Harry Shearer Quotes

I never go perform somewhere alone. I've done that since day one. I've always taken other comics with me.

I consciously decided to make both 'Sammy's Hill' and 'Sammy's House' more of a warm satire and not go the route of writing a dark and bitter book about D.C.

Most modern comedy is crap.

I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.

I grew up in Chicago and was a huge fan of 'The Second City', so when I moved to L.A., I was looking for anything that resembled that... then I started 'The Groundlings', so I went to a show and it was very much like 'Second City'. I was so impressed that that same night I went backstage and I went up to the funniest person there.

My comedy is kind of a counteraction to some of the comedy I don't like. Or things I don't like.

When we left university, in the late '80s, one of the guys had been to the Comedy Store in London, came back very excited and suggested we set up something like it. And so we did.

If I say 'political comedian,' then people think you're talking about you, the Senate and Congress, and what's going on in Washington D.C. If I say 'comedian,' people automatically assume that you're a comedian who talks about how his wife won't listen to him and that dummy down at the mechanic who wouldn't fix his car.

The world's so big, it's hard to pick one best friend. I like everyone in Venezuela, but in L.A., I hang out mostly with my comedy friends. Guys like Paul Scheer, Rob Riggle, Owen Burke, Ed Helms, Seth Morris - we all kind of came up together doing comedy in New York.

My jokes have definitely changed. 'SNL' has helped with that, because when you're on 'SNL,' you have to kind of pay attention to the news. I feel like my material has gotten smarter now.

My least favorite joke right now is Donald Trump.

I think Trump is terrible for comedy. A lot of people say he is great. He's not. You can't joke a joke.

I'm not going to name any names, but let's just say, I want to do jokes on Donald Trump so badly, and I have no venue. So right now, I'm just dry Trumping.

I met a bunch of people and they said, "We're gonna do a show [Second City]." So we would buy the theater out and do a show, and we did that for five years and we ended up becoming popular. It was before sketch comedy was hipster-time - when you would hand out a flier, people would roll their eyes. Now it's kind of cool.

I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce.

Comedy is not pretty.

The latest political rumor, North Korea ruler Kim Jong Il is close to naming his successor. Yeah, he said the only person with glasses big enough to replace me is Nicole Richie.

There's no such thing as post-feminism. It's like saying post-democracy, excuse me, what does that mean? We're nowhere near equality, so the very idea of post-feminism is ridiculous. The same people who 30-40 years ago said the women's movement is not necessary, 'it's going against nature, my wife is not interested' [are] the same people now saying 'well it used to be necessary but not anymore.' The very invention of the word post-feminism is the current form of resistance.

President Obama announced this week that he is going to start sending out his own messages personally on Twitter. And today Anthony Weiner said, “It’s a trap, don’t do it!” But President Obama’s tweets are a little different than Anthony Weiner’s. When Obama sends out pictures of something obscene, it’s the unemployment numbers.

Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.

In my mind, I'm hilarious, so I would love to do some comedy. But, I'm not exactly sure my perspective is a healthy one.

The 1930s - a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way.

CNN said that after the war, there is a plan to divide Iraq into three parts: regular, premium and unleaded.

When Cameron's Conservatives come to power it will be a golden age for cyclists and an Elysium of cycle lanes, bike racks, and sharia law for bike thieves. And I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity.

You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise, the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.