A Quote by Paul F. Tompkins
I long ago vowed, as Batman did before me, never to make fun of stuff that people couldn't help. Because it's (1) easy and (2) not fair. There are plenty of things that people have complete control over that are worthy of ridicule.
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I think you can make fun of anything except things people can't help. They can't help their race or their sex or their age, so you ridicule their pretension or their ego instead. You can ridicule ideas - ideas don't have feelings. You can ridicule an idea that someone holds without hurting them.
There were people I knew that came to college and had never drank before, and never partied, and maybe got a little bit too carried away with it when they did finally get out of the house... I feel like I got that stuff out of my system when I was sixteen and knew to balance things - but at the same time - it's not like I was out getting my medical degree. Playing in a band, you can still have plenty of fun!
Now I don't care what people think. I did some internet campaign where I was the voice of a puppet for Ford Focus ads because they were paying me a lot of money to do it, it was a very easy gig, but then the bonus was, it turned out to be an enormous amount of fun. I've learned not to turn my nose up at things just because they're not what other people might consider cool to do. Because I've also matured enough to know, you never know where these things are going to lead, and you never know what the experience is going to be like.
What I do is, I make fun of people and I make fun of myself and things around us and exaggerate things. And I'm never mean-spirited. See, the word insult means some guy who's a real unkind human being. But I don't do that, because otherwise I wouldn't be headlining all these years, thank god, and all these people showing up to see me.
I want the pleasures of the real exploitation movie, and exploitation has changed so much in 40 years. Plenty of people grow up with this fantasy of, "We're going to do it like Roger Corman did it," as that sounds so fun. If you make something small, goofy and exploitative, it's nowhere near the guaranteed moneymaker it might have been 40 years ago. If you look at the way the world works now and money is made, it doesn't seem that fun. Maybe that's just a mental block I have and I need to get over that and find that corner where you can make money and still have a good movie.
Animals have always been a passion of mine, being able to help them because they can't help themselves, and I think that people have treated them so badly over the years and it's just not fair. It's something I feel like I can help make a difference.
Stuff doesn't matter - boats, cars, fancy things don't matter. What matters, what will matter to me, is the love of the people around me, and did I take a chance? Did I seize an opportunity to do something for people with the talents that I was lucky enough to be given? Did I make a difference in the lives of people who needed me?
My mom is just someone who's easy to talk to and hang with. My sister, it's always cool to be able to help her out with things. My brother is fun when we're just joking and messing around. And my dad is someone who's helpful with my music and easy to talk to about that stuff because he understands me in that sense.
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.
Frank Sinatra did 'Born Free', Tony Bennett did 'Walkabout,' but you have no control over who does what, really. So you just hold yourself responsible for the stuff you do, and then get filthy rich on all this stuff that other people have done.
I have no control over people's perceptions of me at all and that's one of the things I decided very early on is that I can't control the way other people think of me. All I can do, especially when it comes to my career is go out there and do cool unique kinds of things.
I always think it's absurd when people go, 'How can you have a show about Batman without Batman?' 'Gotham' is plenty fascinating, 'Chinatown' style.
Fair isn't fair, Dean. Like I'm supposed to help you because fair is fair? Try I need you to help me so I wont rip out your spine and beat you with it. I might respond to that, maybe.
Cultivating relationships with people who've achieved what you want to achieve makes the path fuller and more fun. You don't know everything, and that is so okay, because there are many people who want to help you along your journey. I used to think people above me might get jealous because I wanted to do what they did. But no, people are much nicer than that.
I've tried it a couple of times over the years, mainly because the thing Ubuntu did so well was make Debian usable. I always felt that Debian was a pointless exercise because to me, the point of a distribution is to make everything easy. Easy to install, to be pretty and to be friendly and Ubuntu did that to Debian.
Let me just say you could end this violence within a very short period of time, have a complete ceasefire - which Iran could control, which Russia could control, which Syria could control, and which we and our coalition friends could control - if one man would merely make it known to the world that he doesn't have to be part of the long-term future; he'll help manage Syria out of this mess and then go off into the sunset, as most people do after a period of public life. If he were to do that, then you could stop the violence and quickly move to management.
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