Baron Vaughn Quotes
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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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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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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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The alphabet was invented in Iraq, so it's a cool place.
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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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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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[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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If you're driving down the street, you keep the neck forward. So that way you can clear out the lanes.
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I am afraid of abandonment, and, if you will, in a really existential way, being exposed as a fraud. Everyone's afraid of it, and I definitely am. This is a fear that motivates. Oh, and heights. And getting stabbed.
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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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I read recently that I was born in Arizona. I wasn't born in Arizona. I was born in New Mexico, but I can understand why people might confuse those two Southwestern desert states.
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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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The thing is that where I want to go isn't necessarily tied to what's going on there politically, but I think Vietnam is a really beautiful country. I think Thailand is also really beautiful.
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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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Last season when I was on set...for some reason I had The Battle Hymn of the Republic in my head but I didn't know all the words. It was one of those songs you had to learn when you were younger. It wasn't as important for people raised in the 80's and 90's as it was to people raised in the 50's, 60's and 70's so when I started singing "My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," Jane Fonda heard me singing it and started singing the rest of it. Suddenly everyone on set everyone was singing. That's just something I can keep in my heart forever.
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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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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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Surprisingly I've never really stolen anything. One time when I was really young, I was walking down the street, found a GI Joe in the mud, and took it home and I was like, "I got a GI Joe!" And then my great grandmother was like, "You stole that." I said, "What are you talking about?" and she said, "That's not yours." I'm like, "But I found it!" She's like, "But it's not yours, and therefore you stole it." So I just went and put it right back in the mud where I found it.
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The Middle East is gorgeous, but again, politically, I would not want to go there.
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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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When you do comedy, 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. 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. I'll get laughs in the places I don't want them and that makes me realize the direction I want to go in.
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The audience is your first collaborator with the material. If that makes sense.
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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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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.