I love Brody Stevens. He's one of my favorite stand-ups.
Brett Gelman
Dinner is often a very celebratory environment, a very safe place, a time to reflect and let the day go and enjoy good food and good wine. It's a very peaceful moment during the day. A great dinner can change your day around.
I love 'Seinfeld.' That was not alternative. You can't get more in mainstream than that.
I'm Jewish, so it's like I'm not totally white. I'm, like, gray.
I don't see how I ever could have thought that having an all-white crew for a special about race would be OK.
Gilbert Gottfried, I think, is just the most underappreciated comedian in the world. I think that he doesn't get enough credit for how funny he is.
I think the thing that really started setting my career on the course that it's on is when I did '1000 Cats' on 'Funny or Die Presents' on HBO. That's what I feel like kind of got me a little bit more into the system.
There are not many people that I respect more than rappers. I'm a huge fan of hip hop. It's incredible, one of the most influential things to me. It takes real genius to be able to do well. It's a very deep art form.
What doesn't kill you, if you use it to make yourself stronger, then you will get stronger. But if you let it beat you down, then you will be weaker.
I've never gone to a bachelor party, where I didn't, no matter how much I loved the people there, hate them so much for their disgusting behavior.
I love taking on roles that other people have written for me just as much as I take on writing - just not as much of a, 'Oh, that guy.' I want people to start saying, 'Oh, Brett Gelman's new piece is coming out. That's a Brett Gelman movie. That's a a Brett Gelman show.'
At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I'm acting with.
I love Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, but if I'm not in the right frame of mind to watch their work, I feel upset after watching it.
Deeper things, heavier things happen to you as you get older and makes you more open.
We have to laugh at how hard life can be and how screwed up we can be at times.
I honestly don't see how anyone can view the GOP and the Right as anything but evil.
I like to challenge the audience. I want people to feel discomfort.
We spend so much of our lives doing math problems on how to feel good. It's such a waste of time. You're going to feel how you feel. It's hard to just set up a way that you're going to live your life that is going to be just endlessly happy and healthy. That's impossible.
All of my favorite directors are coming from a singular perspective, and I think that's been very lacking in film.
I'm an actor, and I want to play flawed characters, and I'm a writer that wants to write flawed characters, trying to let something out and hoping people relate through that or have fun experiencing the story.
'Dinner' is completely scripted. There are some improv elements, but I'm not interested in pranking people. It's more like a play than standup.
Nobody wants to see a woman onscreen who is a wreck. That is pure, unadulterated, systemic misogyny.
I think that all the Mel Brooks' company of actors is just tremendous. It was a crazy group of genius people. All of them taught me what kind of actor I should be and what was funny.
I'm a straight white man - I have options, and I'm not blocked on a consistent basis when I wake up in the morning because of my race, sex, and orientation.
Use your imaginations, and use your empathy. If you don't do that, you're limiting yourself as an artist, and you're hurting the world.
Really go out of your way to hire women, people of color, homosexuals, transgendered people - go out of your way to hire them.
Even if somebody is maybe a little less qualified, you can bring them in, you can teach them, and it will also make your work better because you'll have different perspectives. Even if somebody is less talented, they're coming at it from a completely different perspective, and that helps your work.
I'm not someone who shies away from darkness being funny. I think that life is very dark at times, and there are things that are very funny about that.
I've definitely had the long stretches of time in my personal life where I've felt an intense loneliness and a desperation to feel something real and to have something that truly meant something in my life.
I've always been an actor. I've always approached all my comedy as an actor.
Every white liberal straight man needs to take action and work at unifying all peoples of our sides and stop making women and people of color and the LGBT community fight it out themselves and just pat them on the back. We have to take active roles in supporting them, defending them, and hiring them.
I think that liberal straight white men really need to stop patting themselves on the back for what they think they think and actually take a look at their actions.
I get to live a privileged existence.
Talking is not action. Don't just look at what you say. Look at how you socialize.
A lot of times, comedic actors are discriminated against. People just assume they can't do something other than what they do, rather than thinking, 'Oh, wait - doing what they do normally is really hard.'
Jason Woliner and I have been longtime friends and collaborators.
I'm not a fighter. I don't like to get beat up.
A crazy action only works if there's a great reaction.
Loss is a part of life, unfortunately, and you've got to just deal with it.
I have Janicza solely to thank for my growth as an actor because she saw in me something that other people just weren't seeing, and she knew that I could go beyond the normal, funny 'make-em-ups' that I was doing on an improv stage.
I'm all for free speech, and I don't need my viewpoint to be the only viewpoint.
Don't be proud of me. Do something to make yourself proud of yourself.
We live in a country whose government and many of its people support white supremacy and disintegration of basic human rights.
I like women around. I like female energy. I find it very important.
There's a certain order to network shows that doesn't exist so much in cable, which is, you know, if you want to change a line you've got to talk to the writer.
It's actually just as cool to be on television as to be in a movie, and nobody's ashamed of this back and forth.
I love Adult Swim. They give you so much artistic freedom.
I think that's something that people don't realize enough about when they get into comedy - it's not just about sitting back and observing and saying something funny.
I've always been an actor, even when I was doing improv and my own version of stand up.
I think it's good news that cable television is so, so supportive of the Louis C.K.s, the Lena Dunhams, the Matthew Weiners, and the Vince Gilligans. There's just so many people fearlessly making their stuff, you know?
