Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
From fear to bonding with the audience to getting more open - that's what standup is. It humanises you.
You can play a gig as a band and not know that they hated you; with standup, after every line, you know.
Standup is like shorthand. Every bit must be both brief and profound or the audience will lose interest.
I always imitated other people and thought, 'Well, maybe I'll do standup,' but I was too afraid for that.
The most memorable performance was my appearance in concert in Carnegie Hall. The first standup to do so.
You don't know that you're not a solo artist or standup comedian or drag cabaret artist until you try it.
If I'm a game show host, will someone buy a ticket to see me do standup? To do a dramatic role in a movie?
To say it very honestly, removed from ego, standup is just a thing that I understood, a God-given ability.
Technology can't eliminate the need for people going to want to go out and see theater and standup comedy.
I saw Chris Rock do standup before he was famous. I was just a teenager. That will always be special to me.
You really have to be ambitious and have that drive to really become well known and successful as a standup.
For me, standup will always be some part of my life, and other things will move around and find their place.
I believe, even when I'm doing my standup or my acting or whatever I'm doing, I believe in painting pictures.
When you're doing standup, it's just you. It's your written jokes. You perform it however your personality is.
I'm not a standup. I don't really have jokes. I don't have 10 minutes. It took a while for me to realize this.
I really never had any ambitions to be a standup comic. I was talked into it by guys that I used to work out with.
In standup, the feedback is instantaneous, and if it fails, you know you'll be off-stage and hiding in a short time.
When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.
When I go into schools to speak, I am not giving a speech - it's really a one-man show. I call it 'didactic standup.'
Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.
I've sold shows based on my standup twice to CBS, but they've never gone past the script stage. TV is very competitive.
I think as a standup performer you have to feel the audience. So the audience kind of dictates what they get, you know?
As a standup comedian, I've worked almost every New Year's Eve of my adult life. It's the best-paying night of the year.
When you're a standup comic, you get up and you try stuff, and you're always kind of seeing how far you can push things.
I started doing standup because of Hugh Grant's best-man speech in 'Four Weddings,' which is basically a standup routine.
I did all this standup comedy in college, and from that point on, I tried to develop myself and get my name back out there.
I will stay in the car until the last minute that I'm going to jump out and do a standup or jump out and do some interviews.
I really love standup because it's something that I've been literally doing for 40 years, which means I'm a thousand years old.
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.
Whenever people hear that Kurt Cobain was a fan of my standup, it's like hearing Jimi Hendrix loved Buddy Hackett or something.
I always thought that if I got no love at all early in my standup career, or I was god awful, I thought I'd get into psychology.
I think that standup has always been an acquired taste and there was always only a handful of performers that were really inspired.
Metal is easily my favorite thing - Exodus and Anthrax and Megadeth - so it just kind of organically came through in the standup act.
Ross Noble at the Leicester De Montfort Hall on his Randomist tour - it's the only time I've hurt from laughing at a standup comedian.
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.'
Other kids would sneak out of the house to go to parties and do untoward things. I was sneaking out to do standup downtown. It paid off.
My wife and I take what we call our Friday comedy day off. We watch standup comics on TV. The raunchier the better. We love Eddie Izzard.
I think any good standup or actor is part philosopher, part psychologist and sociologist, because you're constantly recreating behaviors.
I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn't include someone the size of the Hindenburg.
One of the first jokes I wrote was this nail salon bit that ended up blowing up on YouTube. That's kind of what propelled me into standup.
The demand for standup in the eighties was created by how easy it was to exploit 'comedians' and create very cheap television programming.
I'm in this for the long haul, I want to be doing this until I die. I am a standup comedian. I know a lot of people say I'm not, but I am.
Standup is a place where, as long as it's funny enough, you can say your most embarrassing things, shameful things and disappointing things.
A couple of female standup comics I know refer to their kids as their Little Career Killers. I was like, I really do not want to feel that way.
People always come up to me and say, 'you should do standup.' It's nice to discover things about yourself. That keeps everything lively and fun.
As a standup, I try to change the world. As an entertainer, I try to entertain. And as a lesbian, I try to pick up the prettiest girl in the room.
If you like standup and decide that it's overtaking your life and want to hate it, watch 1,000 standup comedians who are trying to get on a TV show.
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.
Black people who want to do comedy go into standup, where our heroes opened a lot of doors. Improv doesn't have a ton of heroes that you can look to.
When I was doing standup, I always wanted to get out of the standup world and take it back into the theatrical world, like with 'No Cure For Cancer.'