“Comic-Con is nerd Christmas. People go wanting to have fun.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Freelancers are ‘free’ because they take risks – they don’t like being told what to do. That’s both exciting and daunting, because you have to police you.”
― Chris Hardwick
“If you can build your career around your passions, then you’re winning in life; that’s one of the best things you can ask for.”
― Chris Hardwick
“While the liberal media elite depict the bowler as a chubby guy with a comb-over and polyester pants, the reality is that bowling is one of the most tech-heavy sports today. Robotic pinsetters and computerized scoring were just the beginning.”
― Chris Hardwick
“For me personally, I have a fear of, ‘If I stop, I’m going to die.’ If I stop doing the things that are enriching to me or creatively exciting to me or if I stop creating, then I feel stagnant. If something isn’t growing, it’s dying.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Bowling is all physics and energy distribution. It’s F = ma. So it is actually one of the most science-y sports, because it literally is just a ball and a surface and objects to knock down.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Trying to make strangers laugh is crazy and more than a little narcissistic.”
― Chris Hardwick
“We’re not in an information age anymore. We’re in the information management age.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Videogames make you feel like you’re actually doing something. Your brain processes the tiered game achievements as real-life achievements. Every time you get to the next level, hot jets of reward chemical coat your brain in a lathery foam, and it seems like you’re actually accomplishing stuff.”
― Chris Hardwick
“In the end, all that time I spent in the ‘Star Wars’ universe fostered galaxies of creativity and made me a better person here on Earth, because it taught me that everyone counts. That’s why I can sincerely and with a straight face say: ‘May the Force be with you.’”
― Chris Hardwick
“Comic-Con is interesting because there’s so much going on at once, it’s literally impossible to do everything. You need clones and some sort of hoverboard so you can surf over the crowd of packed-in nerds.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I’ve gone from being bullied by jocks as a kid to being bullied by nerds as an adult.”
― Chris Hardwick
“The podcast movement was really a creative survival mechanism for standup comics.”
― Chris Hardwick
“You don’t need 30 million people to listen to your podcast. If 10,000 people listen to your podcast, which is not a hard number to achieve, then 10,000 people are listening, and you can build a community, and literally change the world just recording into a microphone.”
― Chris Hardwick
“My father was one of the greatest professional bowlers of all time. Seriously. Billy Hardwick: PBA Hall of Fame, Player of the Year in ’63 and ’69, and the first winner of the triple crown of bowling, among other things.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Any nerd who grew up around the time that I did, BBC programming was a treasure chest for us.”
― Chris Hardwick
“American television constantly tries to co-op British comedy and create their own version of it. Most of the time it doesn’t work; obviously, in the case of ‘The Office,’ it did. But a lot of times, it doesn’t really work.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Steve Martin said that philosophy is good for comedy because it screws up your thinking just enough, and I agree with that. Being forced to see life’s metadata is good training for looking for interesting angles on a topic.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Real philosophy is like trying to read an alarm system installation manual in Korean.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Don’t tell television, but there is some superior programming being made on the Interwebz.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Any time you’re lucky enough to get on a show people watch, it’s a good thing.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Traditionally nerd-based culture is now a big sector of pop culture.”
― Chris Hardwick
“If you do a joke that’s really old, then what happens is people on Reddit and Twitter just go, ‘Real original, you’re just doing old jokes!’ But bands do it all the time.”
― Chris Hardwick
“The ‘Hipster Nerds’ like stuff because they hate it. It’s like they ironically like it.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I think the mistake a lot of people make with new media is they just focus on one thing. But any one thing – just doing podcasts or just having a website or just doing television – isn’t enough anymore.”
― Chris Hardwick
“The lifeblood of YouTube is sharing.”
― Chris Hardwick
“When you first start working, you take whatever job is offered, because you have to build your resume. But you don’t think about what you’re building.”
― Chris Hardwick
“In the ’90s, you couldn’t say the word ‘nerd’ to someone when pitching a show. They would have considered that too niche and wouldn’t have listened.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I had a personal blog, but why does anyone care that I went shopping for hats?”
― Chris Hardwick
“I’ve been out of work so many times in my life that relying too much on just one job is terrifying.”
― Chris Hardwick
“A big company is like trying to steer a luxury liner.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I don’t know if I’m a Twitter addict. That seems kind of harsh. I would say it’s more that I’m seriously involved. That it’s a long-term relationship – like a girlfriend, which my actual girlfriend loves to hear.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Comedy has sort of been my life-long obsession. I literally obsessed over comedy. I really didn’t play sports – for me it was just comedy, computers and chess club; those were my big things.”
― Chris Hardwick
“When comedians get successful, the fans that they have aren’t the fans they would hang out with. I don’t have that problem.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I like listening to people talk about things that they love. They get to express things they don’t normally get to express.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I feel like so much of why I sort of want to work in television is so that people know to come see me live.”
― Chris Hardwick
“You can’t throw money at the Internet to make it work – it really is all about the quality of the content.”
― Chris Hardwick
“We are in niche consumption mode, but ‘niche’ doesn’t mean ‘small’ anymore. Niche can mean focused, and particularly with the Web, which is a global audience… you can have something niche and still get 10 to 15 million views.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Our mandate at Nerdist is that we only get involved with nice people around things that we love. We have the luxury of being in the demographic that we’re programming for.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Some people learn comedy, and some people just are comedy.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Every year on my birthday, I start a new playlist titled after my current age so I can keep track of my favorite songs of the year as a sort of musical diary because I am a teenage girl.”
― Chris Hardwick
“The nerdist movement is less about consumers; there is a large contingent that are creative nerdists instead of consumers.”
― Chris Hardwick
“My best friend, Wil Wheaton, identifies himself as a geek.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Comedy club audiences pay up to $25 per person and another fistful of cash to cover a two-drink minimum, so when they don’t like something, they let you know – with silence.”
― Chris Hardwick
“The goal of almost every comic is to find a comedy voice – a specific point of view that an audience can latch onto.”
― Chris Hardwick
“What’s more unnerving than magnetism, ghosts, and unpurified water? Gadgetmongers who purport to protect us from metaphysical monsters that go bump in the New Age night.”
― Chris Hardwick
“The worst day ever was when I found out my grandfather was going to die.”
― Chris Hardwick
“If I wasn’t acting or doing stand-up, I would be in animation. Or if I had the discipline I might studies physics.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Just as someone who’s been interested in radio and programming for so long, I can usually tell when an interviewer is doing a segment just to fill a programming slot. They ask questions, but they don’t care about the answers.”
― Chris Hardwick
“It’s funny: when I first started getting vocal about how much I liked ‘Doctor Who,’ I didn’t realize how deep the fan base was.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I am a freelancer. My services are available to anyone at any time.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I learned not to confuse ‘busy’ with ‘productive,’ but I’m still far too addicted to email to resist its early-morning digital snuggles.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I played tournament chess from fifth grade up into high school.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Like lycanthropy, the nerd gene can skip a generation. My maternal grandfather was a technophile.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Nerds get caught up in minutiae, because there is a tremendous and fulfilling sense of control in understanding every single detail of a thing more than any other living creature.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Comment threads are the new therapy for people. They just go and post the worst things they can think of because they feel bad, and then other people start attacking them, and then they attack back.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I don’t really read reviews and comments that much. There just isn’t a lot to be gained from it.”
― Chris Hardwick
“For podcasters, people are just being themselves in a public fashion. So when someone is attacking a podcast, they’re really attacking the person, because the person is the podcast. So I think that’s why podcasters take it to heart. It’s a very personal form of media, probably the most personal form of media.”
― Chris Hardwick
“With stand-up, there’s a little bit of an exaggerated reality because things have to be manipulated to create comedy, to create jokes.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Television and movies just take so long. If you pitch a show or develop a project, it can be a year before your show even gets on the air, if it gets picked up.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I almost think of nerd brains as rattlesnake venom; like, you can milk it. You can milk the pulpy venom out of the nerd brain and use it for good if you want to.”
― Chris Hardwick
“We didn’t understand irony yet in the ’80s; we just kind of existed at face value, so there was no nerd cool yet because the digital revolution was still in its infancy.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I probably get one or two days off every five or six weeks.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I think for a lot of people, bowling is sort of a joke. But I love it, and it means a lot to me, so any chance to help promote it or celebrate it or not make the hackiest jokes – ‘Bowlers are like plumbers and they wear the craziest shirts!’ – I’m way into.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I think being an outcast is what sort of strengthens the nerd movement, because you’re isolated, so you have time.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I do find some of the meanest, most exclusionary people are the nerds. And they rebel against other nerds! What are you doing? As much as I love nerds and the nerd movement, the nerd-on-nerd violence is really bad. A lot of times, nerds are the meanest ones online. And also, the trolling can be very extensive because they’re smart.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Even before I had an assistant, my calendar was color-coded and I had all these different e-mail rules for how to prioritize e-mails, so I made it a point years ago to figure all that stuff out because my life was a mess.”
― Chris Hardwick
“Bowling really was a big American sport in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, and then it kind of died off in the ’80s.”
― Chris Hardwick
“I think when I look out and I see there’s so much negativity in the world and a lot of people are unhappy and a lot people are anxious, it just feels like that’s one view of the world. But you don’t have to always focus on that view of the world.”
― Chris Hardwick
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