Harry Shearer Quotes & Sayings

In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera. — Harry Shearer

The theater business is very much about "Hey, if you want our big blockbuster at Christmas time, you'll play our piece of crap in April." — Harry Shearer

I didn't have a lot of independent film connections. It really took until the digital film revolution came along that I realized that I could do it myself. — Harry Shearer

I just think everyone knows you go on those [political satire] shows if you're a politician to, "humanize yourself" - to show, "Hey, I can take a joke." Well, why should satire be in the service of humanizing these people who are supposed to be the target of our venom and vitriol? I think that's unseemly. — Harry Shearer

I've got an odd, negative bond with C. Montgomery Burns. He reminds a lot of people of bosses they've worked for. He certainly reminds me of someone I'm working for — Harry Shearer

I was a Political Science major. — Harry Shearer

I have a very strong visual memory of the first time I made him laugh. That was remarkable. I was like, "Oh, God, I just made Jack Benny laugh." — Harry Shearer

For a guy who is always banging on about the masculine virtues, Nixon had this remarkable proclivity for very dainty gestures. — Harry Shearer

I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism. — Harry Shearer

Democrats always like to brag that their guys are smarter than the opponents and Republicans always like to brag that their guys are more moral than the opponents. But if you're looking for morals in politics you're looking for bananas in the cheese department. — Harry Shearer

When it moved to Friday night it disappeared, when they find another show that can do what The Simpsons does, they will be delighted to do cancel The Simpsons. — Harry Shearer

Well Washington DC what are you going to do. They think the capitol steps are the state of the art in comedy. You try to drag them into the 20th century let alone the 21st and they refuse to come with you. — Harry Shearer

If absolute power corrupts absolutely,
does absolute powerlessness make you pure? — Harry Shearer

When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws. — Harry Shearer

That was Embassy Pictures, they went bankrupt shortly after This is Spinal Tap came out. — Harry Shearer

Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties. — Harry Shearer

[The word class has] been excised from the acceptable political vocabulary, except in the limited usage of right-wingers when they accuse liberals of inciting 'class warfare' - a charge that means it's okay for rich people to vote their economic interests but it's not all right to encourage poor people to do so. — Harry Shearer

I wasn't playing Nixon's satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy. — Harry Shearer

I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines, nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation. — Harry Shearer

The act of getting married, stripped of the necessity to have a secure setting to raise children, seems to me no less grim than registering your emotions with the government. — Harry Shearer

Sometimes, songs spill out of you very fast, and sometimes you have to wrangle them to the floor. But the same thing is true of comedy, where sometimes it really flows. — Harry Shearer

A movie script more than anything else is a plan of action for the crew. Everybody in the crew looks at the script to see what they're going to do. It has to contain where you are, and how many people are there, and what they do, and what time of day it is, and what time of year it is. — Harry Shearer

Anybody who says that having the public recognize them and relate to the work they do is irritating should get into another line of work. You're in this business for people to know what you do and like it. — Harry Shearer

Music often happens even faster than comedy in terms of the creation. — Harry Shearer

[C. Montgomery] Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it's the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character. — Harry Shearer

Here's a guy [Richard Nixon] who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk. — Harry Shearer

If you're going to do something that lasts 90 minutes, you can't really do it with stick figures. — Harry Shearer

I would come back to public school for usually about half the year. It was actually better for me to be out of school a lot, because I was two years younger than everybody, which is a bad situation, socially. — Harry Shearer

Nixon's genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election - but he didn't tell us that then. — Harry Shearer

I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years. — Harry Shearer

I'd always loved radio. — Harry Shearer

As a kid, I really did want to hang out with the grownups, so it was hanging out with the hippest grownups in the world. This was the nicest bunch of people I've worked with in show business, with the exception of the people around A Mighty Wind. It really was a wonderful eight years. — Harry Shearer

You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards. — Harry Shearer

When I did that first movie, it was the introduction to all the set-up time and the waiting time that's endemic in motion pictures, and the repetition. — Harry Shearer

The Simpsons will end as soon as Fox is able to find an 8 p.m. comedy hit to replace it - so I give us another 50 years. — Harry Shearer

You know, radio was a really easy way to do the shows. You'd come in, do a read-through, there'd be a few rehearsals, then you'd come the night of the show and do it in front of the audience and then go home. — Harry Shearer

I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals. — Harry Shearer

Satire is an art best practiced behind the back of the intended target. I think inviting politicians on a satirical show becomes a very big trap. Because one of two things happen: Either you have to kind of unsharpen your fangs because you can't be quite as cruel to people to their face as you are behind their backs ... Or you don't defang, and those guests get the word and they stop coming. — Harry Shearer

Nobody makes a movie thinking it's still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later. — Harry Shearer

I couldn't help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama's. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed. — Harry Shearer

My parents didn't want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood. — Harry Shearer

The first thing you've got to do is know your craft, and then you can do something else with it. — Harry Shearer

The hardest work most of us do is maintaining the appearance of normality. — Harry Shearer

There were really funny characteristics about this guy [Richard Nixon], chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times - just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out. — Harry Shearer

To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will. — Harry Shearer

Bush is a frat boy in the White House but we've had that before. But I wasn't one of those people that was threatening to leave the country. By the way none of those people have left the country. Alec Baldwin is still here. — Harry Shearer

The last president we had was the smartest guy anyone could remember and he did the dumbest thing anyone has ever seen in the White House so go figure. — Harry Shearer

I was never into candy and games and clowns. — Harry Shearer

You can get an awful lot of effects into the customer's mind for a great deal less time and money in radio than you can in television. — Harry Shearer

I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre. — Harry Shearer

You have to do real acting, not just do a voice. — Harry Shearer

Privilege has its own way of seeing the world. — Harry Shearer

If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out. — Harry Shearer

We're very pleased to be on a show which is known and loved around the world. — Harry Shearer

I'm at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show - so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know. — Harry Shearer

I always used to sit next to Mel Blanc when we'd do the shows. When you have Jack Benny on one side and Mel Blanc on the other, you're not going to go far wrong. — Harry Shearer

I've been doing Nixon pretty much my whole professional life. I was in this comedy group called the Credibility Gap in Los Angeles when he was president. I was doing Nixon on the radio, and when we did live shows I physicalized him - if that's a word - for the first time. And then I did a Nixon sketch on a very short-lived NBC show called Sunday Best. — Harry Shearer