Harry Shearer Quotes (33 Quotes)

In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.

The last president we had was the smartest guy anyone could remember and he did the dumbest thing anyone has ever seen in the White House so go figure.

I'd been freelance writing all this time, and I then got involved in a radio broadcast which was a series of satirical newscasts every day.

Well Washington DC what are you going to do. They think the capitol steps are the state of the art in comedy. You try to drag them into the 20th century let alone the 21st and they refuse to come with you.

When it moved to Friday night it disappeared, when they find another show that can do what The Simpsons does, they will be delighted to do cancel The Simpsons.

The music was born on the pianos of the front parlor of the brothels.

We have been on the air long enough we've gone completely around from being denounced by conservative Christians ... to myself being the subject of cover stories in two Christian magazines hailing the show as the most moral show on TV, ... Inside the Actors Studio.

I think it's the distance between what we're supposed to think their job entails and what their job really entails.

Bush is a frat boy in the White House but we've had that before. But I wasn't one of those people that was threatening to leave the country. By the way none of those people have left the country. Alec Baldwin is still here.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. 'Oh My God'-- that's all you can say.

I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years.

It grew out of the fact that so many record executives had seen Judith, and had said, 'She's great, we know she's great, we love her, we don't know what to do with her,'

That was Embassy Pictures, they went bankrupt shortly after This is Spinal Tap came out.

I didn't have a lot of independent film connections. It really took until the digital film revolution came along that I realized that I could do it myself.

We're very pleased to be on a show which is known and loved around the world.

You sit around as an artist and think, 'I can do this better than these guys,' whatever the record company isn't doing at the moment. So somebody called our bluff and said, 'OK, you're the record company.

You have to do real acting, not just do a voice.

I'm at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show - so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know.

We were never on strike. The day that story appeared in Variety newspaper, I was at Fox doing vocal services for that week's show.

I realize I'm going against the grain, doing a fully produced CD of comedy sketches and music at a time when the only comedy recordings are basically standup. But it's the kind of comedy records I grew up on and ... (have) always been kind of my favorite.

When I did that first movie, it was the introduction to all the set-up time and the waiting time that's endemic in motion pictures, and the repetition.

My parents didn't want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood.

What we hope is to break Judith as a major artist. Secondly, I'm going to put my television stuff, both from 'Saturday Night Live' and HBO, on DVD for the first time, and package it with a CD of comedy material -- mainly from my radio show ('Le Show') about the era of anchors who are leaving or have left Brokaw, Rather, Koppel. And then to go down the line, Judith has a lot more material.

Democrats always like to brag that their guys are smarter than the opponents and Republicans always like to brag that their guys are more moral than the opponents. But if you're looking for morals in politics you're looking for bananas in the cheese department.

You know, radio was a really easy way to do the shows. You'd come in, do a read-through, there'd be a few rehearsals, then you'd come the night of the show and do it in front of the audience and then go home.

A bunch of different kid roles on the Benny show. I worked for him for eight years, so I played Jack as a kid and other kinds of parts as well.

Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties.

I was a Political Science major.

When (Pryor) took the 'N' word and repeated it in so many contexts and made you laugh at it so much, by the end he had drained that word of its power to sting and hurt,

If you can sit through The Aristocrats and laugh at it, you come out the other end realizing that to be made to laugh at it robs the telling of it of the power to shock and sting. It's why (word-abusing comic George) Carlin is in the movie. It's basically a lesson about words, how we can give power to words and take it back. Comedy lubricates that transaction sometimes.

...I was one of the first Cinemascope children...

I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines, nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.