Quotes About Stand-up

I love the Comedy Cellar. The audience has no expectations because they don't know me. It's great. It's only winning - if I bomb, they just say, 'Oh, the French guy sucks.' But if I do well, then they remember me.

I left school and couldn't find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I've always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.

I was only 20, 21. I was basically going to college to get me out of the ghetto. A friend suggested I try stand-up.

It's that I wasn't suited to do the kind of comedy that these people were coming to hear - mainstream comedy.

I don't think anyone's particularly conscious of thinking suits are the thing, but when you see a comedian on stage in jeans and a t-shirt it doesn't matter how good they are - it always looks like amateur hour when they walk onto the stage.

The beauty of stand-up is that it's very flexible, it's very malleable and immediate. Whatever is in your head that day you can verbalise in some way that night. It's the medium that suits me best.

For every stand-up comedian, Just for Laughs is our Super Bowl. Every comic in the world goes to Just for Laughs in Montreal. And they presented me with the Stand-Up Comedian of the Year award for 2018. This is my Oscar; this is my Emmy. That's my baby now.

Jerry: I think anyone should do whatever they like. I don't think there should be any rules. Judd: As long as it gets laughs? Jerry: If it doesn't get laughs, you're not gonna get work, and you're not gonna be a comedian. So the audience ultimately decides. It's a very democratic system.

My uncle and I had a fairly compact "Take My Wife" routine for two people who were not married and couldn't stand the sight of each other.

Something about New York, man: You can do more comedy there probably than you can anywhere in the world. If you're interested in being funny, New York is the place to go.

My biggest pet peeve, I guess, is other comedians criticizing Larry the Cable Guy.

There are some extremely acceptable male comedians out there: Joel Osteen, Abraham Lincoln, the man who played Phil Spector in HBO's 'Phil Spector.' But even those guys, while insightful and amusing, aren't exactly funny.

I feel I don't get credit enough for it, the pioneering I did in comedy.

A lot of stand-up comedy is embarrassing: too many idiots doing it in orange neckties against brick walls. I find most sitcoms embarrassing, too, because they seem so forced.

Like other kids wanted to become firemen or astronauts, I wanted to make people laugh.

I always wanted to be a comedic actor - that's what I wanted from the job - to do comedy and to create my own comedy. But I still love doing stand-up and will probably be doing it forever. I'd love to be an old guy who can't really walk, can't really stand-up, and I have to sit on the stool and tell jokes.

I like to warm them up with stand-up, get them into my world and tone, and then bring other characters on. There's so much you can do theatrically on stage. You keep changing the direction and angles, and then people don't get bored.

I have other careers in terms of stand-up, stage acting and writing, so I don't feel too hidebound by that, but I do quite like playing those warm roles.

If you pay attention, stand-up can be great improv training ground. But one of the things that helped me the most was doing warm-up for the 'Mr. Show' tapings way back when.

It takes both courage and talent to stand up in front of fellow human beings and make them crack a smile, and at the same time keep it clean.

Funny is funny, whether you have three cameras or one.

I think people just think I am crazy because they see me doing stand-up, but I am generally not. I am very sad. I'm one of those guys that lights candles and listens to Rachmaninoff.

You look at Richard Pryor and Robert Klein and George Carlin and Richard Lewis - those guys were so smart, they were the thinking-man stand-ups.

There's something about doing stand-up that's cathartic.