Ezra Furman Quotes

Sometimes the best way to make 'em laugh is to show 'em how you honestly feel.

I think comedy stems from being honest, often painfully so. I hope I can achieve that perspective in my own life and also have fun.

You shouldn't get too close to the truth, because then maybe you stop being funny.

I don't just try to be funny.

I don't think it's wrong to make fun of some of the stuff that we think and we do.

We have to be able to poke fun at ourselves.

I'm a funny guy. I want people to laugh. I laugh at myself, I make fun of myself. But at the end of the day everything that I say has a message in it.

You have to be so honest in comedy.

Nobody can make more fun of me than I already make of myself.

No one wants to be pretentious about what they do or take it seriously, because that is just weird.

You can be funny and say what you mean; these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Some of the best jokes came from people who meant it. See: Pryor, Bruce, Carlin, etc.

It's occurred to me I need to laugh at myself more, and that I don't need to be some sad folk singer all the time. I don't want to be the queen of pain.

I think comedy has to come from a real place. It has to come from an honest place.

In comedy you have to be willing to not take yourself seriously, you know? I take comedy really seriously, and so to take comedy seriously, you must not, you cannot, ever take yourself seriously.

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.

A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

You can pretend to be serious; but you can't pretend to be witty.

To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true... I've never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it.

I've always littered my songs with jokes. You might need to dig a little deeper to find the humor, but I would totally object to being some kind of distraught personality. I've never tried to attach myself to that.

Most of my songs make fun of myself.

I do sarcasm really poorly.

People often can't separate, or can't understand, that to be funny is to be serious; it's a way of pulling people in and not scaring them off. I think a lot of the funny stuff, underneath it, there's a deep anxiety going on.

It's not good for comedy to be like, 'Thanks for liking me.' Being popular is poison.

I definitely prefer working in comedy over drama, but at the same time, when it comes to comedy, I tend to prefer comedies that have a great sense of truth to them and that come from an honest place.

I don't fancy myself as a very sarcastic person in real life.