Rob McElhenney Quotes

Television has been the single greatest shaper of emptiness.

The line between humor and bad taste is your audience, in which some people will find everything offensive, and some people will find nothing offensive, but the truth is that most humor originates in what would be called bad taste.

There's a hardening of the culture. Reality TV has lowered the standards of entertainment. You're left wondering about the legitimacy of relationships. It's probably harder to entertain the same people with a more classic form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic genre.

Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay.

Even when I started in 1970, I knew that television was having a negative effect on our society.

Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don't know who that's attributed to. I think it's Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.

I'm a big fan of comedians not having to apologize for anything. Nowadays it seems comedians are always apologizing for being funny.

Pop culture is great, but it can be bad, at times.

It just so happens that people aren't doing comedy about abortion or cannibalism or waterboarding. And that to me doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't aspects of those subjects that are funny, it just means that people are too uptight.

You're not anyone in America unless you're on TV.

Television and I grew up together.

Nothing is really real unless it “happens” on television…Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic – or rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television

People get ideas of how to live or not to live from what you do on television.

I think that we rightly spend more time thinking about and criticising the stuff that is really successful, because we want to make sure that we understand all the ways that it is both a positive and negative influence. It isn't always a bad thing.

I just didn't realize the unbelievable impact Disney films had on American society until my assistant coached me on the stories and brought me up to speed.

I'm a take-no-prisoners type of comic, and I'm lucky because my fans get me and never have a problem with the politically incorrect themes of my act. But I am continually amazed by how a certain section of our society seems to be so freakin' sensitive about jokes.

Movies don't necessarily change culture. I don't know if we know for sure if movies change culture but we know for sure that they reflect culture.

I'm the best you can get. Have you guessed me yet? I'm the slime oozin' out from your TV set!

People have become so literal because they're used to reality-based television.

Trust me when you read the script for Bad Santa 2 I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. I read the script first, and I was laughing out loud and blushing and couldn't believe what I was reading.

For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

Whatever the joke is has to be funny, and not coming from a mean-spirited place. I think some things are totally off limits. If someone's spouse died, or one of their children, I would never joke about that in a Roast situation. I don't have any aspirations towards writing any cancer jokes, and there's some stuff that I think is definitely taboo.

I don't know if you can tell, but I grew up watching a lot of television.

Dark humor appealed to me because it was a bigger laugh than you could get with anything else. Seeing people laugh at something inappropriate with their whole bodies, a guttural, visceral laugh beyond a mere "hah."

The classic comedian says there's nothing that's taboo; if you laugh at one thing you've got to laugh at everything, that comedy is taking people to dark areas and showing them the light.