words from the great C.K.

JW: Your material always seems incredibly thought-through. It’s not just button-pushing for the sake of button-pushing.

Yeah, sometimes. But I’ve said things onstage that are totally indefensible if you take them at their naked truth, and it’s all part of a thing. I remember when I did the joke the other night about the weird babies, and I said Chinese babies are the same as deformed babies — that’s just…what a horrible thing to say, and Pamela said to me, her natural stance is, “Don’t pick on people, don’t say things, you don’t have to hurt people,” but she now said, for the first time, things like the Chinese people joke are really important in your act, and they are, because I’m fucking around with a lot of big ideas, and if I just did those, it would start to…I don’t have the authority to really talk about those things, I don’t have the education or the right to seriously talk about these things. I have no fucking right to be talking about that, and when I make a joke like about a baby with a tree branch growing out of its head and a Chinese baby being the same thing, I’m just being a dick, and I’m being a dick in a new and exciting way, I’m really good at it, and I’m able to find jokes like that in places that people didn’t know that they were before, so that’s just a really good joke to me, but it’s also weird, it takes away my credibility, it makes it clear that, look, I don’t expect you to believe any of this, I’m just being a dick, I’m just enjoying myself. It’s just fun. Really, this thing about evolution I said, you’re really going to think I’m taking it seriously? I just said that Chinese babies are deformed for being Chinese — what kind of person would say that? If you’re a really Hitler-esque eugenic person or something, or someone who’s just honking a big horn and being a dick, just riding a bike with exploding shoes, just being a numb nuts…