Sergio Leone Quotes

Everybody who's ever influenced me, from a Richard Prior to a Whoopie Goldberg to, you know, any of the voices that have resonated with me as a performer since I was a kid, you know, you couldn't really say that their work didn't have some element of political commentary in it.

I like to make broader strokes with politics in my work.

Entertainment is not politically neutral.

Chris Rock does the political thing really well, but that never worked for me.

But I think theatre in a repressive society is an immensely exciting event and theatre in a luxurious old, affluent old society like ours is an entertaining event.

Politics is developing more comedians than radio ever did.

It is difficult to make political art work.

I was always a big fan of Charlie Chaplin movies. I love 'The Great Dictator' and 'City Lights.'

If you're watching a comedian on television and he's making a political point, I would say he's gotten too serious.

I just love movies, so suddenly, you're political about movies, and that's dark. It's just not fun when something you love becomes calculated.

When I did 'Esquire,' I did a lot of celebrity covers, but the celebrity cover was Hubert Humphrey as a dummy, sitting on Lyndon Johnson's lap and aping his feelings about the war. I did celebrity covers that made a difference in what was going on in American culture.

I've always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy.

You know, I'm a comedian the same as Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. We all came up the same way. The three of us have interest in politics; I call us fundits, we're fundits! We're not pundits!

All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

All literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature...

I will not have the Federal Theater used politically.

Comedy has become, I think, a very important branch of public intellectualism. But it still ain't Washington.

People use the guise of art, and artistic expression, to do all kinds of hateful things. It's like Trump and everybody else using the guise of humor to say hateful things, the excuse being, 'I was just being funny.'

I feel like comedy is important, and I think political satire can be really important.

The 'Dead' films allow me to talk about things that a drama, say, won't. 'Dawn Of The Dead,' which was set in a shopping mall, is on one level about consumerism; 'Land Of The Dead' is a response to Bush.

There's such a rich history in 'SNL' of political humor, and I think audience members expect that from us.

People go, 'Oh, Trump must be good for comedy,' and I go, 'Ehhh.'

Film can do lots of things: It can produce alternative ideas, ask questions, just record the reality of what's happening, it can analyze what's happening. Of course, most commercial films are controlled by big corporations who have an interest in not doing those films.

I request the audience to not mix cinema with politics.

We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.