Quotes from Jim Jefferies

I probably get a bit more backlash in Australia than I do in America, to be honest. I was never invited to the Melbourne Comedy Festival because I was too gross, things like that. Which never happened in any other country.

Comedy comes out of everyone's worst day. No one writes a sitcom episode about everyone having a good day. It's always about someone being locked out of their house or someone being dumped or whatever.

I do enjoy having researchers and writers around me because I am getting a lot of different influences now from the opposite sex, different races, people of different ages, who are helping write the routines. So I am seeing things from other people's perspectives, which I never really had to do before.

I've never sat down with the intent of trying to shock or anything like that; it just so happens that the sense of humour I enjoyed watching as a kid is the type of humour I try to emulate as an adult. It's not a decision. It might sound a bit wanky, but it's the truth.

In my own life, hate has consumed me at times. Or envy. When my TV show was canceled, I didn't think it deserved to be canceled because people liked it. It was canceled for the wrong reasons, you know? I was consumed with hate for about a year.

The thing where I thought I made it was when I paid my house off. It wasn't actually a moment on stage - it was the first bit of financial security. It was the first time I looked at my house, and it was all paid off, and I thought, 'Alright. Jokes paid for this.'

I still like to shock, but the jokes are less sexist. It's just that, at one point in my stories, there was some sense of pride, some enthusiasm, and now I'm just embarrassed by myself.

I always thought I was a good person, a decent person. I never harassed anyone or touched anyone. And you say to yourself , 'Oh, that's good enough,' but yes, I had certain jokes that I always assumed the audience would understand. This is Persona.

I used to watch everybody's stuff, but I found I would get slightly influenced by the other comics. I try to avoid it now.

I've actually phased out the misogynistic jokes because I used to think that everyone knew that I was joking.

A lot of my stand-up early on was stories from my childhood. And my childhood is over - there's not new childhood stories to come. They've all been mentioned.

I'm somewhat of a socialist in the sense that I believe in housing for the homeless and medical care for all. So, for me, the American dream has been having a TV show, and being successful and having a nice house and having everything.

Can't punch women in the face!

Nixon started auditing late-night show hosts because they were making jokes about him. Then, every single one of their staff got tax audits.

There's a fallacy with stand up comedy, which is, people come up to comedians, and they go, 'You say what I think but I'm not brave enough to say,' and that's not particularly true.

I have an uncle I no longer talk to because of a joke I made about my grandmother, who is his mother. He's an 80-year-old man upset about a woman who died 15 years ago.

Every comedian is just doing the comedy they find funny. This is me and it's not clean in any way. I could get a lot more work on TV playing clean but it's never interesting.

People don't get angry at you for shock value. People get angry at you when you affect something that is at their core, whether it be guns or religion or whatever. Their belief system.

One of the flaws in the American dream is that there isn't as much of a safety net as you may get in other countries.

I feel like, at times, I've been seen as the dirty stepchild of Australian comedy. I think there's a few people out there that are pissed off that I made it big overseas.

I think the difference between America and Australia is very simple. It's 20 million people versus 350 million.

You can't worry too much about what you think the audience wants to hear. You just have to hope that you're a likeable enough person that what you're saying will relate to other people, so they can laugh at it as well.

Myself and Jamie Moffat did not agree on everything but he always knew I had the experience.

Having your own show, where you're not in trouble all the time, because you're kind of the boss, is a wonderful experience. If I made mistakes everyone was very nice to me.