Wyatt John Foster Cenac Jr. is an American comedian, actor, producer, and writer. He was a correspondent and writer for The Daily Show from 2008 to 2012. He starred in the TBS series People of Earth and in Barry Jenkins’s first feature Medicine for Melancholy.
Wyatt Cenac Quotes
1. “I wrote for ‘King of the Hill’ for three seasons.”
— Wyatt Cenac
2. “For me, when I think of curiosity on television, a lot of times my childhood was shaped by shows on PBS that encouraged and embraced curiosity.”
— Wyatt Cenac
3. “Monsters aren’t as scary if you start shining lights on them.”
— Wyatt Cenac
4. “I feel like you can’t trust a cat. I feel like a cat’s got an ulterior motive. The moment you show any weakness to a cat, the cat is gonna take over.”
— Wyatt Cenac
5. “What’s nice about a lot of Wes Anderson’s films is that there’s a patience to it. I think that patience brings out a lot more funny things that you would miss otherwise if you just had to make quick cuts and keep the pace, whatever that pace is that bigger budget comedies have to have.”
— Wyatt Cenac
6. “I was arrested when I was 19 for inciting a riot.”
— Wyatt Cenac
7. “I represent my community, and I represent my people. And I’ve got to be honest if something seems questionable.”
— Wyatt Cenac
8. “There’s so many shows, whether it’s ‘Last Week Tonight’ or ‘The Daily Show’ or ‘Full Frontal’ or ‘Late Night With Seth Meyers,’ that are really doing great stuff talking about what’s going on in the world and what’s going on with the president, and those stories that everyone winds up talking about, whether on social media or in their jobs.”
— Wyatt Cenac
9. “I think, with these shows, with ‘Last Week Tonight,’ with ‘Full Frontal,’ I think, as these shows have evolved, we all have research departments now.”
— Wyatt Cenac
10. “Everybody has a stake in the story of policing.”
— Wyatt Cenac
11. “One of the things that I was kind of holding on to from ‘The Daily Show’ was there was an exhaustion that I would feel because we just kind of got caught up in the news cycle. You tell a story, and that’s an interesting story, and then the next day we have to drop it and talk about something else. That’s so unfair to the story and the people.”
— Wyatt Cenac
12. “Everyone gets very excited about the idea of space travel, but… it’s not going to be everybody that gets to go.”
— Wyatt Cenac
13. “We all live with contradictions.”
— Wyatt Cenac
14. “I am not looking at my TV show to change the world.”
— Wyatt Cenac
15. “Policing of the disabled and how many deaf people get shot by cops is sort of insane. And it’s not talked about.”
— Wyatt Cenac
16. “The thing that I’m known for – at least, depending on what Subreddit you go to – is being a comedian. And so, even when talking about heavy things, I still want to try to use humor to walk us in the door.”
— Wyatt Cenac
17. “When I was in college, I walked by the journalism school every day on my way to my own classes, and that’s the closest I’ve come to having any sort of journalism background.”
— Wyatt Cenac
18. “For me, in trying to talk about something like policing, it’s such a huge issue, and it’s an issue that’s very local and very personalized to communities, to cities, to legislators, and so, in that way, I think as we started looking into talking about policing, the thing that you realize is that you can’t paint everything with the same brush.”
— Wyatt Cenac
19. “There aren’t a lot of roles for sleepy-eyed black dudes.”
— Wyatt Cenac
20. “Sometimes I feel I’m being animated, but it comes off differently. Unfortunately, I was cursed with these sleepy eyes.”
— Wyatt Cenac
21. “I just hate the Internet.”
— Wyatt Cenac
22. “I listen to a lot of Freddie Hubbard.”
— Wyatt Cenac
23. “Kanye is a student of art. He’s an art-school-dropout type of kid that will talk about art till the cows come home.”
— Wyatt Cenac
24. “I have worked in animation on ‘King of the Hill.’ I’ve worked in late-night with ‘The Daily Show.’ I’ve worked on single-camera stuff, whether it was a movie or television. I have performed onstage.”
— Wyatt Cenac
25. “If you have a car, you tune it up; you replace the parts. You try to keep it in good shape. This country has tires that are shot, a bunch of engine problems, and rather than saying, ‘Okay, let’s maybe put some new parts in here,’ we just keep putting gas in and driving forward.”
— Wyatt Cenac
26. “I probably learned more about Marion Barry listening to Chris Rock than I did reading a headline.”
— Wyatt Cenac
27. “I remember Tim Meadows gave me a radio. It was a radio he didn’t want anymore. I gave it to my grandmother, and she had it ’til the day she died. To me, it was, ‘I got a thing from Tim Meadows!’ I think my grandmother was like, ‘I got a thing from my grandson!’”
— Wyatt Cenac
28. “I think, a lot of times when you do a comedy show, people will turn out for a name they know. So, they get excited when they see Patton Oswalt is going to be on the show, but they kind of cross their arms until Patton Oswalt shows up.”
— Wyatt Cenac
29. “I spent a lot of time in Brooklyn as a kid. I was born in New York, and my grandmother lived in Crown Heights, so there’s a part of it that I feel this connection to.”
— Wyatt Cenac
30. “When we simply write a place off as, like, ‘Well, it’s just Trump country,’ for the people who are there, we do them a disservice on some level. It’s their country, too.”
— Wyatt Cenac
31. “I feel like I’ve always thought of myself as a comedian.”
— Wyatt Cenac
32. “I wrote this 12-page ‘Luke Cage’ comic book for Marvel once, and I got to create a villain. His name was Lone Shark, so there was this running thing of whether it was spelled L-O-A-N or L-O-N-E. I like the idea of ‘I’m a lone shark,’ and then people are like, ‘You are here to collect a debt?’”
— Wyatt Cenac
33. “There are plenty of people I’ve seen and thought that person is funny, or that person is really talented, and they’ve got something, but maybe the buying public doesn’t see the same thing I see, or the stars don’t align in the right way for them.”
— Wyatt Cenac
34. “I enjoy ‘Life Aquatic.’ I think that one, from a visual standpoint, is just such a fun, visual movie to look at, whether it’s the shots of the ship cut down the middle, that set where you can see everyone in each of their rooms doing whatever and moving about – something like that, I could watch that on a loop for an hour.”
— Wyatt Cenac
35. “There are things that are only palatable until they become uncomfortable for us, so it’s very easy to complain about some problem the minute it becomes a problem for you. But you’re okay with certain aspects of gentrification if they’re the aspects you like.”
— Wyatt Cenac
36. “At ‘The Daily Show,’ we were satirizing a news program. You put somebody in a suit, you put ’em behind a desk, and they become an authority figure.”
— Wyatt Cenac
37. “I always found myself feeling that happiness rises and frustration trickles down. If the people at the top are frustrated, then everybody down the line feels that. But if the people at the bottom are happy and fulfilled, then they do their jobs a little better, and it goes up that way.”
— Wyatt Cenac
38. “I think, with any topical show, it’s very easy to find yourself caught up in the news cycle, and working at ‘The Daily Show,’ I definitely found myself in that, where we would be talking about the last 24 hours.”
— Wyatt Cenac
39. “There’s more we can do as a community to try to change what policing looks like in our cities.”
— Wyatt Cenac
40. “As long as you walk away from any experience, good or bad, with lessons and things you can take into the next experience, I don’t think you can do anything but look back on it with an appreciation.”
— Wyatt Cenac
41. “Watching something is a personal experience, and I think watching something that is dealing with a heavy subject matter, it’s a personal thing.”
— Wyatt Cenac
42. “It’s interesting to go places and see that, at the end of the day, people just want to feel safe, and what that looks like to them varies… but that was encouraging to see that there is more common ground than perhaps I realized.”
— Wyatt Cenac
43. “The majority of the DC and Marvel comic lines are white male characters, and the minute you make Thor a woman or Captain America a black guy, the Internet is filled with hateful comments and people saying, ‘That’s not what Captain America is supposed to look like.’”
— Wyatt Cenac
44. “There are 18,000 police agencies in this country. There’s no network requiring them to operate according to the same guidelines.”
— Wyatt Cenac
45. “Women deal with real issues with policing that don’t really get talked about.”
— Wyatt Cenac
46. “I can’t be manic without it feeling false to me.”
— Wyatt Cenac
47. “There’s always a certain concern whenever you go and shoot a field piece: that maybe all the elements won’t come together, knowing that you have limited time to tell a story, hoping that you get all the elements you need, hoping the subjects are comfortable.”
— Wyatt Cenac
48. “If you wanna be the comic relief in a big-budget movie, go to L.A. because there are five auditions in a week that you could hit up, and that increases your chances of getting those jobs.”
— Wyatt Cenac
49. “I kinda feel like if I can do what I like in New York – and I like New York, I was born in New York, I have a lot more of a connection to New York – the hope is to stay in New York.”
— Wyatt Cenac
50. “When I used to put videos on MySpace, there’d always be someone posting something nasty. To those people, I’d send friend requests, and invariably, they accepted them.”
— Wyatt Cenac
51. “It’s a very short walk to go from making jokes to getting on a soapbox and going on a diatribe.”
— Wyatt Cenac
52. “Flights are a good way to catch up on podcasts, but I’ll listen to some jazz to fall asleep.”
— Wyatt Cenac
53. “I went to an all-boys Catholic school in Dallas.”
— Wyatt Cenac
54. “There are some artists that may actually be crazy, but there are some artists that just make different choices, and because they are different, we call them crazy.”
— Wyatt Cenac
55. “I’m not trying to walk away from responsibility or anything like that, but I think there’s a bunch of people on TV who get trust simply for being on TV.”
— Wyatt Cenac
56. “What’s sad is that we can have a reality-television performer for president without incorporating the other aspects of reality television – like voting and voter engagement.”
— Wyatt Cenac
57. “After I left the ‘Daily Show,’ I was kind of sitting out for five years. I know what it’s like to not be able to have that platform for my voice the way I want it.”
— Wyatt Cenac
58. “For me, funny is funny, and what’s unfortunate is these comedians aren’t being allowed to operate in rooms for everybody and that everybody can laugh and say, ‘Okay, I find that person funny, and I don’t just have to find them funny because they look like me.’”
— Wyatt Cenac
59. “When I was a kid, I loved really loud things. My grandmother and I went to the Fulton Mall, and I bought a three-piece suit that was paisley. Paisley over the whole suit. I was 6 and thought it was great. My mother took a photo of me in it, sent it to my grandmother, and burned the suit.”
— Wyatt Cenac
60. “The role of a comedian is to go in and make something funny. That might be a situation where I’m writing, a situation where I’m in control, like standup or something of my own that I’m making, or it might be something like being an actor in someone else’s project.”
— Wyatt Cenac
