Baron Vaughn Quotes
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I can't do Christopher Walken impressions anymore, thanks [Barack] Obama.
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As you go on you realize "Okay I know how to get laughs but am I saying things I want to say? Am I writing jokes that I like?" You get to a point that is that so you move on.
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The alphabet was invented in Iraq, so it's a cool place.
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The Middle East is gorgeous, but again, politically, I would not want to go there.
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When you're a young comedian the first thing you want to do is get a laugh.
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Basically I made her [ Sara Pocock] listen to funk music for a good month, a nonstop stream of George Clinton. I was talking about the art from...if you look at the art from George Clinton albums there are two or three artists he worked with...I made her listen to my album too so all the images are from jokes I made. I wanted it to look like the thoughts that are coming out of my brain which is what comedy is anyway.
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Sometimes you're not getting the laughs you want or at the place you want but that doesn't mean it's not funny. It means you haven't explored it enough.
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I like being around people who are good conversationalists. When there's a give and take, and you are heightening an idea, exploring it together, that is my favorite thing in the world. I love a small dinner party - let's say six people, max, where everybody's having the same conversation. That's my favorite thing in the world.
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There's a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.
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The audience is your first collaborator with the material. If that makes sense.
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Netflix is very protective with their information .
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I was processing a lot of different things and kind of looking over a lot of things and rethinking my childhood.
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[Harold Pinter] is a British playwright and is one of my favorite writers. Harold was very obsessed with when memory becomes mythology, that at some point you change your memory to fit who you believe you are.
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I just got diagnosed with tendonitis which is such an insulting diagnosis. Just point to my shoulder and say "old."
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Every laugh is not equal. They come from different places. That's sort of the challenge I go towards, making sure the laughs are for the reasons I want. It becomes a back and forth dance with the audience.
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The audience is not your boss. They are your collaborators and when you collaborate with someone you don't have to listen to everything they think or say.
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First of all I love Empire Records and That Thing You Do and all the movies he did from that era. He hates when I bring that up.
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When it was announced that Michael Keaton was going to be Batman, everyone was mad. When they announced that Val Kilmer was going to be Batman, everyone was mad. When it was announced that George Clooney was going to be Batman, everyone was mad. When it was announced that Christian Bale was going to be Batman, everyone was mad. And everyone was mad about Ben Affleck. So every single incarnation, people are going to be mad; you just can't do anything about it.
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I think Batman Returns is right for riffs. I love it but it's the ultimate Tim Burton movie. There is so much that happens that's crazy and there are a ton of things to riff.
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I am a big fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He's the voice of science and scientific thinking in the United States and the world. He's the most visible proponent of scientific thinking, and he's very unflinching about it. He knows that it's correct and vouches for it in a very intelligent and very firm way, which I really appreciate.
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You can fit two United States and maybe a third one into the entire continent of Africa, but on a map we make the entire continent of Africa look like the size of the United States, which is why a lot of people don't know that Africa is a continent. They think it's a country because it looks as big as we do.
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Sometimes I have young comics that ask me, "What should I do when I meet an agent or a manager and they ask me stuff?" And I say, "Well, they always usually ask, 'Where do you see yourself in five years, 10 years, 15 years?' And it's good to have an answer for that."
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There are a bunch of different movies I feel that way about. However, there is a debate because as you may know after MST3K ended there have been things like Cinematic Titanic that are the children and the grandchildren of this way of dissecting movies and making fun of them and in a way celebrating the absurdity of those movies as well. There are certain movies that sort of fit into the MST3K paradigm which is hidden gems, these weird horror/sci-fi/fantasy movies.
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You're the hero of your own story. So it's interesting for historical revisionism to happen. I had let go of my own story from my own childhood and whatever anger I had and I began to see it from a very different place. It's really easy to be like "This thing happened to me! Look what they did to me or are doing to me." These are such powerful ideas and it's so easy to hold onto them forever.
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Anyone who buys a ticket can just go in there, and I don't like everyone, so I always see concerts as like, I'm going to get punched, I'm going to get elbowed, I'm going to get stepped on, get spilled on, someone's going to hit me with their body odor or something.
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Shrimp are the insects of the ocean. They're bottom feeders. So they're delicious, but they're the bugs of the sea.
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Lily Tomlin...I used to watch reruns of Laugh-In and she was always my favorite part. She's this very unique talent and the way she does things has been a very big influence on me.
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Being around Lily Tomlin has been great, how she treats people, how she handles herself, how she goes about interpreting her character or deciding how the comedy should work.
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I'll get laughs in the places I don't want them and that makes me realize the direction I want to go in. I don't mean to get too deep into comedy here.
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I remember reading in a comedy book very long ago when I first started, a person said there's a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.
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