Humor Influence Quotes

Someone asked why I invited Jon Stewart to be the first guest on the 'Journal''s premiere in 2007. 'Because Mark Twain isn't available,' I answered. I was serious.

In terms of what influenced me, I grew up on The Beatles, and I always was struck by their dry British sense of humor.

I was pretty much a child of 'Monty Python.' I grew up loving that type of humor and even structured a lot of humor in the same fashion.

Most young comedians would be lying to say that they weren't huge Weird Al fans when they were kids. Weird Al is probably the first person I ever realized had a career that was just making jokes.

When I was a little kid I loved the Marx brothers and discovered Monty Python when I was 10 or 11-years-old. I used to take a tape recorder and hold it up in front of the TV to record entire episodes to play over and over again, so that I could memorise it.

Satire doesn't effect change.

I didn't really watch 'Beavis & Butt-head' that much or 'King of the Hill,' but I was a huge 'Office Space' fan.

We're all comedy fans in my family. My parents mainly wouldn't let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn't let us watch 'The Flintstones' if he was home, because he said it was a rip-off of 'The Honeymooners'. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old 'Honeymooners'.

I listened to George Carlin when I was a kid and knew every word of his routines.

I mean, 'Kids In The Hall' is the reason I have any career at all.

I grew up in New York wanting to be like those funny men in the movies and on the radio.

If there were a Mount Rushmore of American humor, Terry Southern would be the mountain they'd carve it from

Low' was probably the album that influenced me more than any other, because of how it combined humor and impressive, glamorous, driving energy with this totally surreal soundscape production.

I was always a big fan of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner's '2000-Year-Old Man' sketch. I think it's one of the biggest influences on the podcast, definitely. You'd never say Carl Reiner was the funniest dude on there, because he's just teeing it up, but he knows what questions to ask to lead to great improv.

My father was always clowning around. It was a huge influence on me. In my family, everything is turned into a joke.

I hope and assume that every good comedy writer, no matter the age, has a moment where they discover how great Cheers is.

Everything I write is based on something I've personally experienced, or things that my friends have experienced that I just find horribly entertaining.

All those zany comedies have instilled a sense of pace in me.

I just liked stand-up comedy so much. I used to memorize Bill Cosby albums and other people's albums, George Carlin, Flip Wilson.

I guess the one-liner kind of comic sounds like a guy who can talk and talk and whatever the subject is, he can pull out a one-liner, but I couldn't do that. I didn't like the association. I mean, I love Steven Wright, but so many people started saying "Steven Wright" to me, and I would get mad, because I never wanted to be thought of as copying anybody.

I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college, as I was walking across campus one day, I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I've ever done.

My comedy is kind of a counteraction to some of the comedy I don't like. Or things I don't like.

Bill Hicks is a huge influence. I love him.

My dad was a fiercely funny guy, and he and his brother would get on runs. So my younger brother and I were basically mimicking them when we started goofing off.

When I started out, it was around the whole 9/11 - Islamophobia was just sort of hitting a second wind. Obviously that informed a lot of my humor, and it influenced a lot of what I was talking about on stage because it was extremely relevant at the time.