Harry Shearer
Harry Shearer
Harry Julius Sheareris an American actor, voice actor, comedian, writer, musician, author, radio host, director and producer. He is known for his long-running roles on The Simpsons, his work on Saturday Night Live, the comedy band Spinal Tap and his radio program Le Show. Born in Los Angeles, California, Shearer began his career as a child actor. From 1969 to 1976, Shearer was a member of The Credibility Gap, a radio comedy group. Following the breakup of the group, Shearer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionVoice Actor
Date of Birth23 December 1943
CityLos Angeles, CA
CountryUnited States of America
If you can sit through The Aristocrats and laugh at it, you come out the other end realizing that to be made to laugh at it robs the telling of it of the power to shock and sting. It's why (word-abusing comic George) Carlin is in the movie. It's basically a lesson about words, how we can give power to words and take it back. Comedy lubricates that transaction sometimes.
high and dry. The French were no dummies. They knew where to build.
When (Pryor) took the 'N' word and repeated it in so many contexts and made you laugh at it so much, by the end he had drained that word of its power to sting and hurt,
There are a couple of fairly interesting soundtrack situations that we can't yet announce, because we're still in negotiation. And beyond that, we'll start looking at other artists.
What we hope is to break Judith as a major artist. Secondly, I'm going to put my television stuff, both from 'Saturday Night Live' and HBO, on DVD for the first time, and package it with a CD of comedy material -- mainly from my radio show ('Le Show') about the era of anchors who are leaving or have left: Brokaw, Rather, Koppel. And then to go down the line, Judith has a lot more material.
I think it's the distance between what we're supposed to think their job entails and what their job really entails.
It grew out of the fact that so many record executives had seen Judith, and had said, 'She's great, we know she's great, we love her, we don't know what to do with her,'
...I was one of the first Cinemascope children...
We were never on strike. The day that story appeared in Variety newspaper, I was at Fox doing vocal services for that week's show.
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.
Privilege has its own way of seeing the world.
If you're going to do something that lasts 90 minutes, you can't really do it with stick figures.
You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.
Music can happen with equal ease as a solo or collaborative venture, it seems to me.