I know that it's probably not a good idea for a comedian, especially a satirist, to support a public policy group or a politician. This is something I learned only too well years ago when I did a fundraiser for Pol Pot. A few years later I saw 'The Killing Fields,' and I've got to tell you, I just felt like a schmuck.
Al Franken
Minnesotans know the difference between the job of satirist and the job of senator. And so do I.
I've spent my entire career being a satirist.
Comedy to the Senate? Well, there certainly hasn't been a satirist or a political satirist who's done that. So, that really was uncharted territory during the campaign. But I think it's a good thing. Some people thought that it was an odd career arc, but to me it made absolute sense.
The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.
Anthony Trollope
I get very confused about being called a comedian, because when you say 'I'm a comedian,' people expect you to crack a joke. Maybe I use laughter and humour to make people think. I don't know what you call that - a humourist? A satirist? A pessimistic comedian? I don't know. Satirists can be very dark.
Bassem Youssef
The Dark Satirist, like the Dark Knight - that could be a good name for a superhero.
As a comedian and satirist you have to be neutral, because everyone's fair game. Once you show bias, you lose that.
Bill Bailey
There's so much hate that we direct externally that we forget we have our own psychos. But that's the role of the satirist - you have to examine your own country and say, 'look!'
Carl Hiaasen
I'm accused of, and perhaps rightly so, of not being mean enough. I've been taken to task in many a book review; a good satirist has to, you know, has to kill.
Christopher Buckley
I love Washington. I have an affection for the place. For a satirist, I think it's sort of Disneyland. I mean, you know, there's always some inspiration in the morning's headlines.
American voters tend to make their decisions based on a variety of vectors. Professional political satirists employ rather more scientific criteria. Namely: who will provide us with better material over the next four years?
The needs of the nation are not necessarily convergent with the needs of the deadline satirist.
Some critics of my work took the view that a satirist should defer to the finer feelings of his readers and respect widely held beliefs.
David Low
I found that not having a public profile was not hurting the work, and it freed me up to be the satirist I wanted to be.
Garry Trudeau
Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.
Graydon Carter
As satirists, we get to stand on the sidelines of life and comment on what's happening.
Hasan Minhaj
Trump's hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift.
Howard Jacobson
The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.
Italo Calvino
Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation - from the writers of the world's religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists.
Jack Herer
I've always thought that Lewis Carroll himself had a certain comedy tinge to him. He was a guy who was a satirist. He really was a social commentator in many ways and was trying to satirize Victorian society.
I'm not a stand-up comedian; I'm not a satirist.
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
Basically, my mum and dad bought me a CD player for my 14th birthday. They didn't really listen to music at all, but my dad had a couple of tapes that he'd listen to, like Tom Lehrer. My dad was a physicist and Tom Lehrer was like this really weird Harvard class professor, who was really cool because he was also a satirist and pianist.
The political satirist usually votes against their own interests, but the bottom line is that it doesn't really matter.
I think Canadians are great satirists because we sit in the middle of these two giants: Great Britain and the U.S.
I think I'm more of an absurdist than a satirist. I think I'm more of a - humanist? I hate to say it!
I'd rather call myself a mischief-maker, an imp, rather than a satirist. Satirist sounds so self important. Plus no one is calling himself an imp right now. It makes me feel special.
In a weird way, our satirists probably have the most complicated, nuanced views of our politics now - Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver. I don't know what that says about our country.
The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.
If you don't know Tom Lehrer, you should - in addition to being a classical pianist, mathematician, songwriter, satirist, researcher at Los Alamos and, he claims, inventor of the Jell-O shot, he is just delightfully funny and graceful.
I'm not really a political satirist. I don't kid myself. I'm more interested in doing the mannerisms and the personality.
Rory Bremner I have no problem with; he is a satirist, and a very funny one, too.
Bret Easton Ellis is a social satirist; I consider myself aligned with how he does things. Bret doesn't write about that which he loves about the world, he writes about what disgusts him. You'd be a disturbed individual if you came out and said, 'I love these characters'.
In a more intellectually rigorous age, I wouldn't be talked about as a satirist at all. I would just be a topical comedian.
He has the obligation to society that any human being has. I don't think a satirist has any greater obligation to society than a bricklayer or anybody else.
I'm a satirist, so I've got boxing gloves on if the person is worthy of satire. But I'm not an assassin. If that ever happens, it's only because something happened during the interview that got me going, and then I had to translate my feelings to the mouth of the character.
It's true that none of my characters are admirable. But maybe I'm primarily a satirist, and a satirist needs to hold up what's not admirable.
Mike Judge is my Jonathan Swift, and I say that because I don't know any other satirists. But the problem with satire is that it's so easily misinterpreted.
I have tremendous affection for New York and my life, but I'm a satirist at heart. And it's easy to satirize New York.
There is nothing we can't do. So it's just the fact that we're doing topics like that that other people, especially network TV, won't touch, that we're satirists.
It's funny because I think a lot of it is simply... We've never considered ourselves satirists, but because we're on Comedy Central and because we're South Park on Comedy Central, we can do any topic we want.
Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.
