Top 50 Paul F. Tompkins Quotes

I long ago vowed, as Batman did before me, never to make fun of stuff that people couldn’t help. Because it’s (1) easy and (2) not fair. There are plenty of things that people have complete control over that are worthy of ridicule.

More than just a sobering history lesson, ‘Angry Birds’ is a beautiful game. It’s absolutely lovely.

On ‘Best Week Ever,’ I met a few previous ‘Idol’ winners, and they were the nicest young people you’d ever want to meet. It is a tribute to them that they emerged from ‘Idol’s’ cynicism factory seemingly without mercury poisoning of the soul.

The thing you have to be on guard against, more than anything, is self-sabotage. You have to make sure you’re not your own worst enemy.

I seem to be one of those people that’s immune to Super Bowl fever. I may be a carrier, but I’m immune to it myself.

I don’t know grammar but I do know that I love playing games on my phone.

You know, back when I was a kid who wanted to be in show business, everybody on TV wore nice clothes. They were very glamorous when they would be on the ‘Tonight Show.’ All the dudes wore suits and ties and that just seemed like real show business to me.

Puppets can get away with saying things that human beings can’t. Because they are cartoonish just to look at, they’re not real, you can assign them insane things to feel and vocalize.

I enjoy very traditional stuff, and I enjoy kind of outlandish stuff, and I just really like clothes. I always have.

Look, we have long known that birds and pigs are mortal enemies. That’s just the way of the world. Birds hate pigs.

I got married and we had a relatively simple wedding and there were not a lot of thrills to it.

We all forget that when a TV network says, ‘Look, we’re broke,’ it means that they’re not making as much money as they would like to be making. They’re still making millions and millions of dollars – they’re just not making billions and billions of dollars.

The first time I did Cake Boss or Ice-T or Andrew Lloyd Webber was on ‘Best Week Ever.’

I have a hernia scar from when I was a kid. I had a hernia when I was like in fourth grade.

In an effort to devote more time, energy and focus to fewer projects, I’ve had to make some tough decisions, and one such decision was ‘retiring’ from ‘Speakeasy.’

Elections are so crazy.

There’s so much being said about Donald Trump already, all the time, and the more you joke about him, the more you risk making the same jokes other people are making about him.

Overall, I just love performing so much that when I write, I want to write for me. I kind of learned that on ‘Mr. Show,’ that even in an environment where you can write whatever you want – which is what that environment was – I realized, ‘Man, I still want to be the guy out in front.’

Ultimately, some of these things I did not get paid for, they did not further my career, they were done just for fun.

When I first started doing stand-up back in Philadelphia, the idea of being a professional writer was completely beyond me. It didn’t even occur to me that that was something you could do.

Cake Boss, I guess, has been made aware of my impression and finds it amusing and recognizes that it’s not a completely accurate impersonation of who he is in his daily life. He seems to be a good sport about it.

When you’re getting your facts from people, consider the way that they are being given to you.

Obviously a president can’t rule as a king and ban all guns. But I think we need a president who is going to make sure that there is gun control and that people still feel like their freedoms are intact.

I have Peter O’Toole’s autograph on a first-edition copy of his autobiography that I acquired under false pretenses.

A big difference between podcasts and radio is the intimacy. Radio oftentimes feels big and loud. To me, podcasting is closest to that weird late night stuff, whether it’s late night love song request lines, or it’s some talk radio show where you feel like you’re the only person listening to it.

It’s important for us all to elect people not just on blind party loyalty. We’ve got to really examine what candidates say and do.

I think you can make jokes about anything. But you have to accept that there will be people who don’t like it. And they are completely within their rights, just as you are completely within your rights to say whatever you want to say. They’re within their rights to react how they’re going to react.

As much as I love live performance and as much fun as it can be to travel around, it really is nice to be able to stay at home and make a living and pay the mortgage and spend time with my wife.

What I love about improv so much is that we are all discovering it at roughly the same time. The performers are maybe, what, a half second ahead of the audience? There’s very little lag time. I think of a thing, I say it, then the audience is laughing and it all happened in a second.

You can find nice clothes that suit your style at any number of places – Goodwill, Salvation Army, stores like that. They’re all over the place. If you put in the time, you can find good stuff at decent prices.

Politics is a thing that is kind of the same over and over and over again. But we have to find new ways of poking fun at it and letting the air out of people and satirizing things that are worthy of satire.

Being in Los Angeles, I’ve had access to some of the best improvisers around and I really study them and what they do. It really it just about listening and what you can add to it.

There are absolutely no limits with podcasting because you can do anything you want.

It’s great to work with friends. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but everybody goes into it knowing that. Like, ‘We might be really good friends, but we might be terrible collaborators.’

People are going to hire you, or they’re not, and there’s only so much you can do to hedge your bets.

Fonzie was impossibly cool.

When I started my own podcast, I realized I definitely wanted to do characters.

When I started stand-up, the people I admired most were the people who were the most themselves onstage.

The ideas that you find funny and the things that you are offering to an audience are tied up with who you are and your soul and your heart.

I always liked dressing up. I think, because I always liked performing, I always liked costumes and things like that.

I always wanted to be a performer.

Mork, played by Robin Williams, was my introduction to improv, and my first real peek behind the curtain of television production; I had seen Williams riffing on ‘The Tonight Show’ and soon put it together that certain scenes with Mork were not scripted.

The first thing you start with when you’re trying to write something funny is it has to – it really has to come to you first. I has to be an idea that you have that first makes you laugh, that strikes you as funny.

I’m not afraid of you, ‘American Idol.’

I’ve had people – I’ve seen people do routines that I knew they didn’t take from me but they had – because for whatever reason I had stopped doing it a long time ago. There’s no way they would have heard this bit. But it ends up being pretty much the same thing.

From a personal standpoint I really like that Bernie Sanders is making so much noise.

Just because I have a good vocabulary, I don’t think of myself as anachronistic – just because I try not to use the word ‘like’ every other word.

I always like things that shrink the world for me, that make me feel a strange connection, not just to the person that I’m listening to but to the world.

I just approach everything by just doing the best job I can do and try to be a pleasant person.

Happy Days,’ ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ ‘Mork & Mindy’ – it takes no effort at all to conjure, physically, the profound excitement I felt watching these shows in prime time. I remember sitting on the floor, too close to the TV, rapt.