A Quote by Stephen Merchant
A lot of stand-up comedians are actually very insecure, and they come on slightly battling the audience. They want to be the superior person in the room, sneering at the world. That can be very funny. But to me, what's more interesting is that the world is on my shoulders, and it's pushing me down.
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My parents are actors as well, so I grew up around that world. It was always a very romantic, mythical world. They did a lot of theater, so to me an actor was getting to come backstage and dressing room mirrors with bulbs around them and trying on people's costumes. It was very exciting to me as a child.
I was always fat and not very athletic. Finally in my junior year I went on a diet. I got down from 220 to 140. It was very funny, all of a sudden I was much more popular. I could get dates with pretty girls who had turned me down before. I was the same person! It was a learning thing for me, part of growing up. I realized it was all so artificial.
I like to think that I'm a really strong, tough person, but I'm not. I'm a very, very needy person. I'm very insecure. I'm very impressionable. But, there is a side of me that is very put-together, very strong, very capable and very opinionated. It's the two sides of myself.
I perceive the world in fragments. It is somewhat like being on a very fast train and getting glimpses of things in strange scales as you pass by. A person can be very, very tiny. And a billboard can make a person very large. You see the corner of a house or you see a bird fly by, and it's all fragmented. Somehow, in painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos. I have a very pretentious idea that I want to make life, I want to make sense out of it. The fact that I am doomed to failure - that doesn't deter me in the least.
The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is: "Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out." And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one.
I think a lot of people who maybe know me from one video or come upon me randomly think I'm stuck-up because I'm blonde, or the way I come off, or from something I might have said. But everybody who actually knows me knows that I'm very down-to-earth and super chill.
I grew up very introverted and I'm still a very introverted person, so to me it's about constantly just pushing and pushing out of your comfort zone because that where you're going to grow the most.
I thought comedians were the funny guy in the common room, not understanding that the flaws in my personality were actually the funny things about me.
In a world that keeps on pushing me around, I'm gonna stand my ground, and I won't back down.
The years between leaving school and actually becoming an adult are very important years. You make a lot of choices as to the type of life you want to lead and what type of person you want to be. There were so many people who had opinions of me, a lot of them very unflattering, that it was hard to make up my mind about who I was supposed to be.
We live in an uncertain world and we want to believe that what a man is and what a woman is-I know that. And people don't want to critically interrogate the world around them. Whenever I'm afraid of something or I'm threatened by something, it's because it brings up some sort of insecurity in me. I think the reality is that most of us are insecure about our gender. They think, 'Okay, if there's this trans person over here, then what does that make me?
It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.
I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.
I can't judge the characters I play, because it's for the audience to do. What I can try to do is to understand and embody what were they going through? How did they make the decisions they made? That to me is a more interesting way to approach something, rather than saying this person is a villain and that person is this and - because it's not very interesting to play that anyway.
The stand-up world is very, very hard. There is a lot of competition, and there are not that many venues, and there are not that many opportunities. You have really got to stand out.
I just like to build. Don't get me wrong: I think stand-up is great, and when someone like Richard Pryor or Steve Martin does stand-up, there's nothing better in the world. But I don't want to watch a lot of stand-ups for two hours. So I can do 45 minutes of stand-up and then say, 'Can we do something else now?'
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