Quotes About Standup

I've sold shows based on my standup twice to CBS, but they've never gone past the script stage. TV is very competitive.

Here's the thing about standup directing: not that hard. As I said on Twitter one day, or maybe it was Instagram - sorry, I want to keep my platforms straight - it's essentially the same five shots over and over again. Seven if you're ambitious.

In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face. And that's really not a good instinct with a 'Daily Show' field piece, where it's supposed to be an interview.

In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face.

Even though standup seems like one-way conversation, if you're doing it right, it's actually a two-way discussion between the comic and the audience... the audience just happens to be communicating through laughter.

Most of my standup is about stuff that makes me uncomfortable. There are also things I don't joke about. I don't do jokes about the people who helped me get sober.

It's a unique fraternity to be a standup. I think everybody understands, you know, opportunity, and everybody - especially at the top - are genuinely rooting for you.

To say it very honestly, removed from ego, standup is just a thing that I understood, a God-given ability.

I have a standup I do in gay bars, and it's filthy. I have to assess the crowd. If it's an all-gay crowd, I'll dip into the stories of my sordid past.

In the entertainment industry, there is this fear of getting older, because we have high definition television now, and you can see things that the human eye can't even pick up. But the good thing about standup is that the older you get, the funnier you get.

I wouldn't call myself a standup in the presence of Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock, but I do my share of it and it has been and remains part of my activity and I like it.

It's still a soft R, but when I watch other people's standup, I'm dumbfounded that people call me dirty. That's only because I did family television.

I just like doing standup, that's all I'm interested in or good at.

When I quit my internship and started doing standup to pursue my dreams and do that full time - I feel like that's when I 'Americaned.'

Getting on stage doing standup anytime is hard. You never know what you're going to say. You live and die on your next word.

The role of a comedian is to go in and make something funny. That might be a situation where I'm writing, a situation where I'm in control, like standup or something of my own that I'm making, or it might be something like being an actor in someone else's project.

There's no idea or concept in comedy you could do that hasn't been attacked from some angle. But if you start leaving punchlines out so you'll look cool, I don't get that. But I don't watch standup anyway, so I don't know what they're doing.

There's no one on the road that I tried to pattern myself after. There's no one in history that I tried to pattern myself after. Because one thing I was told that in standup you want to develop your own voice.

I don't have courage in my convictions and I'm not interested in serious things or politics: if you're doing an hour of standup, you should talk about a few serious things.

Before I started doing standup, I knew that I had what it takes to develop an act. I went down to clubs with not many people there, and I just worked on it, man. A lot of my friends are comedians, so that part had a lot of encouragement, even though the shows were very caveman-like.

When I got a part in 'All American Girl,' in 1994, I remember thinking, 'Now I have a series, I'm not going to need to do standup,' but every night I'd go out afterward and get onstage somewhere.

People see me on the 'Daily Show' or 'About a Boy'. But the reality is that I only got into this business to do standup comedy.

I still do standup.

I think as a standup performer you have to feel the audience. So the audience kind of dictates what they get, you know?