Quotes About Stand-up

I enjoy stand-up because it has the biggest reward: instant gratification. You can hear the people laughing.

Insult comedy has been around forever. I can make fun of people, and they won't get mad at me.

We need more intellect and humor back on television, instead of the lowest common denominator of comedy - like the fart joke!

My intent when I moved to L.A. was to get in good with the comedy clubs and, eventually, try to break into Comedy Central and have my half hour special.

Stand-up is still my job. That is the thing I wanted to get into when I was 21. You cannot beat the immediacy of it, making people laugh without any interruptions or edits.

Personally, I don't have a Twitter account. I like to be in control of the way the stand up of Stewart Lee is perceived, I don't want to have to engage with individual people. Also, when I do look at it, loads of factually inaccurate things about me are written.

You do stand-up because you have to do it. If you're doing it to become 'famous,' you're wrong. If you're doing it to become a millionaire, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. In 2003, I was flat broke. I'd been doing stand-up for 14 years at that point. I loved it and just kept at it.

I wasn't one of those kids who stole Richard Pryor records. I wasn't a comedy-nerd kid. I had no concept of stand-up. Actually, the only inkling of stand-up I had was I read one of Paul Reiser's books when I was, like, 12. I found it at a yard sale, and I carried it around with me for six years.

The comics that are just conversing with you up there and drawing on their own life, yeah, I guess so. I guess some do political humor, some do topical humor, but the ones that I like, the ones that are appealing to me, were guys who were just talking to you about their life.

Sometimes people ask me, 'You do stand-up?' I try explaining what I do, and I don't think they really get it. So: 'Yeah, I do stand-up.' I wish there was one word to express what I do - that way, I don't sound arrogant. Whenever I say I'm a performer, people think I'm a performance artist: 'She paints herself white and pretends to be a flower.'

Yeah, I do stand-up, my own type of stand-up.

I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.

When you snatch little pieces of other people's lives and try to palm them off as your own, that's more disgusting than anything. Robin Williams is a huge thief. Denis Leary is a huge thief. His whole stand-up career is based on Bill Hicks, a brilliant guy who died years ago.

My real name is Joseph Herbert. My dad is white; my mom's Asian, Filipino. And when I started stand-up 22 years ago, I used to go up as Joseph Herbert, and I would just have to defend my name. Every time I went onstage, it was so annoying. People would heckle.

Comedy comes from tragedy, and being Iranian in America from 1979 on had been quite tragic. In stand-up comedy, I was able to take the reality and exaggerate it.

Stand-up came naturally to me because people in Ireland talk. But that's not talking on panel shows; it is structured fun. It reminds me of some tragic aunt clapping her hands and bouncing into a room and announcing we should all play games... and if we don't we are all a rotten spoilsport.

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

I do actually use a boxing trainer when I train for stand-up.

Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it's soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.

Stand-up for me is just my opinions on things, so it wouldn't be as fun translated into a sketch. Nor would a sketch be as fun if it were me standing there saying it.

A lot of comics just joke around, but it's just as important to get the truth out there.

I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real laughter.

I don't really sing.

Every comic is taught that you're supposed to have a great seven-minute set and then get a sitcom. And I don't want to get the sitcom.