James Murphy Quotes

Here's my take on Andy Kaufman... For Kaufman, comedy was a skill that was open for examination. He didn't just do comedy, he deconstructed it like it was a transistor set. He pulled out all the wires and switched them around, often in front of our very eyes.

I wanted to do gigs where you've just got mirrors on the stage, and then you light the crowd so they look at the stage and all they can see is themselves. It's just like, "There you go, it's you, you cunts."

I was heavily influenced by Andy Kaufman and Steven Wright.

I dress up as a middle-aged prostitute and do a game show.

I used to be called a post-modern clown. But now, post-modernism is a quaint notion, too.

My heroes, growing up, were people like Andy Kaufman and Groucho Marx and people that very rarely drop the persona.

I grew up in a bit of a vacuum. And as a kid, you see 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' and you're like, 'Oh, it's a cartoon.' There's mixed media. It's funny, and there's stop-motion. But as an adult, you figure it out, how the entire underpinnings of their comedy was poking fun at the rank and file of the British aristocracy and the monarchy.

I do strive to be the Andy Kaufman of TV news.

I really enjoyed doing stand-up. Andy Kaufman was a big hero of mine. I tried to do conceptual stuff like he tried to do.

I don't care if I tell that story and John Roderick gets up afterward and yells, 'I hope you enjoyed the white privilege, mortality comedy of John Hodgman!' That's me!" I'm going to play a sad Handsome Family song at the end and I guarantee you everyone is going to love it because, sometimes, you need a grown man or woman to tell you what you like.

The idea of vaudeville clowns and court jesters is always to show the flaw, to point out what's not working and why it's not coherent.

It takes a surprisingly large amount of intelligence to be a professional idiot.

Ballet: men wearing pants so tight that you can tell what religion they are.

[Comedy] is an escape from illusions. The audience is...thinking, 'This bullshit we see and hear all day makes no sense.'

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

The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.

It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't.

When you're born in this world you're given a ticket to the Freak Show. And when you're born in America, you're given a front row seat. And some of us get to sit there with notebooks.

I am sure the man who powders most, perfumes most, embroiders most, and talks most nonsense, is most admired. Though to be candid, there are some who have too much good sense to esteem such monkey-like animals as these, in whose formation, as the saying is, the tailors and barbers go halves with God Almighty.

Y'see, when you start to lick a national problem you have to go after the fundamentables. You want to cut down air pollution? Cut down the original source... Breathin!

I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.

Stand-up is the place where you can do things that you could never do in public.

As much as "The Lobster" feels like a world we recognize but not the world we live in, it's all drawn in an allegorical way from all the systems that exist.

The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

I've always found relationships, men and women, the fact that they are so radically different, and it manifests itself in so many different ways, and yet somehow we still try to live together and be friends. I find that endlessly valuable as a source of material for humor. Generally dogs are always funny in my opinion. And the federal government - just a relentlessly productive source of humor.