Bo Burnham Quotes

I know the fashion is that everything is fair game [for comedy material] but I don't believe that.

I've always been fascinated by the difference between the jokes you can tell your friends but you can't tell to an audience. There's a fine line you have to tread because you don't know who is out there in the auditorium. A lot of people are too easily offended.

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.

Larry David finds a way to make jokes about the Holocaust. It would never have occurred to me. And it was funny.

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.

I believe comedy should be free to go anywhere. I believe that there is tasteful and untasteful, I think they're very close to each other, and it's how you handle it tonally. But I'm an equal opportunity offender.

I can't do comedy that is cutting and vicious. If I knew I'd said something that was going to make someone feel bad, well, that supersedes everything.

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.

To me, racist jokes are not funny. I am politically correct, in a weird way. I like to push the boundaries that are politically correct.

Hopefully the only things off-limits are crummy jokes, but being a standup comedian, I know that's not always the case... You know it when you have to take a shower afterward.

I don't want people to leave the show being upset. So if I am trying to do a new joke, and sometimes I will talk about things like gun control or hostile massacre and I notice people being upset I will change the direction.

There's no such thing as too far. If it works it's funny, if it doesn't work it's too far, it's stupid. Really there's no such thing as "too far." You're joining the politically correct when you use words like "too far." You don't want to join the army of politically correct.

People wince when something is in bad taste. They laugh when it's funny. If it's too dirty or wrong, they won't laugh. But if it's a big, dirty, smart, funny laugh, they love it.

Here's what I'm afraid of. I know a lot of comedians, friends of mine, who just got into the 'Doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter. They're just gonna laugh anyway.'

I'm not just gonna go after the black Jesse Jackson they all want to make fun of, but I know the wrong people are gonna laugh at that. I don't want to play to that crowd. I don't.

Religious humor is not really my area, so I probably wouldn't do anything about that, or politics or something.

I think you can make fun of anything except things people can't help. They can't help their race or their sex or their age, so you ridicule their pretension or their ego instead. You can ridicule ideas - ideas don't have feelings. You can ridicule an idea that someone holds without hurting them.

I draw the line at filth and crude language. It seems to be an excuse for not being funny.

I try not to apologize, especially publicly. That's a slippery slope, because I'm a comedian. If you take anything I'm saying too seriously, then you shouldn't be paying attention in the first place. If you find me offensive, don't follow me.

Do you think it's a good idea to be sarcastic about slavery?

I've always liked outrageous comedy and pushing the envelope.

Ricky Gervais has jokes about people with disabilities, but do I think that's a healthy thing? Yes, I really do, because he's chosen his targets very carefully, and he's thought about what he's doing.

I think jokes on colour or body shaming shouldn't be made. It's not funny to crack such jokes.

That's a problem I have a lot of the time with humor in music, where it just kind of stops at the obvious level of: 'Hey, isn't it something that's in bad taste?'

If you can help it, don't be rude to people. When you're rude about someone and the audience laugh you can't deny that it's a bullying laugh.