Quotes About Performance

After you do a joke a few times, you have material that you know works. Although sometimes I have a joke that has worked a bunch of times, and then one night it'll flop.

I stumbled on a joke idea and style that worked, the audience went with it and, from that moment on, I was hooked. It's an amazing feeling.

I know what's funny, and I probably know the best way to deliver the joke. Whether it's walking out of a room, facing that way, facing this way. I just have a sense of that.

I can't write a joke. I could never write. I do a lot of stories and I call them stories, but they're just comedy recitals on a given subject.

I always joke that everything else that I do is to support my theater habit.

Whatever happened to a good pie-in-the-face joke?

It's hard talking about acting, in a way, because it's like explaining a joke: I do think it loses something in the telling.

Louis CK knows that just because a joke is using space as a resource instead of something to be crammed like a hamper, this doesn't mean a story isn't happening.

I think sometimes in comedy the characters are often sacrificed for the joke, and it's more important for it to be funny than for there to be love.

A joke bombing on stage doesn't bother me, especially if it's intended to bomb.

Directing a television episode is no joke, and it's incredibly difficult and especially when you're acting in it as well.

I think I was born to be a clown. I just haven't figured out how to bring that side of myself into the world of filmmaking. It's much more comfortable for me to cry on a film set than it is to tell a joke.

The voice has been my joker card that sometimes has played like an ace and sometimes a joker. When you sing the way I sing, it's impossible to get people to talk about anything else.

I make jokes. That's what I do.

If you do something that is not gags and punchlines and is character-based, where there are no jokes as such, then it all has to come from a place of truth, and I love that - I love nothing more than getting very serious about my comedy.

I love my jokes.

Comedy has bits, has jokes, has stories, and it has characters.

I am a product... I'm a comedian. I'm not curing cancer. In the end, I tell jokes. I make people laugh.

I keep getting these people at my shows who only know me from television. I can always tell when they're, like, emotionally flinching when I start doing my jokes.

Every comedian feels out an audience. As you're telling jokes, if they're not laughing at this, you change the subject.

I tell jokes for a check; I'm on TV for a check.

You have comedians who just do jokes, and they're called comics, not comedians. You have comedians that do bits - a person that has a lot of jokes that have a beginning, a middle and an end, but it's not a real story. And you have someone that does great stories, the one that blends those things together - that person is doing comedy.

With stand-up, there's a little bit of an exaggerated reality because things have to be manipulated to create comedy, to create jokes.

I like writing a joke, and I like when a joke works, and I like other comics who tell jokes.