A Quote by Roy Blount, Jr.
It was easy to make fun of Bush, but it was sort of like shooting fish in a barrel and it didn't really feel all that good because it was so easy to do. I would much rather live under a thoughtful president. Even if it makes it harder to be funny about politics, it makes it more interesting to be funny about politics.
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That word 'funny' always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman - he really tries to be funny. I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I'm sort of reporting.
There's always a source for humor [in politics]. If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny. So it sort of selects itself. It has to. And plus, often something that wouldn't be funny at the time is okay to make jokes about later.
I feel like people expect me to give them easy answers, but there aren't really easy answers. There are only harder questions. And unless we get to the harder questions part, about what this conversation is really about...of course I want an immigration bill to pass. I want people to have a driver's license and work permits and green cards and passports. But this conversation transcends this bill. We're not going to have a perfect bill. This is politics. I feel like my job is instead of giving people easy answers, my job is to actually to ask people to probe deeper.
I don't like to do anything that's mean spirited just because I don't find it funny. I'd rather be the jackass than makes fun of somebody else. It just seems too cheap and easy.
I was very interested in politics in college and was heading to be a lawyer. I have a degree in economics and I was interested in it. I hadn't really gotten super serious about it and I'd done a lot of student politics in high school. I really think it would be interesting and fun and challenging to go into politics.
It's easy to be popular when you don't make the decisions a president makes. And it's easy to be unpopular when you're the president because you're making decisions that at the time might seem unpopular; but when historians sort it out, it changes.
I certainly didn't predict people who spent years actively disliking the band to all of a sudden like the band. That's pretty funny to me, and it makes playing live kind of interesting, 'cos we're doing lots of things that don't really have a lot to do with that record, and even presenting the songs off that record in a way that's a little more muscular and without as much of the sheen, which is what I think part of what people really liked [about Kaputt].
Bad habits are easy and discipline is hard-and “easy” is where people gravitate. A good work ethic requires a painstaking daily effort. Easy typically leads to a life long list of problems but the discipline of having a plan leads to an extraordinary rewarding life. In the long run, the easy way makes life harder and the harder way makes life easier.
It's like in politics: You can have great intentions for the world, but if you're not a good speaker and if you're not the sort of person that people can intimately link with, then it makes it very easy to say, "Well, they're not a nice person."
Politics is dirty. Politics is exciting. Politics is often very, very difficult and disappointing. And I really would rather the world would be a little more like it was when my dad was young, where you knew pretty much where people stood on the great moral issues.
If you worry about making bogeys, it makes the game that much more difficult. You put more pressure on yourself without even noticing it. It makes a difference to take it easy when things aren't going right.
As soon as you start to talk about your own mannerisms, you are screwed. Because if you are aware of your own mannerisms, or beyond that even what makes any one thing funny to people, I really ascribe to that that if you start deconstructing it too much, it is immediately not funny.
I don't trust tragedies much. It's easy to make a person sad by showing him something tragic. We all recognize when sad things happen: someone dies, someone loses a loved one, young love is crushed. It's much harder to make a man laugh-what's funny to one person isn't funny to another.
I don't feel any pressure to be funny at all. I'm funny because I want to be funny. I could sit here and be serious for an hour and you would go away and make me much funnier than I am.
We're wealthy people. We're sitting here in New York, Washington. We live in a fantastically wealthy country. We don't have to worry about food. We don't have to worry about clothing. We wore the same shirt. We don't have to worry about our safety. It's very easy for us to be environmentalists. It's very easy for me to be an environmentalist. It's very easy for me to care about making sure that we protect the forests and the whales, and all that stuff. It's very hard for someone who makes $1,000 a year or some who makes less than $1 a day to care about the environment.
People used to make fun of alternative comedy because sometimes it would be someone being funny, and sometimes it was a crazy man with a flute making no sense. And it's very easy to be like, yeah, that's not really comedy.
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