Moshe Kasher Quotes

Did people think I sounded black? Totally, but that was a marketing tool as well, but also this is how I grew up and these are my influences.

When I was studying comedy in Chicago, it wasn't long after 9/11. There were a lot Middle Eastern comedians who were doing bits about hailing cabs and being terrorists. So the first two years, I didn't do any of that because I wanted to separate myself from those guys. But race is a big part of who I am, and it should be a big part of my comedy.

I remember when I first saw Whoopi Goldberg doing standup, and she was wearing a sheet on her head, basically pretending to be this little white girl with long luxurious blonde hair. Everyone can relate to that. It's an oral history of black women's lives through laughter.

All of us black comedians are trying to be mainstream, but you don't want to lose the edge.

When you hear my records today hear a vanilla sounding artist with no black inflection, although I was trying to imitate what I heard.

Black comics, they only watch Black comedians. You're a comedian; you're not just a Black comedian. You're a comedian. I try to get that through to everybody.

I'm waiting for my kids to grow up and get into the Offspring and look at me like I'm a total candy-ass.

Maybe it's just L.A., but [high school girls] look like men, like they would have kids and s - t.

I don't think it's very difficult to bring a virginal, angst-ridden, hip-hop grunting white boy to the screen. Not that I have any experience with that. I don't know man. I understood where his head was at, because he was this 18-year-old cat that thought he was a man, but didn't really know what it meant to be a man.

I'm admitting that I don't know that to be true, but it does sound pretty good. So a big part of my childhood was affecting black culture and black accents and black music and anything black I was into.

Shakespeare must be a black girl.

Back in those days, all us skinny white British kids were trying to look cool and sound black. And there was Hendrix, the ultimate in black cool. Everything he did was natural and perfect.

When I first started doing comedy, there was no such thing as a room that had black people and white people in it. That didn't exist.

I see other black women imitate my style, which is no style at all, but just letting our hair be itself. They call it the Afro Look.

Just reading that - just reading that a person can be black and still perform in blackface, making fun of black people for a living, and at the same time be a genius and be an incredible entertainer and at the same time be extremely conflicted and feel like - just feel terrible for doing that, essentially, which is what Bert Williams felt, from what I gather, from what I read - all of that just made - was so incredible to me.

I gravitated toward being a funny guy. I liked the radio comedians. I lived in the Golden Age of radio, and the Golden Age of television came along when I was still in my early teens.

It's hard being a white rapper sometimes! When that happens you just need to battle through.

Bob Hope was an entertainment colossus, shrewd and influential well beyond show business. Richard Zoglin's biography captures it all--the public and private Hope.

I'd kind of expected that kids who knew about the Real World wouldn't act like jock dipwads. Guess I was wrong.

When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.

I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

Since we were renamed, and now it feels like 80 percent of the African-American population has the name Washington or Jefferson or some president or slave owner's name. And, I almost wonder is this, like, is this part of a way of taking back the principle of naming your - I might be going too far into this - but naming your kids something of your choice?

The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans.

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

My period as a young teenager when you really listen to music so you can get understand a little bit more about what the music is was, say, 1965 to 1968. I was just lucky to be in those times.