Paul Provenza Art Quotations

As we set about to edit, I watched 150 hours of footage over and over for a period of months. I had to figure out what hanging out with these artists doing this joke meant. In that process some ideas began to emerge: craft and art, freedom and creativity, boundaries and taboos, etc. So we used comics' performances that illustrated those ideas. We wanted to show rather than tell.

Johnny can't gain his composure, Ed McMahon is doing his characteristic bull moose guffaw, the band -- the instruments are banging into one another -- the audience is in tears, and every time Johnny would try to gain his composure, he would look at Buddy and it would start all over again.

If you've ever been offended by any particular word, you'll probably hear it 100 times in this movie.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

This is a look at a particular world of artists, and when it comes to words, well, that's our currency. In terms of mindset, we'll entertain almost any idea. We're trying to be creative. There's nothing about any given word that's better or worse than other given word. A word is a word.