Kate Clinton Quotes

I've always felt that a really good joke, a really good one-liner, is a really good line of poetry. It's imagistic, it's compact, there is a rhythm to it.

When my brother-in-law, BIll Clinton, was elected, he had gay friends. That was a coming out.

Moms Mabley said you have to say good things about the dead. I say, 'He's dead. Good.'

I definitely want people to laugh because I don't think there's a better feeling - I think it's just so fabulous to laugh. I don't mind if people think, either. I think the brain is a very sexy organ.

I'm really happy that I was raised Catholic because it's given me years of material.

Lesbian humor isn't trying to sell anything, it doesn't have to sell out. Coming out as a lesbian onstage is still a very political act; if it weren't, more women would do it.

I consider a CD or a comedy collection as a record of what I've been doing, and I try to wrap it up and start new material.

In his second term, [Ronald] Reagan completed the work of his first term - the rich got really rich, everything was deregulated, advocacy programs were quashed, the Savings and Loan program was trashed, the deficit was tripled, unions were busted, Housing and Urban Developing was in shambles, banks were closing, the military got lots of new toys, the religious right was strong, and AIDS was ignored.

Lesbians are likely to be drawn to stand-up, if only because it's cheaper to produce and therefore more accessible for women. But the very form of stand-up is masculine.

[On being lesbian:] One pointer: don't come out to your dad in a moving vehicle.

Whenever a woman describes herself as a 'post-feminist' I picture women lashed to posts. Joan of Arc was an early post-feminist.

After the Reagan years, there were only three people of color in the Republican Party. Their slogan was 'Republicans - the Other White Meat.' George [H.] Bush tried to dispel the 'whites only' image of his party, often referring to his Mexican-American grandkids as 'the little brown ones over there,' and nominated Clarence Uncle Thomas to the Supreme Court.

As you can imagine I'm disappointed as anything that I was not selected to be the presidential running mate. And I find it continually appalling that it would be a radical thing to have a woman on the ticket.

Some women can't say the word lesbian... even when their mouth is full of one.

A friend told me that each morning when we get up we have to decide whether we are going to save or savor the world. I don't think that is the decision. It's not an either-or, save or savor. We have to do both, save and savor the world.

Laughter takes the tyranny of the lies we are told and told and told and it blows them apart.

Of all sports, football seems to be the most sanctioned homosocial opportunity for straight men to be with each other, pat butts, struggle, strive, and take showers together. All that talk of tight ends and penetration. The reason there are face masks on those helmets is so that can't kiss each other.

A friend of mine said, no matter what I do I always look like an English teacher. She actually said, you still look like a Campbell's Soup kid.

[On cloning sheep:] Oh great, just what we need - more sheep.

So few people voted in the elections [of 1996] that the ones who did were called activists.

[On Nancy Reagan:] At one photo op press conference, she toured a crack house and decried how awful it was, yet one suspected that for our Drug Czarina it had something to do with a plaid couch.

Teaching is performance art.

What goes for sex goes double for politics.

Gays have always been in the military. Alexander the Great was originally Alexander the Fabulous. A gay man invented C-rations. He claims he could never talk anyone into the cilantro garnish. Obviously, gays were not allowed to design the outfits, because we never would have stayed with the earth tones for so long.

I want to host a religious show. I'm sure nobody will be wanting the 11 o'clock spot on Sunday morning. I think we should really get some of our own preachers and preach that gay is good. And we'd have a great choir.

When women go off together we call it separatism. When men go off together we call it Congress.

In this political climate, people are so shut down to other ideas - I call it a hardening of the categories - that if you can get them to open up and laugh, there is a possibility of improvement, and a possibility of change. I think humor sneaks up on people, and before you know it, you're laughing at something you might not agree with.

We really got a lot of very conservative gay people. You could look at the figures from the last election and realize that a third of the gay movement voted Republican.

Once he became president, George [H.] Bush revealed a vein of Styrofoam and no matter how deep he tried to go, he always ended up bobbing on the surface. His inaugural speech was like being present at the death of language.

My style has been pretty much like a newspaper. It's got politics in it, it's got media, sports, family relations, you know, all the sections you would expect, and wonderful religion things.

Each time we had a visiting writer, I asked what she thought of women and humor. By the end of the year, I had perfected my question and asked Adrienne Rich why there was so little written about women and humor. She looked at me right in the eye and said, 'You write it.' I took that as an order.