A Quote by Paul F. Tompkins
When I started stand-up, the people I admired most were the people who were the most themselves onstage.
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Part of my evolution has been to learn how painful most people's childhoods are. They grow up not liking themselves, not loving themselves. Ask people if they were lovable the minute they were born, and watch them sit back and have to think about it. One lady said, 'I suppose so.' That's painful.
Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn't change them. most of the time, they couldn't change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.
When people ask what were the qualities of Bobby Kennedy that they most admired, it was first that he was tough. Second, he told the truth and third, he stood up for the little guy.
It's interesting to me that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia, and in the marches, people were singing 'Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.'
The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of sensational productivity growth: new products were springing up all over the place, and most of those new products and new methods were developed by people who started their own companies.
There were not that many people who were willing to come out and stand up for Muslims or stand up against the abuses of the Bush administration. That was post-9/11, so I think there was a lot of fear at the time about exactly what that meant - were they unpatriotic if they stood up?
People don't understand it, but the most intense occasions in the House of Commons were the ones I enjoyed most. When events could go either way and you could find yourself out of a job by the end of the day, those were the times when you were most on a high.
When I try to explain to people the big influences in my life, or at least when I first started, the most important ones were my friends who were also writing songs and were typically four or five years older than me.
If we think of Albert Schweitzer, Ghandi, Lincoln, we feel that the people who were the most outstanding in the this world are those who have given the most of themselves.
I did one touring show with Horatio Sanz. We went to, I think it was Iowa State University, and we were in this field house, so people were sitting on the floor. It started out with 2,500 people in there. We delivered the most mediocre improv, and it went from a crowd of 2,500 to 250 people in the course of 45 minutes. It was grim.
My best friend Jerry started a boat-washing business, and it was one of the most critical experiences of my life. I got to meet a lot of people who were entrepreneurs. My parents were schoolteachers, and I was now meeting people who owned companies. I realized that if this guy can do it, why can't I?
The 70s were a wonderful time to be young. I think most young people at that time were pushing the boundaries, asking all sorts of questions of society, of life and of themselves. They were very politicised. It was part of the air that we breathed.
I was always around people who were in the business from the time I was an absolute baby. I grew up in New York City, and my parents, my sister, and I had a house on Fire Island, and they were part of a set of people that were all close and friendly, most of whom were involved in show business in one regard or another. So it was always familiar to me, and I kind of enjoyed it.
There's so many ways to do stand up, and I think, for awhile, people weren't really maximizing the freedom of it. We were all kind of doing a similar kind of stand up, and I started to see some original voices come out of Boston.
In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery.
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