Top 35 Nipsey Russell Quotes

Our country’s social revolution lends itself to jokes and I use them.

He who turns the other cheek will get hit with the other fist.

For artistic fulfillment I prefer to work live. For career advancement, I go to the media.

You see, the patience of an audience is very short, particularly with a non-entity. You’re an intruder, and you must make them laugh within three or four seconds. My poems fit the requirements, and I’m always thinking up new ones.

Comedy is based partly on mean-spiritedness.

Real progress will have been made when people don’t care or even notice the color of a comedian when they’ll just be concerned with whether he’s funny.

I haven’t got a Cadillac. I’ve got a subway token.

My mother just liked the way the name Nipsey sounded.

If the social evolution leads to jokes, I use them.

There aren’t any messages in my social protestations.

Humor is based on the way a man looks at life’s ironies, and being a member of a minority group can certainly be ironic.

My exercise is pall-bearin’ for athletes and food faddists.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

Word games are very easy for me.

I knew racial discrimination at its worst in the 1930s. I lived with the humility of it but I never lost my sense of humor. Humor is the escape valve from the deadly reality of adversity.

Some college athletes don’t want to turn pro, they don’t want to take the cut in pay.

Six good guest shots on top shows during one season are more than enough and any producer who wants to make me happy could offer some floating guest dates for discussion and panel shows. It’s generally agreed that I love to talk, so shows of this kind are right down my alley.

I use mother-in-law jokes, kid jokes, tax jokes – anything that works.

I don’t drink.

I was so scared the first time I flew the flight attendant called me Whitey.

America is the only place in the world where you can work in an Arab home in a Scandinavian neighborhood and find a Puerto Rican baby eating matzo balls with chopsticks.

Truck drivers stop me and say, ‘What is the poem for the day?’ or ‘Give me a poem for my girl.’ I have one on almost every subject.

I’m living the life of liberty, happiness and pursuit.

During all the years I entertained at the Baby Grand night club in Harlem, 90 percent of the audience was white. But when I tried to break Into television, I was told that white folks wouldn’t understand what I was talking about.

I began working on stage in Atlanta when I was 3, doing a dance act with the Ragamuffins of Rhythm. Later I became a juvenile straight man for the older comedians. After that I worked out a stand-up act.

Jack Paar was my first TV patron saint.

I used to say, ‘We’ve always had integration in the South… we just want it now in the daytime.

Game shows are like golf and tennis are for some men. It’s not like going to work.

I’ve dropped a lot of race humor from my routines, not because I think it is in bad taste, but because I don’t want to be guilty of telling old jokes.

I’ve always had the ability to manipulate words and communicate ideas and thoughts.

I talk too much.

New York can be any city it wants to be.

Many times good actors I have known in New York accept series. I tune in at the beginning of the new season and think ‘He’s really working.’ But six months later, if I tune in again, the actor is on a treadmill, grinding it out as best he can, and he can’t help it.

The great part of appearing on game shows is that when you answer a question the camera takes a close-up of you every time. You get more close-ups than in a movie, and that’s terrific for audience identification. The people have to see you to like you.

In all my years in show business – on stage, clubs and TV shows – my audience has been 75 percent white. In Las Vegas and Atlantic City I look out at the crowd and only see a few black faces here and there. But I can’t allow myself to be conscious of the race factor. I couldn’t perform my best under those conditions.