Roseanne Barr Quotes

I think the problems with comedians that are political, and there are some brilliant ones, are the ones that offer no solutions. Not that there's a moral obligation for a comic to fix things, but I like to see a comic that's upset about something and offer a solution. It can be a funny solution. I like to see the thought process.

I think the job of a comedian is to make people laugh, but also challenge them to laugh at things they didn't know they could until now.

I write what I think is funny and I write from a sense of popping a balloon or a sense of injustice, whether it's about yourself, or whether it's about something else. It's my worldview; it doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with it.

I'm a comic, and I'm supposed to outrage and make people laugh, Part of makin' people laugh is to shake up their thinkin'. That's what I came here to do.

The impossible - we are told - cannot be achieved. To overcome the 'impossible,' we need to use our wits and be fearless. We need to break the rules and to circumvent - some would one say to cheat.

I don't want to offend people and I don't want to be mean, but social commentary and comedy for me are part and parcel. I think the greatest social activists are comedians.

I would say most comedians have a very cynical worldview of the way the world can work. It's almost like if you didn't, you couldn't be a comedian.

Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert. Those are the guys I look at who are telling me pretty much the truth. And they throw humor into it which makes it much more interesting to listen to.

Lots of people ask me for advice as if I somehow have found some easy way to create a solution to a problem, and there's no such thing.

The only way we can fly planes and use computers is because people were curious about their world and also skeptical about the things they were told to be immutable, so they figured out other ways of doing things.

Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

The people who fear humor - and they are many - are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.

Good satire hopefully provides thought-provoking conversation.

I think comedy's often the little and the large, isn't it?

Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier's purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr'd, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse.

For me, it's important to elevate the hypocrisy with humor. Then you really are using the humor to elevate the problem, saying this is why it matters, and then saying we can combine the work together with laughing and being around joyful people and helping out. So the comedy sometimes can actually full-on expose the issue, but also it's a gathering tool. It serves a lot of purposes.

I was thinking about comedy and how comedy in many ways opens us up to ideas and really being influenced by Richard Pryor and sort of the way he would use comedy to really speak about larger social issues.

In The 3rd Alternative, Stephen Covey urges us to chart a course beyond the suboptimal solutions to all our crises - beyond left and right, and beyond the many false choices in front of us. The 3rdAlternative is a wise and welcome echo of Einstein's warning that the problems we're facing today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

We all make mistakes. Luckily for us, there are very few mistakes that cant be solved with a suitable application of either lipstick or hand grenades" - Frances Brown

It is not enough just to identify a problem; there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.

Barbara Ehrenreich is smart, provocative, funny, and sane in a world that needs more of all four.

You read something and you know it's not there yet. There's a little section here that... this part's good but that is a little not, it doesn't quite work. That doesn't quite work. That's easy. To say, "OK, now, this is what I think will fix it." That's harder. And most people can tell you what's wrong with something. Very few people can say what they would do to fix it.

I'm not trying to write a bleak and blistering screed against American civilization. I'm writing something that I hope is fun and satirical and full of possibility.

If you are creative enough to imagine a problem, you're clever enough to discover a solution.

Good comedians are great philosophers.