Quotes from Paul F. Tompkins

Some people just want to make up the funny things and play pretend.

I'm fascinated by people who can keep who they are in the midst of this business, which is all about not only pretending to be other people, but also that perception of who you are and how successful you are and your standing in the business.

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

If written with enough care and thoughtfulness, a joke can make you laugh at a belief you hold dear.

Performing live can be a drag, the process that leads up to the actual performance. It's all the travel, it's working up all the details and everything, which I hate.

When the task is mocking pop culture, it's easy to make sarcastic comments and consider the job done. After a while, I began to feel like this route was completely pointless. Talking about silly, inconsequential stuff doesn't mean you can't put some effort into it.

I loved Garry Marshall. The television shows he created in the '80s were the most deeply important entertainment of my childhood.

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.

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.

It is so easy to avoid getting in a fist fight. If you're at a point where you're squaring up against someone in public, then it's on you. There are so many ways to not get in a fist fight.

I do think I'm terrific at giving advice. Although in our hearts we usually know what we should do. It's rare that you get in a situation in life where you don't know how to proceed. You know the thing you should do, but don't want to.

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

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.

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 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.

The podcasting world has changed the way I book my shows. I knew that I could announce a gig on a podcast and that people would hear it. People that like what I do would hear, 'Oh, he's in my city.' And that makes it so much easier.

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.'

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.

The thing I have to keep in mind and I try to keep in mind about myself, about anyone, is you do the best you can do at the time.

Well 'The Pod F. Tompkast,' as much as I love the result of it, was a really labor intensive show. There's a lot of writing, there's a lot of scheduling, there's a lot of recording - it's not a show that we can necessarily do in one day because there are so many moving parts to it.

I like 'Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period' podcast.

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

You can make me laugh at a thing that I think is horrific. You can make me laugh at a thing that affects me personally. But if you've done your homework and you've gone about it the right way, it will still be funny.