41 Quotes by Paul Provenza

He was a huge champion of the idea and a big cheerleader for the movie, and this is where it gets heartbreaking, ... We were supposed to bring it over to his house and screen it for him right after Sundance, and he died while we were at Sundance.

Johnny can't gain his composure, Ed McMahon is doing his characteristic bull moose guffaw, the band -- the instruments are banging into one another -- the audience is in tears, and every time Johnny would try to gain his composure, he would look at Buddy and it would start all over again.

We didn't shoot it like a real movie, ... We never set up lights, we didn't do anything elaborate with sound, we never did makeup or anything like that, because every time something like that happens, it's another layer of artifice.

We don't judge anybody if they're offended, we're just having a good time,

There are a lot of movies out there for you, but there is room on the shelf for something that's free and liberating as well, ... If you don't like dirty jokes, if you don't like rough language, I highly recommend the penguin movie because they dress really nicely.

There are many people who say it was Johnny's favorite ever.

Everybody did an amazing job of letting their hair down and being fearless,

As we set about to edit, I watched 150 hours of footage over and over for a period of months. I had to figure out what hanging out with these artists doing this joke meant. In that process some ideas began to emerge: craft and art, freedom and creativity, boundaries and taboos, etc. So we used comics' performances that illustrated those ideas. We wanted to show rather than tell.

The joke is the comedy equivalent of jazz. It's raunchy, it's free of constraints, yet has a simple 'melody' to hold on to. It's about where you take it, not where it's going. If that is not a workable definition of art, I don't know what is.