Quotes About Stand-up

I don't really write jokes down. I tend to have a premise that I work out and test on stage.

When I hit the scene, there was Billy Connolly and Max Boyce. It was all mother-in-law and Irish jokes, and we broke the mould. Now there are thousands of comedians out there, and I don't think I can be above it all.

I never looked at Gallagher like he was a threat to me.

The Punch Line is one of the best clubs in the world. It's an intimidating place if you're a younger comic, but the community is so lucky to have a place with such a high threshold and standard.

I never want to give up stand-up. Because I still get a thrill out of it.

I've been pitching a show of five female stand-up comedians through the generations, from Phyllis Diller to Amy Schumer, so when I got an e-mail asking me if I would participate in the Women in Comedy Festival, I was thrilled.

To be thrown onto the stand-up stage is an experience that you cannot fathom until you're actually there, because there's no place to go, and everyone is looking at you and you can't even see them because of the lights. And yet you have to manage to start talking and be funny on top of it.

I really don't want to do anything that resembles stand-up comedy. But I will agree to say that I am doing it, and I will hope that people expect it to be that, so I can thwart those expectations.

I've seen many female comics that a lot of people haven't heard of who are so funny, and I saw them come up, and they were working so hard, and then all of a sudden they had a baby, and they just got tied up in motherhood, and eventually, they kind of just stopped doing stand-up, and I thought it was such a shame.

The first time I did stand-up I was 17, and I was really a stand-up once I was 19 in New York, and now I'm 41, and I still feel like I haven't found myself onstage. Earlier in my career, I was really tight, really together, and knew who I was and I was confident.

My first time on stage was the class "graduation" at the Comedy Store. It was awesome. Everything got huge laughs and I just thought I knew how to do comedy.

Too many comics today ramble. By the time they get to the punch line, the audience has either gone to sleep, gone to the bathroom or gone to bed.

It is hard to find something where you can go off as much as I do in stand-up, but I think stand-up allows me that freedom where you can really go off and have a good time.

But a comedian is naked. His only weapon was his wit.

Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good.

I've been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it's pretty equal. I don't know why that is. It's been the same thing for a while. It's hard for female comedians to stand out. That's weird. That's a shame.

I started to realize that comedy is what I really wanted to do, but I didn't want to do stand-up.

I've always loved American stand-up. Richard Pryor is one of the main reasons I got into stand-up. After Pryor, I made my way through the other great American comics, then finally got into the British ones over here.

I've played at the Comedy Studio. I never did as an undergrad, but I have in recent years, whenever I've gone back to anything at Harvard, I've tried to go there and do some sets.

I was considered by my peers to be a good comedian. So that's all I ever strived to do was get some recognition from my peers.

It is really sad that there's no recognition at the national level for comedy.

I used to do stand-up when I was in high school. But I was also making beats for this rap group, and when we got a record deal, I sort of stopped doing the comedy and focused on the music instead. When that ended, I decided to go back to school, take broadcasting, and start my show on public-access TV.

The best comedy you can ever have is when you're in the pub with your mates. You can never beat that. That's what I try to recreate in stand-up.

I had always been heavily influenced by stand-up. I was in a comedy team called Red Johnny And The Round Guy.