A Quote by Tony Rock

When I was growing up, I was really into comedy. I listened to a lot of comedy albums. I loved Richard Pryor, but the comic that had the most impact on me was always my brother Chris, who was in the next room. It was tangible. If Chris could make it, I could try.
Growing up as a comedian the most influential person on me was Jon Stewart. He showed that comedy could have a real tangible effect on the world. He showed that comedy could move the needle of society and that a comic can do real things and make a real contribution.
There are many styles of standup, but the comedians I like are people like Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor. Because Richard Pryor told the truth. Chris Rock. I love Chris Rock. He's funny, but he's also poignant. He's not there just to make people laugh; he's there to make people wake up, too.
When I was growing up, I had more comedy albums than musical ones. George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor - those were my main men.
W. Kamau Bell is in the vanguard of a new era of American comedy for an unsettling, troubling, and strangely hopeful time. Firmly in the fearless tradition of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, & Chris Rock. Comedy as common sense purged of the absurd hypocrisy that is Our America.
I was thinking about comedy and how comedy in many ways opens us up to ideas and really being influenced by Richard Pryor and sort of the way he would use comedy to really speak about larger social issues.
I'd done light comedy. In some quarters, About Last Night... is a romantic comedy. So it wasn't like I'd been doing Sophie's Choice my entire career. But for whatever reason, nobody had really given me the room or the ability to be out and out funny. And Lorne [Michaels] and Mike [Myers] and Chris [Farley] and Dana [Carvey], that crop really helped me do that.
My family is all obsessed with comedy. I grew up watching a lot of comedy in the house. I used to watch Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy with my dad. But my mom is more into slapstick stuff.
The best comedy to me - and again, I grew up with comedy since I was a baby, so I've seen it all - is when you exaggerate the truth, like Richard Pryor did, you understand?
There's not a lot of comics with anything to say. It's entertaining, but when you think of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor or Bill Cosby, they all had something to say.
I'm a comedian. I make comic films and there are certain ideas that occur to me that are comic, with heavy, serious undertones. There are some ideas that are more frivolous to me. The next idea that could occur to me could be comedy about death and famine or something.
As far as stand-ups go, I always loved Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and Sinbad. Basically, I love black comedians because they're the funniest. I wish I were a black comedian, actually.
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.
I'm not a natural comedian, as an artist. I studied comedy growing up. I would watch Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, all day.
In keeping with the theme of "I got my hands on," my brother and I would listen to The Diceman Cometh. That was the dirtiest thing we'd ever heard, and we could listen to that at full volume without fear of penalty, because my mom couldn't hear that either. I wasn't a huge comedy fan growing up, but I definitely listened to Andrew Dice Clay a lot.
As a kid, I loved Paula Poundstone and Richard Pryor. But my mother was a huge influence on my comedy.
I thought if I could do stand-up comedy well enough, I could parlay it back into films - like Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen did. They merged principles of comedy and drama together, and that's what my first film really was, a stab at that kind of comedy.
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