Jess Fox Quotes

He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right. I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him.

You can save yourself, Dagny. You don’t need him.” He smiled softly. “Besides, he was the rock that was pulling you under. Now you are free.

Eternal

Blue didn’t quite know how to say it; she didn’t know quite what it was. “It … just feels like such a waste. Falling in love with all of them.” All of them really meant all of them: 300 Fox Way, the boys, Jesse Dittley. For a sensible person, Blue thought that maybe she had a problem with love. In a dangerous voice, she added, “Don’t say ‘it’s good life experience.’ Do not.” “I wasn’t going to say good life experience. I was going to say that leaving helps, sometimes. And it’s not always a for ever goodbye. There’s leaving and coming back.” “What do I do?” Blue asked cannily. “What have you guys seen me doing?” “Travelling,” Maura replied. “Changing the world.” “Trees in your eyes,” Calla added, more gently than usual. “Stars in your heart.” “I just want you to look at your future as a world where anything is possible.

Conservatism" in America's politics means "Let's keep the niggers in their place." And "liberalism" means "Let's keep the knee-grows in their place-but tell them we'll treat them a little better; let's fool them more, with more promises." With these choices, I felt that the American black man only needed to choose which one to be eaten by, the "liberal" fox or the "conservative" wolf-because both of them would eat him. I didn't go for Goldwater any more than for Johnson-except that in a wolf's den, I'd always known exactly where I stood; I'd watch the dangerous wolf closer than I would the smooth, sly fox. The wolf's very growling would keep me alert and fighting him to survive, whereas I might be lulled and fooled by the tricky fox. I'll give you an illustration of the fox. When the assassination in Dallas made Johnson President, who was the first person he called for? It was for his best friend, "Dicky"-Richard Russell of Georgia. Civil rights was "a moral issue," Johnson was declaring to everybody-while his best friend was the Southern racist who led the civil rights opposition. How would some sheriff sound, declaring himself so against bank robbery-and Jesse James his best friend? How would some sheriff sound, declaring himself so against bank robbery-and Jesse James his best friend? Goldwater as a man, I respected for speaking out his true convictions-something rarely done in politics today. He wasn't whispering to racists and smiling at integrationists. I felt Goldwater wouldn't have risked his unpopular stand without conviction. He flatly told black men he wasn't for them-and there is this to consider: always, the black people have advanced further when they have seen they had to rise up against a system that they clearly saw was outright against them. Under the steady lullabies sung by foxy liberals, the Northern Negro became a beggar. But the Southern Negro, facing the honestly snarling white man, rose up to battle that white man for his freedom-long before it happened in the North. Anyway, I didn't feel that Goldwater was any better for black men than Johnson, or vice-versa. I wasn't in the United States at election time, but if I had been, I wouldn't have put myself in the position of voting for either candidate for the Presidency, or of recommending to any black man to do so. It has turned out that it's Johnson in the White House-and black votes were a major factor in his winning as decisively as he wanted to. If it had been Goldwater, all I am saying is that the black people would at least have known they were dealing with an honestly growling wolf, rather than a fox who could have them half-digested before they even knew what was happening.

You can save yourself, Dagny. You don’t need him. — Heart of Madness (Darkness Within Book 1) by Jess Fox

working on his act collecting information, processing it, and making sure he was able to communicate himself in a way that people would best comprehend

these are not the boos of bombing, but boos of discomfort that come from getting too close to saying the unsaid.

laughter is a tool to facilitate nonaggressive play.

Comics like to say people who are offended just want attention, just want power, and it’s like, duh, because they don’t have either, but the comics can’t understand that because they have both. It would be one thing if comedians combated humorlessness with humor, but instead their reaction is more humorlessness

Fearless” is often used to describe comics unafraid of hurting people, when it should apply to the comedians afraid of being hurt by people and persisting anyway.

However, sometimes I feel that those who fight to protect it do so less like warriors and more like helicopter parents so worried about comedy getting hurt and comedy moving beyond them that they stunt its development. To openly allow for critique is to take comedy seriously, and taking it seriously will allow it to evolve and mature.

Because, today, the people who say they can’t say anything anymore are often found saying it during a performance they earned tens of thousands of dollars for, on their podcast they make hundreds of thousands a year on, or the special they got paid millions for.

We’ve got to process this collectively and it’s going to go through me, the way I do it.

Rooted in the highbrow denial of death is a lowbrow denial of life.

Do you know the story of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”?24 The pop music supercomputers Max Martin and Dr. Luke were listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps

What matters is understanding all of these as intentional formal decisions rooted in specific artistic perspectives.

We can intellectualize as much as we want to,” Richardson told me, “but the idea of this brown thing that comes out of your butt and stinks and you have to deal with it and you’re ashamed of it, there’s nothing funnier in the world.”27 He added, “And it makes a sound when it comes out and sometimes the sound is just a sound, but it reminds you of a thing and this thing stinks like the poop—like, it’s just objectively funny.

While critics are literally paid to seem smart and the rest of us are just doing it because of social pressure, all of us would benefit from having our stupid sides appealed to.

More than a reference, it reflects a true cultural fluency.

you have to focus on how it tries to achieve its funny and what it is trying to communicate, instead of debating if something is funny at all. If you find something funny, there is fun and insight to be had in trying to explain why, but if someone else finds something funny that you don’t, there is nothing you can say that can make the person revoke their laugh.

Truth, as discussed in chapter 5, is fundamental in comedy, but veracity is not.

our “memories” are more of a reflection of our present interpretation of the past than what actually happened.

I never really thought of myself as depressed though, as much as [gets ironically wistful] paralyzed by hope

the isolation of the pandemic mirrored the self-imposed isolation of living online. The disassociation I was feeling in this moment was what a lot of people who grew up knowing only digital existence had been feeling their whole lives.

no artist is creating work just to provide the audience with the facts and figures of their life; they are hoping to do the impossible by trying to make the audience really feel how their reality really feels.

If you are saying supposedly offensive things and the audience is instantly all on board, it is not a comedy show, it’s a rally.

Does political correctness make comedy harder to do? Sure, in the sense that it would be easier to run for a touchdown if you didn’t have to worry about holding the ball, but that’s the game.

While all these technologies claim to be a step forward for communication, removing comedy from its context and turning comedians back to anonymous contributors to the great American joke book is a step backward for the art form.

This raises some very basic, very deep questions about how comedy (if not all of culture) continues, if the levels of trust and context they once depended on are impossible to restore.

There is this idea in the general population that all comedians are sad clowns with traumatic childhoods. Based on my experience, that’s not exactly correct. What is, for the most part, true is that all comedians have a compulsion to perform comedy. This is notable because, especially starting out, performing comedy—be it improv, sketch, or especially stand-up—is stupid hard. Multiple times a night, every night of the week, you have to do it poorly in front of people. And you have to do this for years before you bomb* only some of the time. If you want to go through this long, exhausting, disenchanting journey, then comedy must fill a deep need for you. For every comedian the source of that need is different, be it nature or nurture, but there is a reason almost everyone who eventually makes it describes that first laugh as feeling like a high they were chasing.

turn-of-the-twentieth-century rich dicks sought to elevate certain cultural products out of the grasp of the common man.