Bob Saget Quotes

I believe it is important for comedians to know who came before them.

I really understood a lot more about comedy after listening to Bill Hicks, who died at 32 years old. He's probably the best comedian who ever lived. Although you can't say that because of Carlin, Cosby and Pryor.

It went from Bob Newhart to Flip Wilson to Bill Cosby to Richard Pryor to George Carlin to Cheech and Chong. I had all these records.

You look at Richard Pryor and Robert Klein and George Carlin and Richard Lewis - those guys were so smart, they were the thinking-man stand-ups.

Everybody wants to be Doug Stanhope; everybody wants to be Bill Hicks - and those are great people to aim for, but they had the fundamentals down. They knew how to be funny.

I don't mind personal insults, but when you insult the jokes that I tell you're insulting Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Burns and Allen, Trevor McGee and Molly Picon.

I mean, 'Kids In The Hall' is the reason I have any career at all.

At the end of the day, I want to be part of the same conversation as Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappelle, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.

There's Dick Van Dyke and John Ritter, the two greatest physical comics of our generation.

When I get some budding young comic who'll come up to me and say, 'What was it like to do it in those days?' I try to be as gracious to him as Stan Laurel was to me.

What they call 'alt-comedy' now is basically what comedy was like in the '80s. People tried different things, and everybody went to the clubs; there was no other place. Then somehow, the clubs became infiltrated by Dice Clay and Carrot Top types.

When I first started out, 'Time' magazine did an article on what it called 'the sick comics,' and they were myself, Shelley Berman, Nichols & May, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl. We were considered 'sick.'

When someone can, on a worldwide level, make someone laugh, that's power. A lot my heroes - Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, the Wayans, Adam Sandler - they get it. And I've always felt that Andy Samberg is the future of comedy.

When you ask people who their favorite comedian is or favorite African-American comedian, people generally say Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Eddie Murphy, or Richard Pryor. Redd Foxx gets left out a lot.

People ask me about my influences and I say all the comedians in the 1970s and Dave Allen was a massive influence and a very big influence on a lot of modern comics.

If I can make you laugh and learn, I want to be like George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Sam Kinison and Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle. I want to be of that ilk, I don't want to just make you laugh, I want to make you think.

I know for myself, every now and again on HBO, they'll show some of the young comedian specials from the '80s and early '90s, and it's just fascinating to watch those comedians - some of whom are people that are world-famous, like Chris Rock or Judd Apatow - to see the jokes that people had, but also, the way everything looked.

If you're watching comedy movies, go back and check out the Marx Brothers in 'Duck Soup,' or Buster Keaton in 'The General,' or Laurel and Hardy or W.C. Fields or whatever - and see what pure talent really was, so that you can see where it came from, and then you can sort of gauge it from there.

These guys Steve Harvey and Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac claim they're the Kings of Comedy. They may be funny, but they ain't no kings. That title is reserved for Rudy Ray Moore and Redd Foxx.

I was in love with a lot of people, because I was a student of the game of comedy - Carol Burnett, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Don Rickles, Red Foxx, Moms Mabley - who gets no credit, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Kirby. I loved them all, and I used to just take a page out of all of them.

George Carlin was great right up to the end of his life. But Richard Pryor was probably the best, most gifted stand-up comedian who will ever live.

Anyone in the comedy world knows that Horatio Sanz and Chris Parnell are two of the funniest guys around.

I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn't do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all.

Show me one guy or woman as funny as Rodney Dangerfield or as good as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Joan Rivers. There are a lot of good comics out there, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics.

One of my greatest inspirations for stand-up was Jonathan Winters. He was a genius. One thing about him, and also Lenny Bruce, is that they were in the tradition of the one-man show. That's why Richard Pryor was so great, and George Carlin, too. They prowled the stage, they used voices, they were really talents.