Quotes About Stand-up

My wife asked me if I ever thought I would ever retire from stand-up. And I thought about it, and I was like, 'No, because it's my job; it's what I do, and I enjoy it.' It's still the most challenging thing for me to do.

All I ever wanted to do was stand-up. It kind of charges me and gives me a rush.

But it's hard for a chick to do comedy. It's not as open for them.

Chris Rock is a very funny man.

There's not a lot of comics with anything to say. It's entertaining, but when you think of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor or Bill Cosby, they all had something to say.

A lot of stand-up comedians are actually very insecure, and they come on slightly battling the audience. They want to be the superior person in the room, sneering at the world. That can be very funny. But to me, what's more interesting is that the world is on my shoulders, and it's pushing me down.

Some people think success is overnight. I suppose, considering I came from Australia, it has been pretty quick. But I have a background in stand-up and improv, so I've really had to prove myself.

I used to have costumed characters come out, like SpongeBob. It's just fun to make it into this minor event, just to surprise people and experiment and be weird and just have fun with it. I've done just the hour stand-up, and that's fun, but the other stuff makes it fun for me and gives me something to react to and bounce off of.

To be No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, well, that's alarming. Having been a stand-up comedian, I think it's surprising to a lot of people that I had the insight I had.

When I do stand-up, I'm basically doing a one-man show.

You should really treat stand-up like you would a play. It's a one-man play.

There's no interference in stand-up. It's all the things it's hard to get in film: I get to have a wife, I get to have kids. I get to be sexual. I get to grow. I get to be a man.

I'm comedy's forgotten nearly man.

Stand-up is every man for himself; you learn from hanging out at these clubs and watching other guys, and then trying not to be like them.

My mom and dad are both in stand-up comedy, so that's where I started, that's where I got everything. My roots are holding the mic.

I think comedy is on an organic upsurge right now because when I started, it was 1978 at The Comedy Store and Letterman had just stopped emceeing his morning show.

If you make a bad movie about stand-up, then comedians will mock you for the rest of your life.

Stand-up don't get no respect - it's the hardest thing to do in show business. You don't have no band and there's no music.

That's the nature of my [stand-up] act: black man with a white baby.

I've always had my voice as a comic. I was never that into politics, or prop comedy.

I don't really have funny things to say about politics. I wish I did, but I don't.

For a stand-up comic, a minute on TV without a laugh was death. And Carson was adamant about the formula. He had recently stopped by the Improv to see Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman perform and had pronounced both of them "not ready," telling Budd Friedman, "They're funny, but they don't have six minutes." By

Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good.

I'm a comedian, for God's sake. Viewers shouldn't trust me. And you know what? They're hip enough to know they shouldn't trust me. I'm just doing stand-up comedy.