Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Neal Brennan

You know, when I was a kid, I used to cry every day, like, when I was like, you know, 7 through 11 or 6 through 11, to the point where my brother and sisters would like - there was an ongoing joke where they would make me cry to keep my streak alive of crying every day.

I'm obsessive, I'm a control freak, I get snappy with people.

Everyone has some secret and some source of pain or sadness and I just said mine first and then everybody went after me. I get it every day in my Instagram direct messages, people thanking me for talking about depression and telling me how it helped them.

I get that money is important, and it's scary to think that you won't have enough. At the same time, we can set up reasonable social safety nets and take care of everybody.

I think the biggest influence on my stand-up would be Chris Rock, in that I love that Chris is basically an essayist, in that he'll take a subject and just try and attack it from as many different angles as he can.

I'm not dripping with charisma like many of my friends are. But I do have candour, which is close.

I love doing stand up. I think it's a really worthwhile art form. It's so unique in all the things it combines, in terms of it being philosophizing, preaching, speaking truth to power and basic communicating. It's a good way to talk back to the world.

I think the future belongs to the comedic polymath. It belongs to the person who can generate the most good material in the biggest variety of ways, whether it's sketches or stand-up or songs or tweets or television or films.

Someone like Bethany Frankel goes from being, like, 'some lady' to a star with arguably as much charisma as anybody else on TV. I personally find that riveting.

What I love is getting a new joke, or a premise like a sketch idea or a movie idea. That's the best feeling for a comedian.

You know, like, real paying attention and real observation and deep thought and deep consideration can be a bit, you know, miserable-making.

Here's the thing about standup directing: not that hard. As I said on Twitter one day, or maybe it was Instagram - sorry, I want to keep my platforms straight - it's essentially the same five shots over and over again. Seven if you're ambitious.

When you're in a friend circle, you all kind of talk the same way. And it's hard to do on-the-fly radio edits of yourself.

If you're into social justice it's hard not to be on black people's side.

I can always tell the demographic that will probably recognize me - white dudes, sort of skater-y hip hop white dudes, and working class black dudes.

I think anything is possible if the jokes are good.

People doing rhymes that are nonsense - nothing can make me laugh like that.

I don't really have a process. I just get agitated or aroused by an idea in the world, and then I want to give my rebuttal.

Why marry myself to an entire album? I don't have to. If I download four songs from somebody on an iTunes sojourn, that's about as good as it gets.

I don't think people understand what comedy is supposed to do. We will observe things, we will make fun of things.

There were some things I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about depression in public, I wanted to talk about being in the shadow of people I've dated and people I worked with publicly.

Black audiences are probably the toughest for me to make laugh. I've gotten pretty good at performing for them, but it's still a challenge.

I know from doing stand-up, I don't want to do a joke that I don't trust.

I find that I like what I like. I like a strong melody, I like an inventive structure and I have to like the singer's voice or I have no interest in it.

Whoever is saying the joke is my biggest priority.

The fear of public speaking is a primal fear. You can train your body to not be crazy when you're doing it, but it truly is a primal fear.

It wasn't surprising to me because I've had the conversation with him personally, but Will Smith is more interesting a guy that you could ever capture in a movie or TV show.

The thing about comedians is, we're generally pretty smart. So, if we can be smart and funny, that is the victory.

With '3 Mics', there's nothing I'm talking about that's too hot button.

I just don't believe in the old definition that a fan of music is: I find a band, I listen to all of it and I pretend to like stuff that I don't like. Now if I don't like it, I just go, 'I don't like this.' It's way fairer.

Sentimental is not bad, but it's probably the most likely to go awry. It's the hardest to do and not have it end up being 'Forrest Gump' or something. Maudlin - I just don't want it to be maudlin.

3 Mics' has gotten me fans who actually like me. Now they have a sense of what I'm like, so I get to talk in a way that I really want, and it's fun to go on the road.

I just love well-organized, very serious nonsense.

You can say whatever you want, but there's going to be consequences to it.

It wasn't so much figuring out my voice comedically, because that was always pretty clear. It was more about performing and being a good, watchable performer.

I think the best black screenwriter is Quentin Tarantino.

You know, I liken it to - when you write a joke for somebody else, it's like you - you know, like the Wile E. Coyote dynamite plunger, where he pushes the plunger down and then you see the fuse go then there's an explosion in the distance? That's like writing a joke for somebody. When you tell the joke, you're in the explosion.

Like, I feel like I'm funny, despite the fact that I keep getting rejected by people less funny than me.

I needed to be more self-determining, and the most self-determining thing you can do in comedy is stand-up.

Like, your body has to get used to being in front of people. Like - and you have to be like - you have to be kind of a ham, you know? Like, the thing about writers is they're generally self - comedy writers - self-loathing, sort of play small. And as a, like, performer, you have to think like a comedy writer but act like a performer.

I always say to Blake Griffin that he has a better comedy career than I do.

I love the fact that I can make a podcast in my house and tens of thousands of people will hear it. I also like that it's gotten rid of a lot of gatekeepers.

I think anyone can write about anything that they have knowledge of and exposure to.

I get music from odd places that I assume are fairly typical at this point. I'll just go on iTunes, go to EDM and just look at the Top 100, or I'll go on the Beats app and look on the playlists that are sort of curated.

'Jersey Shore' is one of the best shows of all time. They had so many hooks.

The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.

If you just want money and tax cuts and stuff, fine - just stop acting like you're moral.

You're supposed to not like the 'Austin Powers' movies because people ruin the catchphrases. 'Austin Powers' is so funny.

The Berlin Wall comes down in '89, so then there's basically a vacuum of who was the enemy and then Fox News comes along in '95 and it becomes Democrat versus Republican. Now people on the right are fed a steady diet of anti Democratic party propaganda so they believe Democrats are the enemy and they will not believe anything.

In true, narcissistic fashion, when my father was diagnosed as a narcissist, he called us all up individually to tell us, and he did it with true pride.

The biggest problem in America is most people believe poor people are poor because they are lazy.

My entryway into hip-hop was - my biggest introduction was obviously like, you know, the Def Jam, Run D.M.C., Beastie Boys, like, that conglomerate.

With most specials, even the best comedians will tell you they could have cut 15 or 20 minutes out of it.

People don't like doing podcasts.

America doesn't have poor people, they have temporarily embarrassed millionaires: meaning there are people who are poor for now but that's all about to end when 'blank' happens, or when the number comes in, or when the invention takes off.

Steve Allen was on Johnny Carson one time - I looked for it, but I couldn't find it - and he read the lyrics to 'Hot Stuff' by Donna Summer like a poet. He read them very seriously. I was maybe 8, but it killed me.

I'm not the easiest dude to work with.

It's way more fun to tell jokes for an hour than it is to sit in a room and bash your head against the wall trying to think of sketches.

I think the only op-ed columnist in 'The Times' - where I read all of his stuff - is Paul Krugman.

I haven't watched 'Half Baked' in 17 years, since I was editing it. It's like looking at an old picture where you have bad bangs or something.