Subversive Content Quotes

Well, 'Problematic' was the opposite of a show that was nostalgic and a light fluffy look at life. We were literally trying to kick a hornets' nest, and I don't know how effectively we did or didn't do that.

My show on MTV, as outrageous as it was, it was also making a point, which was, 'Look at what we're doing here. This is something that you don't see on television every day, because you're not allowed to do this on television.'

Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.

Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.

Most people don't see the edginess in my work. They think it's all fantasy and whimsy.

My standards are based on shows I like, like 'Girls' or 'Arrested Development.' And they're all shows that are groundbreaking. I guess in the back of my head, I think, If you're not being groundbreaking, then what are you doing? If you're not being ballsy and honest and vulgar, then what are you doing?

I really love making movies. I just have this yearning in my stomach to go back and somehow subversively screw up television a little bit again.

If I sit down to write a young-adult novel, then I'm going to write either to the punch-pulling expectation of what I can't do, or I'm going to go the other way and think about what can I sneak in to be 'down with the kids' - which would be excruciating.

An underground hit didn't make any money and it cost a dollar to get in.

When you're allowed to tell stories with ambiguity and darkness and things that are still unresolved, that's the dream scenario as opposed to having to fit into a more procedural mode or something a little more conventional. That's not what's working on TV right now.

People have always wondered if I'm trying to push the envelope when it comes to my cinema - they keep questioning the visual graphics and the controversial content.

Sir Hugh Greene is the man I hold most responsible for the state of our country today. For 11 years hardly a week went by without a sniping reference to me. And he gave access to anyone who was prepared to say anything morally subversive.

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.

My songs is hard stuff which politicians don't want on them radio station because they still want people to live in ignorancy.

Within TG, we liberated the use of the lyric forever. There was no longer a taboo on what could be discussed in the conceptual format of a song.

It's hard to describe to people how terrible it was when you could only watch cartoons at a certain time in your life. But no, I would watch all of them - the Warner Bros. cartoons and the Bugs Bunnys and then the Tex Avery stuff. Looking back on it, they were so incredibly subversive for their time. You'd think, "Oh, they're just making jokes and this or that." But when you watch them as an adult, you think, "Oh no, they were talking about some pretty deep stuff."

I like old Disney films that have an edge to them.

We don't want to make little pop culture ephemera or confections, that sort of thing, and so 'ParaNorman' like 'Coraline' has something meaningful to say.

The best kind of television should mess with your head.

I think that in the realm of commercial, popcorn cinema, the amount of message or smuggling of ideas you can get in there is quite limited. Like, if you think you're going to make a difference or change anything, you're on pretty dangerous thin ice.

Putting something in a movie because it's in the news doesn't make it political to me. If you're not going outside the same old, same old, if you're not pushing the envelope, then you're not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.

It's absolutely amazing to me that anyone allowed their children to watch 'The Ren & Stimpy Show' in the '90s; it's dark, gross, nihilistic, and absolutely bizarre.

Hairspray is the only movie I made that's subversive, because they're doing it in every high school in America. A man's playing a woman, and two men sing a love song to each other.