A Quote by Paul Provenza

When I was a young comic just starting out, I was very cautious, as I didn't want to alienate people. George Carlin's bravery became a benchmark. I became perfectly fine with alienating some people in the audience. That just comes with the territory.
George Carlin is kind of my template now because George Carlin before was straight laced regular comic and he had short hair, a tie, suit, nightclub guy. Then he said screw it, let his hair grow, just started telling what he thought was the truth. So that's what I'm trying to do.
As I became George professionally and everyone called me George, Yog became the name that people who knew me from before started to use. It became more valuable to me.
My wife and I have long discussions about [George] Carlin, and we refuse to accept that he died an atheist. It's just, confounding. When I talked to Kelly [George Carlin's daughter] about it, she said that George Carlin once took her at about 12 years old and said, "I've figured it out." And he says it in one of his specials sort of - he goes, "We're all energy and we're all connected. That goldfish you have, you, me, that boot laying in the street, we're all pieces of light to a giant electron.
That weird dark energy - when I was a kid, I didn't know what it was. I just had to 'thrash it out,' as my mother called it. I became quite intolerable, creatively and artistically, with other people. I wanted nothing more than to be part of a group, and yet I couldn't help alienating people.
In the beginning, when I was doing my shows, I was incorporating a lot of Spanish, just trying to be a Latino comic instead of just a comic. Now I try to make the show as broad as possible... I don't want to alienate people. I want to make it so everybody can follow along and everybody can relate.
That was exactly why people didn't want to give us any kind of life, because we were threatening their status quo, and they just didn't want to have room for girls playing rock 'n' roll. It bothered them. First, people just tried to get around it by saying, "Oh, wow, isn't that cute? Girls playing rock 'n' roll!," and when we said, "Yeah, right, this isn't a phase; it's what we want to do with our lives," it became, "Oh! You must be a bunch of sluts. You dykes, you whores." That's what it became. Then it became a name-calling contest.
The average age of the Jazz audience is increasing rapidly. Rapidly enough to suggest that there is no replacement among young people. Young people aren't starting to listen to Jazz and carrying it along in their lives with them. Jazz is becoming more like Classical music in terms of its relationship to the audience. And just a Classical music is grappling with the problem of audience development, so is Jazz grappling with this problem. I believe, deeply that Jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say to ordinary people. But it has to be systematic about getting out the message.
We'd started out as a garage band and it became like a huge band, which was fine. But everything was so magnified, drug addictions, personalities, it just became too much.
When politicians began to see that every last thing that they did in public could be broadcast to a mass audience, the fact that the stakes were so much higher now that every moment became fraught caused them to become more cautious, and the consultants very gradually but inevitably became literal reactionaries.
That became a big time in comic books because it's when people were starting to break out into independent stuff, the market was getting choked with speculators and everybody was trying to do their own trick covers.
When my mum passed away, I was very young, and I became very introverted and very quiet. I became very anxious about what people thought about me.
Many people, especially young people, have started listening to sitar since George Harrison, one of the Beatles, became my disciple.
I played old men back in drama school. It's just now that I'm drawing level with the age of the characters I play, but I'm fine with that, and I've certainly never envied people who became hugely famous when they were young.
I became popular very young. I viewed myself as just a young actor trying to figure out how to do well, and, you know, making mistakes and learning and growing.
Some people will know exactly what they want to do at a very young age, but the odds are low. I feel like people in their early- to mid-20s are very earnest. They’re very serious, and they want to feel like they’ve accomplished a lot at a very young age rather than just trying to figure stuff out. So I try to push them toward a more experimental attitude.
Rock became an incredible commercial success, people just became bored with serious music, and it was forgotten.
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