Mose Allison

There's a few tunes of mine that don't have jokes, but most of them have a joke and they have a humorous point of view somewhere.

But I got an audience that knows what I do. They usually show up, so I usually do pretty good.

I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.

Being famous gets me good concert tickets, good tables in restaurants, good seats at sporting events and that's really about it.

We played a gig and we had a song that was offensive to people of the Jewish persuasion, and we led off with it, and they were offended by it, and that was that.

To me, tattoos are a way of people being able to express themselves and have other people look at them and get a little insight into who they are, without ever even saying a word to them.