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.

If you can handle a nightclub audience successfully, you can handle anything.

I'm tired of being 51st in this country on the NEAP scores on fourth-grade math. We don't have but 50 states.