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I was totally amazed. This little home made underground comix thing was turning into a business before my eyes. It went from us going around Haight Street trying to sell these things we had folded and stapled ourselves to suddenly being a business with distributors, lawyers, contracts, and money talk. ... The whole thing began to take on a heaviness that I believe had a negative effect on my work. I was only twenty-five years old when all this happened. It was a case of "too much too soon," I think. I became acutely self-conscious about what I was doing. Was I now a "spokesman" for the hippies or what? I had no idea how to handle my new position in society! ... Take Keep On Truckin'... for example. Keep on Truckin'... is the curse of my life. This stupid little cartoon caught on hugely. ... I didn't want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture! I didn't want to do 'shtick'—the thing Lenny Bruce warned against. That's when I started to let out all my perverse sex fantasies. It was the only way out of being "America's Best Loved Hippy Cartoonist."
--
The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 163

 

Robert Crumb

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On the bus going home I heard a most fascinating conversation between an old man and woman. "What a thing, though," the old woman said. "You'd hardly credit it." "She's always made a fuss of the whole family, but never me," the old man said. "Does she have a fire when the young people go to see her?" "Fire?" "She won't get people seeing her without warmth." "I know why she's doing it. Don't think I don't," the old man said. "My sister she said to me, 'I wish I had your easy life.' Now that upset me. I was upset by the way she phrased herself. 'Don't talk to me like that,' I said. 'I've only got to get on the phone and ring a certain number,' I said, 'to have you stopped.'" "Yes," the old woman said, "And you can, can't you?" "Were they always the same?" she said. "When you was a child? Can you throw yourself back? How was they years ago?" "The same," the old man said. "Wicked, isn't it?" the old woman said. "Take care, now" she said, as the old man left her. He didn't say a word but got off the bus looking disgruntled.

 

Joe Orton

 

This presidential race is the biggest dick contest in history. "Your dick is indecisive!" "Your dick started an unnecessary war!" "Your dick didn't get injured enough in Vietnam!" "Your dick didn't even go to Vietnam!" "Your dick is soft on terrorism!" "Your dick started terrorism!" "Your dick blamed Vietnam vets for atrocities that made all vets unable to come home to a hero's welcome." "Your dick forged its way out of military service!" Has this kind of dick-waggling happened before outside of a pro-wrestling context?

 

Margaret Cho

 

I mean, don't tell me about Lenny Bruce, man - Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all. Elvis was a goddam truck driver who worshipped his mother and would never say "shit" or "f**k" around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window" out the window and replaced it with "Let's f**k." The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates.

 

Elvis Presley

 

I was lucky to be part of the "underground comix" thing in which cartoonists were completely free to express themselves. To function on those terms means putting everything out in the open—no need to hold anything back—total liberation from censorship, including the inner censor! A lot of my satire is considered by some to be "too hard." My "negro" characters are not about black people, but are more about pushing these "uncool" stereotypes in readers' faces, so suddenly they have to deal with a very tacky part of our human nature. ... Who did I think I was appealing to? I don't know. I was just being a punk, putting down on paper all these messy parts of the culture we internalize and keep quiet about. I admit I'm occasionally embarrassed when I look at some of that work now.

 

Robert Crumb

 

So we pulled up to this diner, where people told us that we could get some good pie. And I like pie. Do you like pie too? So, we go in there, and we say, "Oh, what kind of pie you got?' And they didn't have sweet potato pie, they didn't have pumpkin pie. They had some cream pies mostly, which is OK with me. So, I got some coconut cream pie. And Governor Strickland, he got lemon meringue pie.
So while we're waiting for our pie, the staff come and they want to take a picture with me because they say, you know, the owner of this dinner is a staunch die-hard Republican, so we want to kind of tease him a little bit by getting this picture with you. So we're taking this picture and suddenly the owner comes out with the pie. And he looks at me and I say, "Sir, I understand that you are a die-hard Republican." He says, "That's right." I said, "How's business?" He said, "Not so good." He said, "My customer, they can't afford to eat out anymore." I said, "Who's been in charge of the economy for the last eight years?" He said, "Republicans." I said, "You know, if you kept on hitting your head against a wall over and over again and it started to hurt, at some point would you stop hitting your head against the wall?" He said, "You've got a point."

 

Barack Obama