Quotes About Stand-up

I think it'd be a lot of fun to jump back into the comedy world.

I started doing stand-up when I was 16, my junior year in high school. My two friends and I would sit at home watching stand-up. They kept saying I should try it, and so I did.

Very early on, I met this one comic who said if you're not doing stand-up every night, you're not doing it. And so I just kind of believed that and worked off that.

I'm not really trying to be a stand-up comedian. I have a huge amount of respect for the guys who do it. That's their livelihood. That's their job. It's just something that I enjoy.

There's lots of people I'd be keen to see doing things, someone like Jack Dee.

If anybody is a master at improvisation, it would be Ken Jeong. He is hilarious.

People ask me if I have comedy writers, and I'm like, 'Are you kidding me?'

The king of comedy is dead. Richard Pryor was the king of comedy. The rest of them are the king of copycats.

If you wanted to hear politics, you'd go to Henry Kissinger; you wouldn't go to hear Jackie Mason. The reason I speak about politics is because I know I can get a laugh out of it.

I don't like labels. I have always fought against that as a stand-up.

Ya know, if you treated every comic the way you treated me tonight. You would never see a bad show.

When I was younger and did a stand-up gig, it would take me two weeks to recover. Sometimes I'd get so panicked that I would stutter.

Today's generation likes stand-up comedies in which the performers give their take on a number of subjects. Some of them are a taboo, but youngsters enjoy them. However, when we act in a drama, what is uppermost on our mind is the people's perceptions and opinions.

I want everything to be an honest extension of me. What better way than me talking? It's a direct connection with everyone. With film and television, you make great projects, but stand-up is the thing that is completely yours.

When I was at youth theatre and drama school, I never thought people would mistake me for a stand-up.

The thing about stand-up was, I was doing all this sketch and YouTube stuff where I was not being censored and I got to do my own thing, and it was really cool.

Stand-ups are always good to see on YouTube. There's a guy named Mike Head who lives in Cleveland. He's great. He's an African-American stand-up.

You can get stuck in the trap of reading your YouTube comments all the time. Sometimes I regret it. Not everyone is going to love you. And for some reason, stand-up has this thing where everyone thinks they can do it. So everyone thinks they're an expert.

Certainly, when I left New Zealand, there was no career there as a comedian. I was doing more live gigs than anyone, and I was maybe doing three a week. Even then, it would often be the same people in the audience, going, 'I saw you on Tuesday, mate!'

I'm super happy to say that it's not that hard to write bad stand-up. I guess the trick is to write bad stand-up that sounds like you're trying to be good.

I was just coming out of prison, I was married, and I had a kid, and I didn't know what to do, so I tried stand-up.

For many comedians, two common anxiety triggers include performing in front of family members and doing brand new material.

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn't love them.

I'm also not good with numbers either, so it's not a great mix. People apparently don't want you ball-parkin' it when it comes to their finances.