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.'
— Jim Jefferies
I don't think comedy really does change people's minds; I think you can only get someone who is almost ready to change their mind. You can't change someone from one direction straight into the other, but if you get someone who is considering your view, and you make a good point, there's power in that.
I like to weed out the people who aren't going to enjoy me straight off the bat. If you look at all my specials, I do start more extreme and then, as I get into it, sort of at the three-quarter mark, I normally have a bit of pathos. Is pathos the right word?
The difference between comedians and the general public is that we are meant to be funnier. And when you've got politicians giving material so easy that the general public is doing it, what is the necessity of us anymore?
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 just eat half portions, do cardio every day.
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.
If I didn't have a gig, I used to ring up all the comedy clubs across the country and go, 'If anyone drops out, I can be there.' Normally, someone would ring you up the day of. It's just perseverance, being scrappy, being a hustler. The first few years, a lot of it was under-the-table work, so that was good. I think I can say that now.
For me, Mr. T and Donald Trump are the same sort of phenomenon - they're guys with catchphrases and wacky hair.
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 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.
I don't believe in gun bans; that's a fallacy that people have, that they think if you believe in gun control you want to ban guns. That's not true.
I don't think that I am a Lefty in the sense that I grew up in countries that have a universal health-care system, but I also think that I'm a little Right in other directions. I also think that - in regards to the whole health-care thing - that yeah, they should repeal and replace Obamacare with universal health care.
I can go into New York and sell out a theatre, but I didn't have to fight my way to get there: I was already a made man from television. I sold out a theatre in London without any TV exposure, just word of mouth and being a good comic, and that was a much bigger sense of accomplishment than just being a guy from telly.
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 have watched every episode of 'RuPaul's Drag Race'... I know a bizarre amount of drag queens now. And it's weird because one of the guys that drives my tour bus in America drove the drag queen show before me, and I used to just sit there and hear all the stories so I could go tell my girlfriend because I knew what a big fan she was.
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.
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.
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 don't think you're ever going to be truly successful if everyone likes you.
I never do a whole new set of new material. I do one new joke at a time, and I wedge it in between two good jokes. Or if it's a long story, I don't do it in L.A. or New York; I do it in Kansas and Omaha, all these places I'm going this weekend.
I go to the fanciest restaurants in the world and try them out. I like to see these chefs that are wizards do their thing. I like two types of food: cheap fast food - In-N-Out Burger, Taco Bell, stuff like that - or expensive food. Anything in between just bothers me.
I don't think I'm particularly good with money, but I have made some.
There's a theory with comedy that you shouldn't do anything that's too topical in your specials because people won't be able to watch them in five years. But I look at Trump in the same way I look at Mr. T. I can watch comedy jokes about Mr. T in the '80s and still understand what they're talking about.
I think the difference between America and Australia is very simple. It's 20 million people versus 350 million.
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.
Nixon started auditing late-night show hosts because they were making jokes about him. Then, every single one of their staff got tax audits.
I'm not a big Trump fan. I'm not going to lie to anyone and say I am.
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.
After I had money, I realized about all that all the things I thought I wanted that I don't need a lot of stuff. If there's anything I get excited by, it's a nice car.
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.
I don't care if people get angry about that, believing the rubbish that vaccinations cause trouble or make the child worse or something. That's not what I believe. I think it's important for me to say.
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.
What comedy does, for the most part, is it voices something so simplistically that people will agree with us, and then once you agree with something, you go, 'That's what I think.' So what you're trying to do is try to voice arguments that people get on a side with. So they can use that, maybe at a dinner party, themselves.
I used to be of the opinion that it didn't matter who you voted for. The world balanced itself out and kept on truckin'. Which is true, but politics are still important.
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.
You've got to gamble on yourself. If you don't, no one else is going to. It's very hard when you're poor to turn down money. When you've got money, it's easy. When you're poor, you need money today. People take advantage of poor people.
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.
My girlfriend buys stuff from Trader Joe's, and it's just subpar. When you buy a burrito, it crumbles the way a proper burrito shouldn't. Everything's just crap there.
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.
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 had a head injury when I was living in England; I was in the hospital for three days, and they didn't even ask for my name. I spent three days in there. And then, when I was done, I just got up and left. I wasn't a British citizen; I was there on a work permit.
When I was 23, I didn't have much of an interest in politics. All of my interests were in partying and meeting girls and doing stand-up. That's all I cared about. Now, when you have a kid and stuff, you start watching the news and say, 'They shouldn't take money away from this education department.' You start having much more exact opinions.
I've actually phased out the misogynistic jokes because I used to think that everyone knew that I was joking.
