Steve Coogan
Steve Coogan
Stephen John "Steve" Coogan is an English actor, stand-up comedian, impressionist, writer, and producer. He began his career in the 1980s, working as a voice artist on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image and providing voiceovers for television advertisements. In the early 1990s, he began creating original comic characters, leading him to win the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In 1999, he co-founded the production company Baby Cow Productions...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth14 October 1965
CityMiddleton, England
If the person who can effectively sanction ill-conceived wars can play the electric guitar, which is a symbol of rebellion, then that whole worldview becomes confused.
I don't like comedy that I think is bad comedy, where people are trying to be sick for the sake of it, where there's no intellectual point behind it. I like stuff that's got an underlying point of view.
Even if I screw up in my personal life, as long as I'm not destroying myself, I just think, "Okay, I screwed up." I'm not Mother Theresa.
I don't think I'm kind of universally known. I think in the indie world I'm probably better known than in some mainstream Hollywood terms.
When you see a crowd of people jumping up and down at a pop concert, all gloriously in the moment, I don't think you'll ever see a comedian there. They'll all be standing at the sides, looking at how it all fits together.
Big comedy is good, I like things that are big, but good comedy has to be truthful I think and has to reflect some sort of reality.
To me, I like and understand ritual and I think it is important. Things that we do that give us comfort are important. Like Christmas, I like to go into a church and hear the carols sung. There's a comfort of actually going inside of a church, I find them serene. They're unchanging.
The important thing is not to be defined by what others think of you.
I don't think there's anything outside what comedy can address.
When it comes to morality, I'd rather have an unfaithful president like Bill Clinton, who tried to reform welfare, than a faithful George Bush who propagated an illegal war on the rest of the world. So that is where my morality stands.
Look at all those American preachers who got caught with their pants down. They say one thing and they are doing another. I try to be more honest about it, both in my thinking and my behavior.
The British often shy away from any cinematic interpretation of real sex. They sometimes have what I call "subtle sex," which is really introspective and has soft music in the background. Either that or it's played for comedy. The British are kind of hung up about sex. They find it kind of titillating and they make jokes about it because they're nervous.