Anthony Jeselnik's Quotes

Every comic went through their Mitch Hedberg phase - the glasses, the hair in the face - and you knew immediately when they were doing it.

I don't think people shouldn't try to be edgy, but you have to take what the audience says to you in consideration.

I enjoyed writing for someone else's voice, but I wasn't very good at it.

I feel like every first episode of a TV show is bad, you know, and it always improves.

I like seeing what the comedian thinks is funny, not just what they think I'll think is funny.

I loved Stephen Wright, and I loved Mitch Hedberg, but they seemed like geniuses you could never emulate. You'd just be ripping them off.

I never knew if I would get my own show, but I knew I loved stand-up.

I would write 100 jokes a day. Most of them were terrible. But I just said, 'I'll write more than everybody else, and that's how I'll get better.'

I'm not the voice of reason; I'm more the guy using these offensive topics as fodder to raise tension in a joke.

That's the worst way you can hear about comedy material: from a third person's blog story that they wrote when they were upset.

Everyone has the same kind of fears; everyone has the same big problems in the world, which is, like, fear of death and 'I hope horrible things don't happen to my family,' but they do. And I think people laugh at them as this great release.

I had written for Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman in the past. Jimmy had a different voice, and different priorities. He couldn't be the bad guy in the joke; he couldn't upset people, really.

I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren't hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they're excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.

I'm not just offensive, I'm very smart about the way that I do it, and that takes a lot of time. People say that young comics shouldn't be trying these things. That's ridiculous. You should try everything and see what sticks.

In the second grade, I would just get bored and a joke would pop into my head and I would have to say it. It was almost like I had some brilliant novel in my head that I had to get down, and I would interrupt class all the time and get in trouble.

On Twitter, when someone would die, I would write a joke. Or if there's a tragedy, I would write a joke and tweet it. That was my thing, and then at a certain point, people started demanding it.

The driving force behind doing everything that I've been doing for 11 years as a stand-up is having problems with authority and not liking to be told what to do.