Quotes About Stand-up

Hannibal Buress keeps popping up. His delivery cracks me up. He's smart and funny.

I have this JPM thing: jokes per minute. I've worked out that I should get in about 12 punchlines in five minutes. I need them all. It's like when you walk down a road, if there's a lamp post that's out, it's fine if you can see the next one's alight, but if there's two out, that's a period of frightening darkness.

I really don't take any interest at all in contemporary comedy.

There's nothing more powerful than stand-up. Crushing with your own material, with your own energy, controlling an audience: There's no better high. It's awesome.

I don't like comedians who don't have conviction, and with stand-up, it is always best to have an angle.

Corporate stand-up allowed me to make my own schedule and make money as if I was in show business.

I don't have credibility, I'm a comedian.

I spent seven years in clubs in England, Australia, etc. Not all comedians cross over to sell out in a theatre.

It's part of the gift and the curse of coming behind my brother. I'm not afforded the luxury of just taking a set casual, taking the night off. Because if I bomb, it's, 'Oh, he's not funny - he's just doing it because of his brother.'

I definitely have friends who gave me a tag for a joke I already had. Like, 'Here's another line.' A tag is, 'Oooooh, it's an industry term.' It's like, there's the punchline, and a tag is like a secondary punchline.

You forget that sometimes comedy is just a big night out for people. Almost every show, people come up to me and go, 'This is the first comedy show I've ever seen,' so you want to do well. If you do horribly at somebody's first time seeing live stand-up, well, you've not only tainted yourself, you've tainted a whole art form.

My opening acts are always really strong because I need a guy who can take on a big, big crowd. Which is not that easy to do.

I'm used to taking risks - my career was a risk. Being a stand-up comic is not something that's normally accepted when your mother is Filipino.

Louie is hugely talented. But I get very annoyed at the way the media... say, 'Louis C.K. is the greatest stand-up in the world.' He's not the greatest stand-up in the world. He's not funnier than Dave Attell.

After doing comedy for a while and knowing how hard it is to do physical comedy right, I learned how incredibly talented the Three Stooges really were after re-watching old episodes. They still stand up!

Stand-up comedy is not a man's job. It's an alpha job: To be the only person in a room with a microphone who's allowed to talk.

I think I have got a lot better as an interviewer. I let people talk now which is something you need to do. At the beginning I thought jokes, jokes, jokes, I am a stand up comedian but I think I have mellowed out now.

I always thought that the fastest way for me to get ahead and get noticed and to do well was to make my act very accessible. When I first started, I talked about family stuff, my dog, my cat. It was all I knew back then; I wasn't forcing anything, but I wasn't like, 'Hey, don't you hate doing homework?'

The first place I ever performed was at CU Boulder. I went there my freshman year and discovered stand-up after my friends talked me into signing up for a showcase on campus.

What makes me laugh is hearing the stuff about my son or the stuff about my mom. I was a big fan of Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy; they talked a lot about their moms and their kids. Those are the things that inspired me to do stand-up.

A lot of comics will say that the thing about specials now is that they're not special anymore because there are so many of them, and they come and go, and they're not really talked about. They just kind of come and go.

I like George Carlin's jokes. I like his humor. He's one of my heroes, and I like what he did with talking about everyday things.

When I do stand-up shows at colleges, girls will talk to me after the show, and that always feels good. I like talking to them.

An actor's life is all about rejection. It's you they don't want; it's you who's too tall or too short or too fat. With stand-up, it doesn't matter what you look like.