Mo Rocca
A young imagination is bold, likes to make bigger leaps. It likes to, well, imagine that the dustbuster is a dinosaur; that the computer mouse is a hotrod; that the box is a cave; that the rawhide is a torch... or a baton... or something.Collection: Imagination
I wish I had played team sports. I think every kid should. Teamwork builds character - teaches people about leadership and cooperation.Collection: Leadership
I love Christmas. Frosty the Snowman, peace on Earth and mangers, Salvation Army bell ringers and reindeer, the movie 'Meet Me in St. Louis,' office parties and cookies.Collection: Peace
I love the excess of Christmas. The shopping season that begins in September, the bad pop star recordings of Christmas carols, the decorations that don't know when to come down.Collection: Christmas
Christmas is a stocking stuffed with sugary goodness.Collection: Christmas
One Christmas my father kept our tree up till March. He hated to see it go. I loved that.Collection: Christmas
It's interesting, because I tend to trust a man with big ears.Collection: Trust
I'm in fact a hair under six feet, but I'm very svelte. People would never see me if I turned sideways.
Hypocrisy is great fodder for comedy.
I bruise like a grape.
If there's one thing that everyone can agree on, it's that, right or wrong, they hate the press.
I was not a jock in high school. I know, you're shocked.
The most important thing is to write material that YOU think is funny. If you don't think it's funny, but you're convinced that other people will think it is, well they won't.
It's much easier to make jokes about sensitive issues if there is some dissent, some conflict.
When it comes to war, we focus more on the mainstream coverage of the event, rather than the event itself. People dying is never funny. Protest puppets are always funny.
I can't be everything to everyone. Send me your specs.
Honestly we never lied to people about who we were. Usually the wackier interviews came to pass because the interview subjects, aware that we were Comedy Central, just wanted to get their stories out.
Politicians who wear little tennis socks with the balls at the back should not be taken seriously.
No, no, no separate but equal... never the twain shall meet. And the pendulum kept swinging and it came to rest in the bastard hybrid known as the Daily Show.
It's one of my favorite things to do, watch TV and stretch. I'm so flexible. I can put my legs behind my head. I want to be the most flexible person in the world.
I am a kamikaze gadfly.
I still don't know how to cook and that's just unacceptable.
I have a Keurig coffee maker, which is really kind of a luxury. It was given to me by an ex. I realized when I'm feeling sentimental, I'll gently, tenderly press the button. Then when I remember he dumped me, I punch it.
Generally I get up at around 7. But oftentimes, I'll be lolling in bed a little bit earlier - sometimes as early as 5:45 - filing in my mind all the things I have to get done. Which is, of course, totally unproductive.
I'm always working on a few different stories at once, so there's always some really big coffee table book I'm carrying around.
If I had a time machine I would go back 30 years and show up at my grandmother's apartment before the gargantuan meals she would serve and I would help her.
I know a lot about a few things - mostly useless things.
I was way too hyperactive to study for long. I would freak out, then crash, then be too tired to read or write. I really should have had less sugar.
I'd rather call myself a mischief-maker, an imp, rather than a satirist. Satirist sounds so self important. Plus no one is calling himself an imp right now. It makes me feel special.
Think of all that hard work our founding fathers put in - the revolutionizing, the three-fifths compromising, having to write the entire Constitution with a quill - and yet they neglected to include the right to vote.
Did I end up finding a little blue pill to cure America's electoral dysfunction? Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
I hate homemade sweaters.
Homemade sweaters are always itchy.
I think that Obama is very cool. And I think he's clever, and I think he can be witty. But I don't think he's funny in either the way that Reagan was funny - or John McCain and Dick Cheney are both funny in that ruthless, kind of mean way.
Something that came as a shock to me is that we do not have a constitutional right to vote. And that's not just a fun little historical factoid. It actually has huge ramifications. It's the reason our system is so decentralized - in other words, chaotic.
I don't think everyone should vote. If you have to be dragged into the polls, carried into the polls and smelling salts have to be used, you probably shouldn't be voting. However, we shouldn't be putting up barriers to voting that target certain groups.
Digital television, satellite radio, videogames, iPods - so much media. Do books even matter anymore?
I mean, you're gonna be left behind if you don't appreciate the genius that is Meredith Vieira.
Yes, I still love 'South Park,' but I also love morning TV now.
Look, not embracing the 'Today' show is soooo yesterday.
My sophomore year I spent exactly one day on the JV football team. It was the tryout day.
While some of my closest friends were jocks, it seemed that they spoke a different language with each other. Joining in their conversation was fraught with risk.
Irony is the disparity between what you expect will happen, and what does happen. So raining on your wedding day isn't ironic, it's just crappy. It would have been ironic if she had lived in a place like Seattle, and traveled to the desert of Mexico for a wedding and it ended up raining there, but not in Seattle. Alanis always gets the last laugh though. We all sit here, saying her song isn't ironic, but in fact, that's pretty ironic that she wrote a song called Ironic that wasn't really ironic. Those Canadians are pretty crafty.Collection: Song
I have a dream, and a plan, to combine the commercial possibilities of Valentine's Day with the substance and meaning of black history month. I call it: Blackentine's Day.Collection: Funny
I have such respect for people who do non-fiction casting after settling on the grandparents we got for this. It is really hard to find people who are not fame-whores. We're lucky these people actually wanted to spend their time doing this. All of them would have much rather been cooking without the cameras, being with their families. That's why they're great characters.Collection: Character
One could say, that # Masons were raised right.Collection: Masons
Wheel of Fortune was an important SAT prep for me.Collection: Important
I love the challenge of taking something that may be boring to a lot of people but is unarguably important. It's irresistible. I always take projects that I'm paid to learns stuff. I study much harder now than I did when I was in college.Collection: College
As the great philosopher George Santayana would have said, 'those who cannot remember the past . . . should simply read Jan Van Meter's Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Van Meter's greatest hits collection of slogans is the catchiest ever retelling of American history. It's like the greatest minds of Madison Avenue sat down to write a history book. They don't make sound bites like they used to!Collection: Book