Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.
People need to be peppered or even outraged occasionally. Our national comedy and drama is packed with earthy familiarity and honest vulgarity. Clean vulgarity can be very shocking and that, in my view, gives greater involvement.
We live in a world of communication - everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation.
If you have an embarrassing story, and it's a source of shame, keeping it in just compounds the shame and turns the story into something poisonous. And if someone knows about it, then it can be used against you.
Vulgar and obscene, the papers run rumors daily about people in show business, tales of wicked ways and witless affairs.
What one reads in the newspaper and what one sees on the street are absolutely not the same.
Comedians second-guessing themselves is scary. Poor taste is not a crime and we can't forget that.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
For me, comedy is a day-to-day report on the human condition. It's what's happening right now. I get maybe 20 minutes of my act straight from the newspaper.
Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.