A Quote by Jo Koy
I love storytellers. When I was growing up, my inspirations were watching Eddie Murphy, Dennis Wolfberg, and Louie Anderson. These guys were great at telling stories, and I made that my own style, talking about things that happened to me and trying to make them funny.
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To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.
To me, there were comedies that should go up for Oscars. I think Eddie Murphy in 'The Nutty Professor' was one of the greatest acting performances of all time, but it'd never be recognized that way. They always go for De Niro and Pacino, but Eddie Murphy played seven different people!
I come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.
A Murphy [Eddie Murphy] movie is like a Sidney Poitier comedy - he's that intensely good... He revolutionized acting. He's literally black Brando. Before Eddie Murphy, there were two schools of acting for a black actor: Either you played it LIKE THIS or youplayeditlahkdis. He was the first black guy in a movie to talk like I am talking right now. That did not exist for black actors before him.
So I always respected the guys who were trying to do it on their own without taking a handout from a big organization. They were trying to create their own thing, the DIY style, which is sort of always been my style, kind of a makeshift survival mode and really just kind of forging your own path.
I get some of my ideas from watching my three daughters, but most of them come from my own memories of growing up. I can remember how romantic I was, not just about love, but romance in the classic sense - the romantic ideals: of honor and truth, of loyalty, sacrifice and fairness. Those were the elements that made a story satisfying to me.
I never thought I'd be a comedian. But, growing up, I simply loved watching comedy. The '80s was huge for comedy in the US. Eddie Murphy blew me away with his film Delirious.
My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It's true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.
When I was young, I saw some of my heroes doing it on the telly. We're talking about Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Arthur Lowe, Ian McKellan, Kenneth Williams. These were all guys telling stories to me.
When I first started 'Humans of New York,' I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn't have time to make them anymore.
I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol.
The thing that probably frustrated me and hurt me the most was when there were inaccurate stories written about me or stories that were written that were trying to imply or infer things that weren't true.
Growing up, movies were something my family and, later, my friends and I would stay up all night talking about. The movies I remember moved me and forced you to think about things that made you know yourself better.
I had these cheap alien toys and I made up stories for them. They were space pirates. They didn’t have names so I made up names. These were the first stories I wrote. Even as a little kid I was thinking about torture.
Biggie and Big Pun were the best storytellers of the '90s. I would get wrapped up in the narrative of what they were talking about.
I did an embed in Afghanistan on the Pakistan border in 2008. One of the things you realize when you're talking to low-ranking enlisted men is that no one listens to them. So when I showed up they loved having someone to talk to. That's a real privilege for me. The guys on the ground are the guys I care about. I've had the most satisfaction telling their stories. There is trust and there is stuff that you learn to hold back, especially when you're dealing with younger guys or lower ranking officers. That's different from the top brass who are basically just politicians anyway.
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