Quotes About Stand-up

I failed to get into drama school, and my best friend told me I should do stand-up instead. I was always doing gags and voices, so he booked a gig for me without telling me. I only had four days to write it. I did a seven-minute set; the first four minutes were terrible, but the last two were amazing.

We need more female voices to come out there and do comedy.

I'm a huge sketch comedy fan, and I think my love of sketch is reflected in my stand-up in that I do a lot of vignettes and voices and characters.

I find it pressurising coming to the Voodoo Rooms to do my hour of comedy.

I'm not going to give up the shock part of my comedy.

I wanted to travel and I was fascinated with stand-up and I just knew nothing was ever going to stop me from doing it. My mom tried to, she'd say 'You need to go to school and have a back up.' Nah, mom, this is it.

I've learnt that from stand-up - you should always worry that it's going to go badly, otherwise you're too laissez faire.

Stand-up was like being on a Barbie townhouse stage.

Nico Santos I've known from Bay Area stand-up, and he lives right by me so we hang out all the time.

I've always been into stand-up, and I always wanted to be a comic because it was like the dream job as a kid, and my brother, being the patriarch, he paved the way.

When you put an album out, you can't do any material from the album if people are paying to see you.

I've been doing comedy and paying my bills.

I've done stand-up since I was 18 years old, and I absolutely love it, but I used to go onstage, and the audience was my peers. Now I go onstage, and I could be their mother.

There's only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.

I would say that fifty percent of my show is killer comedy.

I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.

Live performance really terrifies me. I haven't done it, really, in years. I think that's why I retired from my brief career in stand-up.

'Inside' was the second LP album of a comedian's performance before an audience.

When you first start out in stand-up and, probably, as any performer, you enjoy the attention so much, and even though that hasn't died down on stage, it certainly has satiated whatever was in me that was needing that much attention. When I'm off stage, it's not something that I really need.

I try to keep performing as much as possible - I just like to. I used to take huge gaps off between gigs, now I just like to do stand-up gigs as much as I can.

I enjoy performing for heavily armed people. It's easier than going to Georgia.

I do love live performing, but I'm not a stand-up naturally, and I don't like the lifestyle of working just in the evenings at clubs and stuff - not a natural gig-er.

I think one of the perks of getting to do comedy is the ability to hang out with the funniest people in the world.

With the stand-up comic on TV, whether it's Seinfeld or Cosby or Roseanne, more important than their knowledge of how to tell a joke is their knowledge of themselves, or the persona they've created as themselves. So that when you're in a room with writers, you can say, 'Guys, that's a funny line, but I wouldn't say it.'