Jasper Carrott Quotes

In the '90s, comedy was at a very low point, but these days, you've got people like Hannibal Burress, Ron Funches, Maria Bamford - people who can play any club, anywhere.

'Saturday Night Live' will always be this amazing, powerful behemoth, but it's also not the only thing happening in comedy anymore.

'The Simpsons' is like Charlie Parker or Marlon Brando or Richard Pryor: Comedy couldn't go back to the way it was after 'The Simpsons' came out.

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.

There's so many ways to do stand up, and I think, for awhile, people weren't really maximizing the freedom of it. We were all kind of doing a similar kind of stand up, and I started to see some original voices come out of Boston.

There really is no Johnny Carson anymore. There is no one place a comedian can appear and explode.

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

There was this whole middle time that only Chris Rock came out of, you know, 10 years ago it was Chris and a few other people, but that's about it. Chris is in a class of his own; I don't see another comedian who I put in high regard as him.

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.

I was also a big Woody Allen fan. When I got into college I listened to Lenny Bruce but it's taken me years to put him into context historically and really get what he did.

25, 30 years ago, that meant something, they were making some money. And they were doing all sorts of comedy, screaming at the audience, basically crowd control. And then there was the whole urban comedy scene.

I mean, I guess I started during the comedy boom, so it was literally like, on Sunday you could decide you wanted to be a comic, and on Monday, you could be on stage.

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.'

Comedy clubs were something that came to pass in the '80s, but toward the end of that, in the early '90s, people started doing comedy again in alternative spaces.

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.

Black people who want to do comedy go into standup, where our heroes opened a lot of doors. Improv doesn't have a ton of heroes that you can look to.

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.

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.

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 still like doing stand-up now, but it's not the same. It used to be that I was out there with five other comedians. Now I usually just do it alone.

I think comedy is on an organic upsurge right now because when I started, it was 1978 at The Comedy Store and Letterman had just stopped emceeing his morning show.

When you talk about modern comedy I think there's a big three right now, and that's Louis C.K., Bill Burr, and Jim Jefferies. I don't think anyone's doing it better than those three guys.

Comedy today is not what it was years ago. It's always changing, in particular to female comics. No longer are certain subjects considered to be a male preserve. Women can talk about sexuality and their bodily functions and it can be very, very entertaining. It's changed the impact of comedy acting.

There hasn't been an original voice in stand-up since Sam Kinison.

Young stand-ups, we ought to do comedy in George Carlin's spirit, in Richard Pryor's spirit, in Jackie Gleason's spirit, in Lucille Ball's spirit, because they did it with the spirit.