Top 88 Adam McKay Quotes

I don’t want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of ‘Idiocracy’ and ‘Borat,’ without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.

I was completely with the reality TV boom for a while. I really liked a lot of the reality TV, and the one that lost me was the ballroom dancing one they do, ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ That was the one where I watched it and I was perplexed. I thought it was really boring.

In the past, in the ’60s and ’70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.

First off, no one award-wise ever rewards comedy, which is… whatever. I don’t care about that.

The ‘Police Academy’ stuff was all hyper-slapsticky.

There’s nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world.

With the derivatives market larger than ever, we need way more regulation of Wall Street, not less.

Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way.

I think there’s a tendency to think geeks and nerds are just sweet guys that were picked on, but that hasn’t been my experience. I’m certainly not like that, in a lot of ways.

I would never do ‘Stardust Memories’ because I don’t particularly like that kind of movie – that would be why I wouldn’t do that.

We, Will Ferrell and I, were approached by Sequoia, which is a big financing firm up in Palo Alto; they do a lot of Internet stuff, and they came to us and said they had an idea for a comedy site, and Will and I were sorta like, ‘Yeah, we don’t know. It’s the Internet, we’ve seen it come and go.’

Every time a congressman or pundit says its ‘class warfare’ to increase taxes on the wealthy, it’s a massive lie.

I was shocked when ‘The Hobbit’ ended where it ended. I wasn’t paying attention to what they were doing; I didn’t know they had another movie, and I couldn’t believe it was when the dragon came out.

You need the audience to go on the ride with you. You can’t just isolate them.

I think when a lot of actors hear improv, they think of throwing a line in or doing a slightly different take.

My first joke was about a company called Five Star Parking that was all over Philadelphia: ‘Who’s reviewing parking lots?’

I’m a huge hip hop fan going way back, like, back to ’83. I had my Gemini mixer listening to Run-DMC and Kurtis Blow.

Celebrities and ‘famous’ people are just regular folks. I know, it’s a shocking and potentially dangerous statement.

Nothing is funnier than confidently doing the wrong thing.

David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He’s not only a great director, but he’s also a great writer.

You have a guy like Bernie Madoff literally steal $80 billion, you know, AIG steal hundreds of billions, Goldman Sachs. Crime has changed so much, and to really do a movie with, like, drug dealers or drug smugglers is kind of almost quaint at this point.

Nowadays, the truth is, I think a lot of the newer generation of action stars usually are pretty self-deprecating and cool. I mean, Dwayne Johnson is a great example.

If you look at ‘Avatar,’ could you imagine if you did ‘Avatar’ for 50 million dollars? It would be ridiculous! You would almost be getting laughs from the audience, unless you got a real indie director to do something incredibly stylised.

McCain is the kid who was really cool in middle school but never got high school game and people are sick of him acting like he’s still popular.

It should be a law for one whole year that all laugh tracks are Seth Rogen. The world would get ever so slightly better.

Nothing is more enjoyable for me than when I’m watching a movie or a TV show and there’s that sense that anything can happen. It is the most fun feeling in the world.

You’re not a slave to those test audiences.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

I don’t think arrested-adolescent humor will fade. Maybe the form will change, but I guarantee its replacement will still be based in immature behavior from mature figures.

As far as what makes a viral video, then it’s gotta be something that you’ve either never seen before, a fresh piece of comedy, or something that relates to something topical.

It’s one thing to break stuff and damage people’s possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that’s dangerous comedy.

I was a huge fan of comedy in high school.

Sequels are desperate.

All you can really do as director is sort of set a tone.

First and foremost when you’re doing comedy, you gotta be relevant and applicable to the times that you’re living in. When you try and just do comedy about who is dating who and lifestyle jokes, it gets tiring after a while. It’s hard to be funny in that realm.

All we have is our vote. But it’s powerful.

George W. Bush was a silver spoon dolt with no record to speak of other than bankruptcy and selling tropical plants, and we let him sail into the White House, but Barack talks about religious fundamentalism and guns being prevalent in poor areas, and we roast him for weeks?

Things I used to get in trouble for writing at ‘SNL,’ suddenly other people like it.

If you do a Western that’s funny, there’s no way people don’t call it a spoof or a parody, even though it may not be.

Pete Wilson deregulated energy as a pay out to Enron, and we blamed Gray Davis.

I have no tax breaks or corporate interests to be supported by Barack Obama.

Having two kids, I don’t get out to see stand up much anymore.

The way you really stop Al-Qaeda is by stopping their funding. It’s not by carpet-bombing or land invasions or anything.

I love Paul Rudd.

Wal-Mart is the biggest distributor of DVDs out there, but personally, I think their manufacturing policies have destroyed our economy, and they don’t pay their employees enough. I have massive problems with them.

Word of mouth and the Internet are the only press we have left.

Any time Chris Nolan wants to call me for advice, he can.

I love ‘The Wire;’ that’s my favorite show, so I’ll watch that.

We lost our minds in the ’80s and ’90s; we really as a society just felt that everyone could only care about themselves. There was no responsibility to discuss what’s going on in your town, your state, your nation. And it was a blast, it was really fun, but it doesn’t work.

As far as how much you listen to the audience, you listen to them when they really hate something.

There’s nothing more fun than making fun of what’s sacred.

I am actually talking about possibly adapting ‘The Boys,’ by Garth Ennis, which would not be a comedy, but an action movie with comedy elements to it.

Dave Herman as Michael Bolton is one of my favorite performances ever.

Obama is the new kid with the weird name who people just sense is a little classier than his surroundings. He moved from a private school where he was class president and is now at the giant public high school with the metal detectors and the smoking lounge.

I’m sure when they partied when Rome was burning, that was a really great party.

I can’t exactly say why there’s not much protest music to speak off. And I know there are acts out there still putting a message in their music.

Other than Green Day, we haven’t had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.

My theme song is ‘One Tin Soldier’ by Coven.

If you’re making comedies, they have to have a fun and a rhythm to them.

The living nightmare for a red state NASCAR driver would be a gay French driver.

Actually, ‘Wayne’s World 2’ I kind of liked. I think ‘Wayne’s World 2’ does have some creative things in it, some ideas in it.

Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You’re already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren’t.

After thousands of hours of news coverage, we have learned that Hillary is a liar and Barack is a terrorist or something.

I love action movies.

‘Step Brothers 2’ would have been fun, there’s no doubt about it. Maybe someday. Does that idea age? I don’t know. It all depends on how the movie ages.

I think everyone knows the news has become ridiculous. It’s entertainment driven.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to have someone in a seat in a theater laughing so hard that they’re making weird sounds.

‘The Real World’ is the most predictable arc ever. They get on the show, they’re all excited, we’re gonna be best friends, then people start drinking and get hammered, and say stupid stuff, and that’s pretty much it.

Tom Brokaw was never young.

I’ll tell you one thing… no doubt about it, my favorite kind of comedy is talking head comedy. I mean, if it were up to me, I’d do a whole entire movie that was just around a dinner table.

I got the sense that Alabama is a place where people don’t want handouts and don’t much care for people talking out of the side of their mouth.

America is a country that prides itself on being able to identify a ‘straight shooter’ or ‘the genuine article’ when it comes to our leaders. As a nation, we can ‘feel it in our gut’ when someone is giving us a bum steer.

‘Firewall’ seems both scary and protective at the same time. And how often does that happen within one word besides ‘military’ and ‘government?’