A Quote by Vic Reeves
The comedy I do on TV came from me being at art school and seeing Gilbert and George films, thinking they were hilarious. I was trying to do that, a sketch version of art, and it ended up on TV.
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Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.
A rap is a tweaked version of comedy, because comedy came first. People weren't spitting before they were doing comedy. Comedy has been relevant for years. It's the same art form, pretty much. Discovering that and applying it, I think that has made my stand-up better.
I went to an art high school in Washington D.C., and I majored in visual art. When I started there, I was horrible - couldn't draw, couldn't sketch, couldn't do anything. I remember at one point I came to terms with the fact that I had to work my ass off to do well and that's exactly what I did. I drew and drew and drew, and it worked - I ended up getting the award for best artist and went on to apply to design school because I loved it so much. I think it really speaks to the idea that you can in fact excel at whatever you put your mind and your heart to.
When I was a little kid, I was a huge fan of 'The Kids in the Hall.' They were like my boy band. I was obsessed with sketch comedy. Being raised Christian, I was somewhat sheltered from the more radical high-art world. So to me, comedy was where people got to express themselves in an abstract way. It was a big part of my growing up.
I had always drawn, every day as long as I had held a pencil, and just assumed everyone else had too…Art had saved me and helped me fit in…Art was always my saving grace…Comedy didn’t come until much later for me. I’ve always tried to combine the two things, art and comedy, and couldn’t make a choice between the two. It was always my ambition to make comedy with an art-school slant, and art that could be funny instead of po-faced.
A lot of it came from seeing how kids responded to the character. They would dress up and some would reenact the sketch in its entirety and it got us thinking about those Halloween specials we'd see on TV as a kid, and we just thought 'David Pumpkins' would work perfect for sort of a throwback nostalgic Halloween special.
I was never that kid who grew up in New York and was always at the arthouse watching important films. I was the kid who grew up in the Midwest where there weren't any art films, and I watched TV. And that was really the medium that affected me and that I fell in love with.
I'm part of that generation that grew up watching TV, and being an actor was all about being on TV or being in films.
To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.
Living through art is a better way to live - not necessarily making art, but being surrounded by art. I think it's just as banal as trying to show my version of the beauty in the world. It's about beauty at the end of the day.
TV is a language all its own, a land of one dimensional stereotypes that destroys culture, not adds to it. TV is anti-art, a reflection of consumerism that serves the power structure. TV is about demographics.
I went to art school... but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum, so people would ask me to come and work for them.
I was really bored in school because I couldn't do what I wanted to do, which was act. And then when I was 14, a local TV company came to the youth theater, and they were auditioning kids to be in this new TV series.
I used to do stand-up when I was in high school. But I was also making beats for this rap group, and when we got a record deal, I sort of stopped doing the comedy and focused on the music instead. When that ended, I decided to go back to school, take broadcasting, and start my show on public-access TV.
I took a break from TV for about three-four years. During that time, I had to let go of some of the best shows that were offered to me, as I wanted to focus on films. It was believed that if you are seen too much on TV, you won't get films.
We were seeing TV becoming increasingly cinematic, with stuff like 'True Detective.' And 'Game of Thrones' opened up 'genre TV' and showed it doesn't have to be cheesy.
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