A Quote by John Oliver
It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.
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You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.
I was being trained because I wanted to be a preacher like my father. I wanted to talk about Moses; I wanted to talk about God... I wanted to talk about the apostles, the disciples and all that.
There were some things I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about depression in public, I wanted to talk about being in the shadow of people I've dated and people I worked with publicly.
On the contrary, it's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics . It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!
I'm just gonna talk about being Nigerian-American. I'm gonna talk about being single. I'm gonna talk about what happened to me on the train today. I'm gonna talk about so many other things that, as a comic, you're able to talk about because you see the world in sarcasm.
It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.
For me [in my stand-ups] I do what is from the heart. I do what I relate to, what I can talk about, things that I can define. I don't try to talk about things just because they might be a popular subject. I talk about things I know about.
Growning up I felt incredibly guilty anout my fantasies and the things I wanted sexually. I was like: "Why do I feel this way? I don't understand it, but nobody's going to talk to me about it because we're not allowed to talk about that..."
The truth is, whoever I've dated, if I've ever wanted to talk about them on stage, I've asked them first, and I've gotten their permission to tell a story or talk about them before I do it.
I always wanted to have a young female artist that would tell me the truth about life and not only talk about the good things or the things that were exciting or interesting but also talk about the things that people in general are skeptical to talk about- the bad things that do happen. A good 50% of our lives is things that are happening that we're not necessarily super thrilled about and I feel like that's missing from pop music a lot of the time so my main goal is to be truthful about everything and not just specific things.
All the subject matter I talk about isn't new; all comics talk about the same things. But it's how you talk about them or present them or what you look like up there that makes the difference between an okay comic and a great one.
Oh, my other goal was that I wanted to talk about this area and this time in history. I wanted to talk about growing up in Oakland, a white kid, from this kind of generation of broken homes and listening to hip-hop.
I've always tried to do things a little bit before they were being done by the mainstream. I challenge myself to do that in stand-up also, to talk about things that I'm not hearing anybody talk about onstage and in the media.
I don't hide anything about my life, I talk about everything. I talk about it - all kinds of things. I've done songs about bad experiences, a couple about growing up in the ghetto and being abused, sexually. Being raped. And I talk about it.
If you just had an inspiration at night or with a girl or whatever and you want to talk about it, you don't necessarily want to share it with everybody . . . That's the first thing that made me want to go solo; I wanted to talk about my own things, I wanted to try to be creative [in] my own way.
The part of the strangeness of coming back from the war is the way we talk about it. We try to have a discussion about the war that doesn't turn into a discussion about one political side or the other. I wanted to reach out and talk to people about it through fiction, the way a narrative can draw someone in and ask them those questions.
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