Jerrod Carmichael Quotes

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

I never thought of myself as a comedian. That is a label - make me laugh. I want to make you think.

Doug Motel makes 'conscious comedy'. He makes me laugh, and he makes me think.

My ultimate goal is to make people laugh and make them think, which isn't always an easy task.

Good satire hopefully provides thought-provoking conversation.

In all of my work I'm trying to create a dialogue, in which I want to provoke the recipients, stimulate them to use their own imaginations. I don't just say things recipients want to hear, flatter their egos or comfort them by agreeing with them. I have to provoke them, to take them as seriously as I take myself.

If you go back to 'Pretty Fly,' it was a very popish song, but there was a satirical side to it, and I think that's cool. I like the idea that it's making people think just a little bit.

Irony is a great tool to deal with things. It's an intellectualization, a way to go above things, which can work.

I don't like comedy that I think is bad comedy, where people are trying to be sick for the sake of it, where there's no intellectual point behind it. I like stuff that's got an underlying point of view.

Comedians are sociologists. We're pointing out stuff that the general public doesn't even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

This is going to sound pretentious, but I like comedy that addresses something I find either worrisome or interesting in my life.

Comedy, in my opinion, is best when it's in the gray, and you're kind of pushing people's thoughts that they sort of had but never vocalized. And I think a joke is not good if someone says something, and immediately people are clapping because they're like, 'Yes! That is how I feel as well!'

I believe comedy is a really good lens to filter serious issues through. If people are laughing, they don't necessarily realize until they stop laughing that they just took something in that's going to start a conversation.

I like some of my stuff not to be particularly funny. It's supposed to be amusing, entertaining or thought-provoking, like a curiosity. If you put it on in front of 500 people in the Odeon they wouldn't laugh. They shouldn't laugh.

Sometimes it's difficult to laugh at certain things but comedy can help.

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

That's sort of what I wanted to make fun of a little bit with Don Jon. And I think oftentimes, if you're going to talk about a sort of substantial topic like this, the best way to do it is with a sense of humor.

After wisdom comes wit.

Satire is at once the most agreeable and most dangerous of mental qualities. It always pleases when it is refined, but we always fear those who use it too much; yet satire should be allowed when unmixed with spite, and when the person satirized can join in the satire.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.

It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

One of the great things about humor is, you can slip things past people with humor, you can use it as a sweetener. So you can actually tell them things, give them messages, get terribly, terribly serious and terribly, terribly dark, and because there are jokes in there, they'll go along with you, and they'll travel a lot further along with you than they would otherwise.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

I'm a deep thinker when it comes to shallow no brainers.