A Quote by Andre Leon Talley
What's that show? 'TMZ'? They stand there and say, 'I've got this on this person.' The focus on celebrities can be detrimental because people could be thinking of other things, but it's a part of the culture and it's what sells.
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Celebrities say they date other celebrities because they have the same job. But I think they just like dating famous people. Celebrities attract each other, like cattle.
I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their [bleeping] Representatives are.
I don't like reading things that people say on the Internet because I know so much of it is not true. I don't want to waste my time worrying about what other people are thinking. I just want to focus on being able to do cool projects.
School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn't want to learn. Math is just the worst. To this day, I can't concentrate on it. People always say, 'You should have tried harder.' But actually, I cheated a lot because I could not sit and do homework.
People say a lot of mess about celebrities. In the social media world, celebrities are able to go online and see nice things and horrible things written about them - but these people on the Internet wouldn't have the guts to say it to their face.
Before I got into stand-up, I was a really quiet guy who had all these thoughts, all these things I wanted to say, but there was never anyplace for me to say them because my mom would look at me and go, 'You better not say what you're thinking. You better not.'
And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.
I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.
When a show becomes successful, people want to hire the people on the show for other things, and we would all try to do other things, but we could never end up doing them, so casting directors were just like, 'Enough of them! Don't touch the 'Glee' kids, because you can't use them!'
When you are part of a massive TV show like Strictly,' it's not just about the professional dancers and celebrities taking part, there could be young or old people out there who are watching and they might also be inspired to take up dancing, and I find that so special.
I think online, like on YouTube and stuff, people could pretty much say whatever they want. They have no filter in their brain, because no one knows who they are. They're totally anonymous, so they could say whatever they want. But when they're in person with me, they wouldn't say those things, because I can actually see who they are.
I knew I wanted to be in comedy but the path of least resistance was doing stand-up in folk music clubs where I could get on stage. I guess you could get up no matter how bad you were and you didn't have to audition. You just got up. Everything else required an audition and if you auditioned for a TV show, you would stand in line with a hundred other people. But at the clubs, it was okay just to get up, so that's why I started in stand-up.
Comedians are - at the end of the day, we're just a bunch of people that lack a little bit of - we're very insecure, and we want to be loved and liked by everybody. And you know, I could check my Twitter and there could be 150 people that say wonderful things. There'll be one person who says something negative. And all we focus on is that negative.
I sat with five of the "Mothers of the Movement." Of course I'm hyping the show, but I keep telling everybody this part is not hype. After a while particularly in the case of Sybrina Fulton, they've become celebrities and people forget that they've become celebrities because of the death, the murder of their child. So I wanted people to see the burning desire for these women to live their child's legacy, to not let their child have died in vain, so they're fighting to stop the violence.
There's something about that idea of looking up and hoping, and thinking, 'I'm good.' Some things, like show business, are absolutely subjective. People look at a TV show and think, 'I could do that.' And maybe they could do that. But they're not.
I feel a lot of personal responsibility to undo the negative stereotypes. I know that it's not coming from a bad place. It's coming from an ignorant place. I can sort of be an ambassador in a subtle way to say, "This is what I am: a comedian, a show host, a writer." It will still always be part of the conversation and people will want to focus on it because there is a culture that is so embedded that if you have a disability, you're someone to be either admired just for living, or be pitied for having to struggle.
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