Words matter. These are the best Ari Shaffir Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Get out of people’s way and let them be who they are. If they make a mistake, fine, that’s on them.
No one’s telling Tarantino what to do. You might like it or you might not like it, but the reality is he’s getting his own vision out there.
When Joe Rogan started his podcasts he’d have me, Joe Diaz, and all our friends help him for the first few. And I told him ‘Dude, no one will listen to audio that’s over an hour long. You’ve got to end it at 59:59 or less.’ And I was way wrong.
I grew up so conservative. I grew up as an orthodox Jew.
Once I started getting more successful, I just stopped caring completely – ‘I’ll just do exactly what I want. It doesn’t matter.’
I’m not as much a fan of the venues as I am the comics who inhabit them. I don’t care if it’s a bomb shelter, a bus, or a theater, if I’m watching somebody who makes me laugh, I’m down.
To me, every time it goes badly I see it as a good thing – because that means I’m one step closer to where I want to be.
I want to do a travel book.
I have a running daydream about winning an Oscar and giving my speech about how ridiculous it is to rank art. And then I’d call them all sycophants and leave the statue at the podium as I walked away.
Leonard Cohen kept his Jew name. He’s so cool. It’s too bad he died.
Bill Burr, Freddy Soto, Joe Rogan, Tom Segura… those people influenced me a lot more than any of the older guys like Richard Pryor.
I was playing basketball, and I had hemorrhoids in high school.
Marc Maron yells at people. I have a memory of him yelling at Jonah Ray from offstage about something he was saying, just fun stuff.
I got an award for Most Improved Player for volleyball in tenth grade that I cared about a lot.
The biggest thing I lost when I left religion was that sense of community and the culture. It was an unexpected kind of free-falling. When I was in it, I didn’t understand how much the community was a part of my life.
The fact that I didn’t believe in God was something that I just didn’t consider. And then when I did, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m out.’
The Comedy Store is my home!
I definitely recommend keeping frozen corn dogs in your freezer.
I know how lazy I am. So if I have to go somewhere else I can’t get to easily, I talk myself out of it.
I don’t vote and I don’t follow who’s trying to rule us. The revolution is coming. Until then, I’ll just watch ‘Game of Thrones.’
When people tell me to do a clean show, I’m like, ‘Guys, I don’t even understand your thoughts anymore.’ What, you can’t say a curse word? Nobody thinks that way!
I used to get a lot of death threats. After a while I realized that no one’s gonna do anything or they would’ve.
My CD, my first release, was at the Comedy Works in Denver, one of the best clubs in the country.
The only threat is a growing pushback from militant liberals who seek to destroy free expression as they look to limit the speech of anyone who has feelings they find objectionable. It makes comics tentative to push boundaries and freely talk about the thoughts in their heads. That part is terrible for development.
I hate being rejected.
I worked for the Comedy Store as an employee trying to become a paid regular. I had this dream of achieving a half hour special on TV.
Early on, I had a girlfriend come see me, and she was like, ‘Yeah, it was good, but you were funny at a dining hall at the University of Maryland.’ That’s when I realized I was contrived. I was reciting jokes. So I really worked on – no matter what – sounding like I was just talking to the people.
Being Orthodox Jewish is kind of like being raised on like network sitcoms.
The worst is when you bomb and when you bomb in front of someone you’re trying to impress. That’s the worst.
You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don’t wait until they’re in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.
I’m not intentionally dirty. It just kind of happens. It’s not like I’m a shock comic who’s looking to walk people.
Failing is part of my process. A new bit never works the first time. I figure I have to bomb 7 times to make it good. So I tweak it.
I’ll just walk around New York and watch people on the streets.
I love doing my podcast, but it’s not my art form. I don’t have to work on it. It’s off the cuff.
It’s all about the art. It’s not about getting on TV or not getting on TV.
Being Jewish is a culture and a religion; we have food, music, and land specific to us.
Very rarely are you going to see a story about a comic winning a fight. Yeah we’re all degenerates in some way and we’re all awful people, so we just show our weaknesses.
My father said that I was lower than a dog, because even a dog believes in God.
Figure out a way to get back onstage because once you do it a few times you’ll get over it. Unless it’s like a clinical thing. I don’t know about clinical like stage fright, that might be worse than what I’m talking about. But if it’s normal stage fright get over it.
Sometimes I start off shows by explaining to people that it’s just a bunch of stories – I always say ‘It’s like standup, just less funny.’
I get lost a lot.
I never had good grades until I dropped out of religion. And then suddenly, my grades went up.
One thing I hate in ethnic comedy is giving the audience the opportunity to laugh in a racist way at a thing. A lot of times dwarf comedians will do that, Arab comics, and gay comics will do it; everyone is laughing, but they’re not laughing at the joke, they’re laughing at this crazy character.
I’m a bit of an introvert, so after talking for an hour and then shaking hands and taking pictures with the people who came out, I kind of need to be alone for a bit to get away from all stimuli.
I’m like an overgrown child! I don’t know how to do anything!