Quotes About Stand-up

Every male comedian of note who is over the age of 45 has a kid, and they talk about it and don't get grouped as 'dad comics.'

It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.

There's a lot of nuances to stand-up that you definitely see when you watch someone like Chris Rock in that his body position is also part of why the joke works.

I'm from Oakland and I started doing comedy around 2001.

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

I did a 'Last Comic Standing' audition in 2006, where you're just performing for three people in a comedy club, in a big comedy club, and I remember them cutting me off, asking about my name in the middle of one of my jokes. Yeah, it's just real weird when you're doing stand-up in that type of sterile, unnatural setting.

Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It's unsuccessful if they don't laugh.

It's very rare and unusual to see a female comic perform pregnant.

It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn't stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.

They don't make you pay for the humor. It's up and down, but they're trying to give you as many laughs as possible in 2 minutes. They are the most honest comedians ever.

There was no Groundlings or Upright Citizens Brigade where I was from. Looking back on it, I was trying to do sketch comedy in my stand-up, which is still kind of what I am doing now. To go full-circle here, it's kind of like one-man sketch.

Every comedian is just doing the comedy they find funny. This is me and it's not clean in any way. I could get a lot more work on TV playing clean but it's never interesting.

Continuing to do stand-up is always a challenge because the audiences and the environments in which you work very often differ.

A comedy club is a place where you work out material, you're trying material.

Although I do stand-up - doing actual stage work is terrifying for me.

I did stand-up. I loved George Carlin and Steve Martin.

I don't want to do many panel shows. I'm a comic actor, not a comedian. There would be something wrong in Steve Coogan or Julia Davis doing panel shows all the time.

The really good stand up comedians can be angry but relatable, and they have interestingly humanizing personalities. Their observational skills are far greater than mine, so I'll just stick to reading lines off a page.

I got stood up by the letter Y, he was hanging around with his X.

I'll never stop doing stand-up. There's nothing better than getting in front of 2,500 people and making an entire room laugh.

I'm not one of those kind of people who does the observational 'Hey, don't you hate it when you're at the grocery store and the line's long and the cash register starts taking too long.' I don't really do that kind of stuff. I'm heavy on persona, and I do a lot of interacting with the audience.

I can do four shows in a row singing no problem. Four shows in a row stand up, my voice is destroyed. I'm a storyteller so I act out a lot of characters and I act out a lot of situations and I'm distorting my voice and imitating characters I run into. I'm actually more exhausted doing that than I am with the rock shows, believe it or not.

I tell stories, and I do it through writing, through acting, through my stand-up, and through directing. All the hats I wear - producing as well - ultimately, I am a storyteller.

When I first started, stand-up comedians writing novels was thought of as a great encroachment on the art form and people got very angsty. But comedians are storytellers so it's really a hop, skip and a jump.