just an idiot talking - I'm not insisting that I'm any smarter than anyone else. It's satire.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change.

When Prince Charles speaks, everybody pretends to be fascinated, even though he has never said anything interesting except in that intercepted telephone conversation wherein he expressed the desire to be a feminine hygeine product.

Final installment of Things More Fun Than Reading the Sarah Palin Memoir: Driving into a tree, microwaving your head, and getting stabbed in the eye with a carrot.

Everything can be satirized.

It's all been satirized for your protection.

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.

By the very nature of satire or parody, you have to love and respect your target and respect it enough to understand every aspect of it, so you can more effectively make fun of it.

Everything needs to be lampooned. I believe that there's not any sacred ground.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

And humor has always been a weapon. You want to get even on somebody? You want to attack somebody? Make fun of them.

The key to humor is often self-loathing or sarcasm. In a sense, that's how self-loathing is made palatable.

Comedy is a great weapon of attack. It's not a great weapon of support.

An insult is mean or unkind. Milton Berle called me the Sultan of Insult, and I was called the King of Insult. But the guy that gave me the best title - and I use it to this day - was Johnny Carson. He called me Mr. Warmth.

From my experience, politicians are much more uncomfortable being made fun of than they are being preached at and screeched at - you know, and the soapbox routine. They're much more uneasy knowing they're a target of ridicule.

Facetiousness is allowable when it is the most proper instrument of exposing things apparently base and vile to due contempt.

I haven't watched 'Mad TV' a lot, but I have seen some stuff on there that is truly funny. You have to have some sort of attitude toward the subject, and they seem to have it. It depends on how much blood you want to draw.

I've spent my entire career being a satirist.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Satire is a form of social control, it's what you do. It's not personal. It's a job.

If nothing is serious anymore, then there's nothing to satirize.

You can make fun of everything.

What I don't like is snark for snark's sake. If you are going to make fun of me, at least be witty while doing it.

Even people that I agree with can do something that would be a target for a bit of humor.