Quotes About Stand-up

Too much comedy today is vulgar, not clever. I say that as a comedian and as a consumer.

My father was and is a great father. My father always wanted to do stand-up. He wanted to be an actor. But instead he did two jobs. He did customer service at a hospital and he worked as a waiter at night. He pretty much sacrificed everything for his daughters.

So much in L.A. is waiting. It's so irritating. That's what's good about stand-up. You can go away, and you don't have to sit and wait by your phone. But it is very frustrating.

My ambition was to stop waiting tables. That was how I measured success: finally, I was able to stop waiting tables, and I was able to pay the rent, and that was by being a stand-up comic. Not a very good stand-up comic, but good enough to make a living.

My stand-up has always been very character-based. I'm not really the kind of person that's like, 'Hey, here's what's on my mind! Tip your waitress!' I would create the jokes based on the character I was playing. It was always a performance-based thing for me.

I'd never experienced stress before I did stand-up, and it was a massive shock to my system, this thing of waking up, and the nerves of, 'You're on stage tonight.'

People walked out on Richard Pryor and he's the funniest man alive.

The only one that got through was Jimmy Walker, because he plays the gas station attendant. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just that we were kind of purists at the time, and we didn't want any comedians.

There's a joke that I do where I make fun of myself for being bow-legged, and I compare myself to a camel and how a camel walks and sits, and that has become a joke that people - when I deliver that joke, people are in tears.

I'm standing behind a wall of jokes. You don't know about my personal life, my girlfriends, or what I do when I'm not on the road. There's this guy, this comedian, and this is how he thinks, but people really don't know anything about me.

The best part about stand-up is that you control everything. Period.

I'm a big fan of comedy such as Cendric the Entertainer.

The bigger the audience, the better with comedy.

It's fun being Bill Engvall.

I love playing the bitter guy.

The entire New York comedy scene has moved to L.A. - it's bled the New York comedy scene dry.

I'm always blown away by stand-ups. I'm blown away by people like that who are craftspeople at comedy.

I come from a time when people like Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby told stories that were devastatingly funny without being off-color.

I spent five years in Dublin as a stand-up, living on pea sandwiches. But at times I quite enjoyed the bohemian penniless existence.

Before stand-up, I didn't even have an agent. Once I started doing stand-up - boom. I got an agent. In fact, I got three agents. I got a lawyer. Now I get taken seriously.

I don't have an act. I just talk. I'm just Lenny Bruce.

My stand-up has a lot of performance in it, and I loved doing it so much that, after years, I put the idea of having a show on the back burner.

With stand-up, it's more interesting to hear about people's failures than their successes.

Being on TV sucks. It's a lot of work. You memorize scripts and then you show up and they change everything. I'm a control freak. When I'm doing stand-up, I say what I want and then I get instant feedback.