Jason Gann Quotes

I know a lot of sad people who aren't comedians.

I have an inability to enjoy things, but that's why we're in comedy. If we were happy, we wouldn't be funny, I guess.

The glass is always half empty. All good comedians are manic-depressive.

I can do comedy, so people want me to do that, but the other side of comedy is depression. Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don't realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.

During the Great Depression, when people laughed their worries disappeared. Audiences loved these funny men. I decided to become one.

There is a cliche that probably has some anecdotal evidence on the side that comedians are very depressed people, but that's because no one is ever going to seem as funny in a normal conversation as compared to when they're up there onstage in the spotlight making a huge audience keel over with laughter.

You never have a comedian who hasn't got a very deep strain of sadness within him or her. Every great clown has been very near to tragedy.

I'm always trying to find the next comedian that just gives me something a little funny to combine with all of the depressing news that I'm processing.

You learn to laugh at yourself, and you also lean on comedy as a crutch to kind of take the edge off because comedians often are self-deprecating, and they cross lines that they shouldn't. Stuff like that brings a smile to my face every once in a while when needed.

Look at Sam Beckett. Most depressed man who ever lived, but he sure was funny.

A comedian is not funny unless he is taking his demons out for a walk.

Bert Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.

Comedians on the stage are invariably suicidal when they get home.

If you don't laugh, you're going to cry and people are crying. That's why I guess you have lots of people like comedians to keep us laughing.

A comedian is simply a different kind of therapist. A comedian is a psychologist and a psychiatrist rolled into one. Except I can't prescribe medicine. (You still need a doctorate, which is bullshit.) Okay, so I'm not like a psychiatrist. Fine. But I'm still like a psychologist (except I can't diagnose or treat mental illness).

There was a darkness, a melancholy, that people had trouble accepting. Maybe now, it would work better.

I think I have a dark view of the world. I have to make everything funny, otherwise it all seems so sad.

I've had days when I go in my bedroom for 24 hours at a time. I call them my Cilla Black days, and they're literally black days. It's like the old Boomtown Rats song 'I Don't Like Mondays.' You just want to shut the whole day down.

I'm nuts and I know it. But so long as I make 'em laugh, they ain't going to lock me up.

We may smile at these matters, but they are melancholy illustrations.

I love stand-up comics, particularly those who have embraced podcasting.

I always say that the stand-up world is the arena of the unwell, and it is.

I was a big Jay Leno fan, so I was sorry to see him go. But my number one person that I watch, she's not late night, but in terms of the comedian genre, is Ellen DeGeneres - love her.

Yes, I've seen Louis CK. I wouldn't in any way make a degrading remark about Louis CK, but the question is do I think anyone is funny? And the answer is not too many people. He might fit right in there.

I'm a big fan of Louis CK - I think he's a master of standup.