Quotes About Comedy

My favorite comedians are basically themselves onstage.

I sort of write onstage. I'll throw an idea out there, like Home Depot, and just start talking about it.

I get nervous all the time. The only time I'm not nervous is onstage, which is weird.

If you can jump up onstage and make people laugh, shouldn't you also be able to inhabit a character?

If I was going onstage, of course I would talk about it. How could I not?

I'm a Brooklyn guy onstage, and I try to really feed my fans with the kind of material they expect from me.

Good comics gravitate to each other; you know who's your type of person by watching them onstage, hopefully.

When you're onstage with Chris Rock, anything can happen. He is one of the greatest comic geniuses we've ever seen.

Even when I go do comedy stuff live, I can still feel the drummer in me about to go onstage.

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

I'm always trying out new stuff onstage. That's where I do all my writing.

When you're onstage and you know you're bombing, that's very, very scary. Because you know you gotta keep going - you're bombing, but you can't stop.

There is nothing - nothing - like writing a great joke and having that joke kill onstage.

I don't know what Tracy Morgan does onstage, but I can assure you, it's no act.

I don't sit and write stand-up material; I come up with an idea onstage.

When I started out in the late '80s, my act was pretty terrible, and for years, I kind of toiled in obscurity. I don't believe in a hierarchy in comedy; I feel that a person deserves respect the first time they get onstage, and after that, they just have to be funny and get more consistent.

I don't practice or write stuff down - everything I do onstage was just made up before I went on.

I had one guy say, 'I watched your show and didn't agree with what you said.' And I'm like, 'It's a joke. How could you not agree? I can understand you saying it's not funny.' But it's like my going onstage and doing a knock-knock and somebody going, 'I disagree. There's no door here.'

I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.

A lot of comedians are really funny onstage, but they can't do a podcast.

When I started stand-up, the people I admired most were the people who were the most themselves onstage.

I always just felt more comfortable just kind of hiding behind a character than being myself onstage.

Joe Rogan has this podcast where he's talking astrophysics and lean BMI indexes and weird philosophy most of the time and yet, when you see him onstage, you're like, 'Oh, this guy is just a killer comedian.'

I will say that, I, being a Jew, experience unease before I go onstage; and after I go onstage, and in general. But luckily the forty-five minutes to an hour that I'm onstage I usually forget everything else and I just press play.