Maz Jobrani Quotes

But the only comparison that I want to Lenny Bruce is that I'm funny. I'm Freddie Prinze, Puerto Rican all the way.

It's great extremes which leads to great drama and great comedy.

My first manager, he had left Germany when he was five, but he would joke about the Nazis. And I'd laugh, but I'd look at him, and he was the first one who told me, 'You know, funny is a powerful thing; it's a wonderful weapon.'

In Geneva, I was seen as an outsider. In the U.S., I was considered Eurotrash. And in London, I'm seen as an American.

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.

Being uprooted from your own culture, provided you take with you the way of thinking and being that characterises the more integrated social culture from which you come, is not as disruptive to happiness and well-being as becoming part of a relatively fragmented culture.

The Irish and British, they love satire, it's a large part of the culture.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

The people in New York - their humor is on a level that goes, uh, very deep, you know?

For me, comedy is a day-to-day report on the human condition. It's what's happening right now. I get maybe 20 minutes of my act straight from the newspaper.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

People find the humor in life all the time. And you have to in order to make it through real life. Like, some things are tragic, but you have to laugh.

George W. Bush has dutifully, if not intentionally, provided Americans with laughs for nearly a decade. He has also made them cry, sometimes for the same reason.

I could always talk about being a Latino and having a Mexican mom and a Honduran dad and being from Honduras. That was always an easy go-to place. But on the other hand, it was a crutch.

When I was 11, I moved to the United States with my two brothers and my mom. We moved to northern New York, up near the Canadian border, from Argentina, and there was nobody there that spoke Spanish, and because there was no internet at the time, not even cable TV yet, I lost the connection with my childhood friends and the culture I had been brought up with for my first decade completely.

I am a comedian and you guys know whatever I say, I don't mean any of it.

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

What I do is, I make fun of people and I make fun of myself and things around us and exaggerate things. And I'm never mean-spirited. See, the word insult means some guy who's a real unkind human being. But I don't do that, because otherwise I wouldn't be headlining all these years, thank god, and all these people showing up to see me.

Comedy is tragedy plus timing.

Round-heads and Wooden-shoes are standing jokes.

I think Georges Feydeau said comedy is just tragedy speeded up.

It doesn't do any good to just be on the side of black people. The funnier comedic position is to be on the side of oppressed people in general.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.