A Quote by Reggie Watts
Good comedians are great philosophers.
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A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.
Comedians are thinkers. The best ones are akin to philosophers, in my opinion.
You have comedians who just do jokes, and they're called comics, not comedians. You have comedians that do bits - a person that has a lot of jokes that have a beginning, a middle and an end, but it's not a real story. And you have someone that does great stories, the one that blends those things together - that person is doing comedy.
Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.
When I first started, stand-up comedians writing novels was thought of as a great encroachment on the art form and people got very angsty. But comedians are storytellers so it's really a hop, skip and a jump.
You can be good at comedy, which means you'll be given spots, but beyond that it is luck that pushes you to the next level. There are loads of brilliant comedians who haven't had the breaks, and plenty of average comedians who have.
I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise. After all, all people - not just philosophers - have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better.
There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.
I'll take anyone I can get that will pay money to see me. And if there's more of me in the world, people who think they're good people and comedians who have a good message or whatever, then that's great. If there's some kind of balance there that's good.
We mustn't complain too much of being comedians - it's an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed - that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.
The French have never produced a great philosopher. Great wine maybe, but no great philosophers.
I try to stay with it and I try to stay in contact with comedians and just keep comedians in my life 'cause comedians are their own species. If you get away from them, especially as a comedian, I think it's dangerous.
I did get good enough to get on HBO's Young Comedians Special, but I certainly wasn't the person who got launched off of HBO's Young Comedians Special. That would be Ray Romano that year. I had some semi-intelligent jokes, but when people would see me, they would think, "Oh, that's a good writer." No one would ever have said, "Oh, that's a good performer."
There's no books out there articulating what the alt-right is. If they're such great philosophers, and they have such good ideas, and they're on the vanguard of intellectualism, where are their books? They don't have any.
'2 Dope Queens,' it was just a way for us to showcase female comedians, showcase comedians of color, showcase LGBT comedians, and shake up the landscape and be like, 'Hey, there is more than just what is out there.'
After the comedy boom of the '80s, there was a certain formula that comedians had to do and could do in order to be successful touring comedians, and those were mainly observational comedians who had a very strict structure of what made an act, and I think it was very performance oriented.
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