Tom Lehrer Quotes

If I think of a joke that's really dirty and I think it's funny I'll try it but what I've found over the years is they just don't laugh. It doesn't work coming out of my mouth so it's like they taught me 'don't do that. Don't go that way or you'll lose me.'

I had an awful joke about Auschwitz I drove everybody crazy with that joke. But that joke makes me feel good. You know what "cuit" means? When something is cooked. It's a joke like that: "What are the birds doing when they fly over Auschwitz? 'Cuit! Cuit!'" It's awful, but it's desacralizing. For me, it's good.

Are they real fires? Or are people just reacting to something? Just because there’s an alarm going doesn’t mean it’s a fire. And I think that people are confusing the two. It’s only a fire when it offends the fans, and the fans turn on you. Tosh has fans, and they get the joke. If you’ve watched enough Tracy Morgan, you let the worst thing go by. When did Tracy Morgan become Walter Cronkite? You have to mean something to me to offend me. You can’t break up with me if we don’t date.

I'm not offended. Lenny Bruce taught me that everything's funny. You can make everything funny. I don't think that assassinations are funny, I don't think you can make fun of ISIS, but almost everything is funny. And If we can't laugh at ourselves, who can we laugh at? So I don't mind ethnic humor. I like ethnic humor. I like dialect jokes. Laughter is a very subjective thing. If it's funny to you it's funny. And a lot of things are funny to me.

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.

The line between humor and bad taste is your audience, in which some people will find everything offensive, and some people will find nothing offensive, but the truth is that most humor originates in what would be called bad taste.

I love Kathy Griffin, I think she's brilliant, but for me, there is a line when I go OK, that's too much.

There was no joke I could make that was too offensive. I can actually remember at least one time where my mother told me something that, I was like, 'whoa!'

I don't care if my jokes are appropriate for a kid.

I like sort of esoteric and weird Twitter jokes. But I actually unfollow people if they make jokes about a celebrity's death within the first two minutes of that celebrity dying.

Vulgarity shouldn't pass off as humour.

People don't understand that when I'm on the show I'm totally relaxed, hanging out, having a fun time, watching videos, and being goofy. Sometimes I say stupid comments, just being funny, and people think I'm a dumb person.

Half the time, you go on any one of these news sites, whether it be a Yahoo or a Google, and one of the top headlines is always, "Did a comedian go too far?" or "Comedian offends." It's like, "Really? Comedian?" A person that's supposed to make funny and make silly and historically was the only person who was allowed to make fun of the king? We're the ones that you're taking seriously?

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

Sure, retarded jokes write themselves. But the spelling is always way off.

There is nothing that's off limits. If people think something is off limits, I make it my business to go make a joke about it; that's my job.

To me, racist jokes are not funny. I am politically correct, in a weird way. I like to push the boundaries that are politically correct.

There are certain things that are probably too mean. I don't particularly like fat jokes. Those kind of bother me. But I guess what I was trying to say is, if I said I would never laugh at this, you could probably dig around and find a situation where I did laugh. I try not to be a hypocrite with that one. I find when there's a controversy about someone saying something offensive, I usually take the angle of, "Well, I don't know if that was offensive; it just wasn't funny." I generally don't gasp, "Oh my God!" I think people have been getting raked over the coals lately.

There's a danger zone if you take yourself too seriously. It's a terrible trap to fall into. I think it's the death of comedy.

A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

My mother was always the one with the dark, really filthy sense of humor. She was a vulgar woman. She used to tell me to do comedy before I even tried it. She was always up for any gag.

I'm not big on fat jokes. That's a little beneath me. I'm not a huge fan of making a joke completely at someone else's expense. Even though I think he does it better than anyone else, I don't love... Well, it's different with Sacha Baron Cohen, but that whole thing where you're "punking" people? I don't like that. I don't like doing it, and I don't particularly find it funny when the joke is on a person who doesn't know they're being set up.

I don't like jokes about sex or bodily functions or drug use or the difference between New York and L.A. I never do any of that.

Trust me when you read the script for Bad Santa 2 I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. I read the script first, and I was laughing out loud and blushing and couldn't believe what I was reading.

I tell very mean jokes.