Quotes About Stand-up

I might've been witty, but I didn't have a shtick. So, I never considered myself a comedian.

Coming from the Midwest, I didn't know about stand-up as an art. I just thought stand-up comedians were old men in suits talking about their wives.

Show me one guy or woman as funny as Rodney Dangerfield or as good as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Joan Rivers. There are a lot of good comics out there, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics.

When did I start comedy? I came out of the womb and did 10 minutes.

I went to college as an economics major because that was the easiest major that could still please your Asian parents, and then, much to their dismay, I became a stand-up comedian.

When I was doing stand-up, there were a lot of things I talked about that seemed very silly but were therapeutic.

I hate comics who look at comedy as therapy. But at least it gets things out of my system in a funny way.

Stand-up is good therapy.

Lesbians are likely to be drawn to stand-up, if only because it's cheaper to produce and therefore more accessible for women. But the very form of stand-up is masculine.

A lot of times when I sit down with the other comics and try to talk theory, they say I'm being too serious.

I really can't describe what my stand-up is like - people see it and they say it's like that, or it's like this, and that's really up to them, that's fine, but I don't sit around all day analysing it. I just try and enjoy a show and interest myself because if I don't do that then I won't interest anybody else.

Have four things going. I have stand-up comedy, two television shows and I'm working on a play. I like to work, and I fear that something could fall through. You know what they say: 'The show must go off.'

People really have come for a dialogue when they go to a stand-up show in the U.K. They say, 'I understand that you have now finished your little comedy monologue; now I have something to say regarding what I've just heard.

Ten comics can say the same joke, and I'm the one who gets called a thief.

Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.

If the only reason to be on stage communicating with people is to tell them a joke and make them laugh, that seems thin for me. That has a place - I don't think it should stop happening - but for me, I don't know. I just don't.

I love seeing Mark Steel or Mark Thomas, but I'm not that sort of person.

Before I got into stand-up, I was a really quiet guy who had all these thoughts, all these things I wanted to say, but there was never anyplace for me to say them because my mom would look at me and go, 'You better not say what you're thinking. You better not.'

When I started on the London circuit in 1989, nationwide there were about 150 to 200 people that were what you could call alternative comedians - that weren't club comics. Now, last year when the Laughing Horse chain of clubs held a new acts competition, a thousand people entered. So, there are 800 people more.

A laugh is a weird sound, and when you get a couple thousand people making it at once, it's really strange. But when I can feel proud of myself for causing it, it's great.

Stand-up used to be much more of a form combat. Heckling was much more common [in the '90s]. And I couldn't get stage time, and so I would go out to Pip's in Sheepshead Bay.

I like to do stand-up for people who live real life.

A stand-up comedian will never be the life of a party. Instead, he will be the guy who is standing at a corner and observing people.

It's very rare that stand-up comics have kids, because once they do, they stop doing stand-up.