'Man Down' is not a serious study of the human condition: it is a balls-out attempt at making people laugh. So nobody in the show can afford to cling on to any vanity, because we're always going to push the humiliation levels.
The "human condition" is always to push forward for the better and economics is the study of that process.
I say if black people don't unite and begin to support themselves, their communities and their families, they might as well begin to go out of business as a people. Nobody's going to have any mercy. And nobody's going to have any compunction about making slaves out of them.
I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.
The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!
Nobody gets any fun out of baseball any more. I guess a kid's crazy not to be serious about it when he's drawing down $20,000 or $30,000 a year, and any smart-aleck gag you try may be your last. But what's life without a laugh?
I always knew I wanted to do comedy. I like making people laugh. I started out young just making my family laugh and trying to make kids laugh in school and getting into plays. I think it's the only thing I know how to do so hopefully it works out.
My advice would be to look at the things you do to make money as ways to inform your work in the end. If our work is to study the human condition, most humans that we are going to be playing aren't going to be artists, so go out and, as I did, learn what it's like to have a 9-to-5 job... Think of it as character study.
People who are mean or unkind or rigid - think about it - cannot laugh at themselves. If we can't laugh at ourselves and the human condition, we're going to be mean.
I'm tired of explaining to Hollywood that people would laugh at me, because I go around America making them laugh every week. Nobody would be offended, nobody would think my leather pants are too controversial.
The future has to do with fear. Don't attempt to come up here. Don't attempt to go forward, you were nobody, you are nobody, and you'll always be nothing, so don't even think about coming here because if you do, something awful will happen to you.
If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.
I have always been down to test what I can do and push the limits of my acting. I have always wanted to try new genres and stuff - but I love comedy. I grew up on comedy, and I love having a good time and making people laugh. But it is also really nice to switch it around and make people think and feel some darker emotions.
If I laugh a couple of times a day, I'm doing good. People think it's their God-given right to be happy, and it's just not. It's something you've got to work at. I like to paint the human condition, and the human condition is not smiles and happy people.
If we walk down the sidewalk of any street in America a significant number of the people we pass by, if we dug into what they're going through in their lives, they're carrying burdens that they don't talk about but they're extremely heavy and painful. And so, one of the secrets of the human condition is that suffering binds people together. And when you go through something agonizing, others who know what you're feeling because they've been through it will so often reach out to you and connect with you, and give you strength and lift you up.
I love doing [stand-up]. I love making people laugh no matter how. Whether it's a commercial, or a TV show, or a reality show, or a talk show, or a special, or a book. However I can make people laugh, that's what I want to do.
Personal humiliation was painful. Humiliation of one's family was much worse. Humiliation of one's social status was agony to bear. But humiliation of one's nation was the most excruciating of human miseries.