Peter Sellers Quotes

It's easier not to make a particular joke in case it offends. But every joke will offend someone, and I've always believed that the audience is bigger than one person. The danger is that things will become bland.

Funny is funny, and it can come in 8 billion different shades and flavors, so I think it's silly to kind of limit it.

That's one of the great things about comedy: we can - and should - say the things that other people aren't supposed to say. If we didn't do that, if we didn't push against those limits, we'd just be standing around onstage and yelling.

In the 1990s, it's OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It's acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke... about gays. The gay community is the last sacred cow in this society.

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.

Comedians have a huge carte blanche and the ability to get away with saying a lot of things.

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

Whatever happens in life can happen on the stage, but as a comedian you should always be clear what your target is. It's fine to be gratuitously tasteless if that's what you are intending to do. It's that old line: I don't defend what a comedian might say but I defend to the death his right to say it.

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.

Comedians second-guessing themselves is scary. Poor taste is not a crime and we can't forget that.

I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.

The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.

When I was 16 or 17, I saw Lenny Bruce being taken to jail. They took him off stage because he talked about race.

Comedy can always be taken the wrong way. If I do a bit that is meant to diffuse racism or sexism, I'm not going to avoid it on the chance that a small portion of the audience might take it the wrong way.

Political correctness? In my humor, I never talk about politics. I was never much into all that.

Obviously I don't want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct - I'm not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappear, and you just have science fiction.

The success of my comedy has been not being afraid to touch on subject matters or issues that everyone else is politically scared of.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

If artists didn't exist in the United States, conservative politicians would have to invent them.

When people think of the American Identity, they don’t think of torture, they don’t think of illegal wiretapping … or many of the other things that have been happening in the last 6 years…. Singers are like the canary in the coal mine. When things are happening, they must be sung out.

I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

You can't hold comedy back, because it needs to be exposed.

People use the guise of art, and artistic expression, to do all kinds of hateful things. It's like Trump and everybody else using the guise of humor to say hateful things, the excuse being, 'I was just being funny.'

One of the jobs of comedy is to expose hypocrisy. When you look at countries like Iran or North Korea that don't have freedom of speech, we who do should push it as far as we need to.

In the end, censoring a comedian's jokes is on par with censoring 'Huckleberry Finn.' Now, I'm not comparing myself to Mark Twain - he had much wavier hair and a slightly thicker mustache. But when you deny an artist the chance to explore his art, you're forcing your beliefs on him.