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I was raised by a dad who has a fantastic sense of humor who raised me on 'The Muppet Show,' Steve Martin movies, and Woody Allen's standup, and he really encouraged me to ham it up from an early age.
Both the benefit and the terrifying aspect of standup is when it's going poorly, you've only yourself to blame. There's no one to bail you out. But when it's going great, all that approval is for you.
I first did standup at a lesbian bar. I didn't know it was a lesbian bar at the time, but the lesbians loved me. I was huge among the lesbians and am to this day. I'm thrilled with the lesbian support.
Right around 11 or 12, when I saw Eddie Murphy's standup special 'Delirious,' and I taped it on a VHS tape - I think I watched it every single day. I lived and breathed Eddie Murphy for that whole year.
I had a band before I did standup - I've always done music. I got known for being funny, and that's how I make a living - and from acting - but I never stopped playing and producing and recording music.
Standup keeps me grounded and keeps me in touch. I get to go from small towns to big cities, across Canada and the U.S., and you're out there and talking to people. You get a sense of what they respond to.
A weird sort of awareness set in, like, 'Wow. My standup isn't just separate from everything else I do anymore.' With Twitter and Face book, everything is universal that everything everybody says gets seen.
I never did standup before. It just looked like it was really hard, looked like there was like up days and down days - and I'm too emotionally unstable for that. I need to always be funny and always be loved.
Tracy Ullman, I grew up watching her shows and standup and improv and specials. Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg. They inspire me to do it all. I always wanted to do it all; I never wanted to be put in a box.
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 bombed so much as a standup that messing up doesn't matter to me anymore. I kind of enjoy bombing sometimes - I try and make everybody hate me more. Like, once I know it's not going well, I can just have fun.
When I became a standup comic, my hero, one of them, was Richard Pryor, and you know, I think that comedians, like, comedians talk about hacks, and what a hack is, is someone who does stuff that's not original.
Standup is a form of therapy. It is OK to tell problems to your audience as long as you are being honest and not boring them. I tell them that I am saving $75 an hour when I talk to them instead of a therapist.
I stopped doing standup because it stopped being fun. And the reason it stopped being fun was it was harder to write - and this was before the Internet - it was harder to write new stuff. It had gotten so crazy.
I joined a campus competition, as I felt I could do comedy, and I won. Then I started doing standup gigs in 2009 while completing my law degree, but I never told my parents. They only discovered a few years later.
It's important that when you do standup, you do small places like coffee shops and also big places like colleges. It helps you find the little nuances in your set that don't work, and you can shave off the excess.
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.
Today, I am a touring standup comic who cannot stand up. Within three minutes, I begin to wilt, lose my balance, and topple over. I can tap dance and run in heels, but I need to use a wheelchair to navigate airports.
In standup, it's just you. You're your own writer, your own critic, your own director, and it's never the same. You really don't always have it down. Your continue to learn, you continue to risk, and I really love it.
Podcasts feature comedians being as funny as they can be in a non-censored situation. It's really akin to standup in a way. When you go see a comedian in standup, that is the most pure, unadulterated form of their art.
I personally knew and worked with Sammy Davis, Jr. Sammy hired me to open for him at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas when I was a 19-year-old standup comedian, and that's where my fascination with his incredible story began.
People say I'm good at standup. I don't even think I'm that great at standup. I just hit hard. I don't think I'm super technical or anything like that. I got a couple knockouts. I think I just hit hard more than anything.
The name of my first comedy album was 'Raised by Cable.' Coming up and watching all of these weird movies on different channels was such an influence on me and an influence on how I do standup. It informs everything I do.
In my standup work, I always do these characters, older people who are just off to the side. It's easier to write a story about the guy who made it to the top, but the middle is so much more interesting, so much more murky.
I was working at Nordstrom Rack, Borders Books, and I was cleaning yachts on the weekends for private parties and being a busboy. I had to break down the tables and roll the forks up in napkins. And I was still doing standup.
Over the years, I've realized that I have as much in common with the performance artist, the standup comedian, the screenwriter, as I do with the theologian. I'm in an odd world where I make things and share them with people.
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.
When I finished my residency in New Orleans, I went to L.A. where I would work as a doctor during the day, and then at night I would actually go to The Improv and do standup, all the while kind of cultivating my comedy resume.
I think what I do in my acting world and what I do in my standup world is bring up a brand that I want to bring across. Once you figure out your brand and what you do, it's kind of easy at that. You end up getting your audience.
Kids have to understand that they have control. Not their parents, not the principal, not the president of the U.S. It starts with them and it ends with them. To end this epidemic of bullying they have to standup for one another.
I'm sure when alternative comedy started, before which - Billy Connolly aside - standup was essentially a person being racist and sexist onstage, there was also the sense that this was the death of comedy. But it's just progress.
When I was at university, I did essays on political theatre. And it was really frustrating that the ideas weren't reaching the people they were talking about. Standup is the one place where you are talking to every level of society.
I don't talk about having cancer in my standup anymore. I don't have cancer. But if it comes up for me again, that I'm going through something, I'm going to talk about it. I'm going to do whatever feels right whenever it feels right.
I don't enjoy writing newspaper articles any more than people like reading them. I'm a standup comic, not a journalist, although sometimes onstage I will say: 'What else is in the news?' Writing is work, which I'm not comfortable with.
I guess standup is really painting pictures with words - especially for me, as I describe quite fantastical, visual things. My art teacher, Dexter Dalwood, always seemed to think they were linked. We bonded over our love of Vic Reeves.
Growing up, I didn't really watch a lot of standup. I didn't know you could be a low-energy comedian. It was something I did daydream about, but in the way you daydream about becoming the president or something - it could never happen.
I've done a lot of dramedies in my career. You know, I started as a standup comic, and then the movies that I was doing, like 'Up Side of Anger' were kind of like - they're hard. They're hard to sell; they're hard to get made, you know.
Standup really is a young man's game, a single young man's game. Even when I was younger, when I wasn't single, it was hard to be on the road because you go through relationships because your girlfriend kinda got tired of you being gone.
When I started doing standup when I was 17, I was talking about being Indian and specifically ethnic jokes. Straightforward stuff that was fairly ignorant that I knew would get the laugh. It wasn't flipping stereotypes; it was using them.
The thing about the performance part... starting with improv and standup, you're starting with yourself as the character, and I don't feel as much like, 'Oh, I'm a vessel for -' I feel like someone who calls themselves an actor is a vessel.
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.
As a standup performer, I'm onstage, and it's important how the audience is looking at me. I'm looking at whether they're leaning forward or not, those types of things. You read an energy. And it's the same thing in a scene with other actors.
I was a kid, and I would watch standup comics do the 'Tonight Show,' and if Johnny Carson liked you, he'd wave you over to the desk; that pretty much meant you were about to be the most successful comedian in the country for the next few years.
I was always just like, 'Standups are making it up.' A lot of people have that myth about standup. And so it wasn't until I was in college for theater school in Boston that I realized I can actually start going to open mics and figuring this out.
The thing is when I started doing standup, you had to have a clean act because that's how you got on television. There weren't all these cable shows. Also, I didn't want to have that kind of act in case my family came to see me or my kid one day.
I think standup is pretty good for an introvert because you are performing, but, I mean, it's on your own terms. There are so many people in the room, but it's a one-sided conversation. And you actually don't have to interact - unless you want to.
My first summer in college, I interned for Arena Stage in D.C. and taught a disastrous class on standup comedy to middle schoolers at the Arena Stage camp. I had never taught anything before, and needless to say, I quickly lost control of the class.
Standup comedy was my weird hobby. I would drag my poor parents out to the only open mics that were in coffee shops instead of bars. I'd get up and go, 'Hi, I'm 17, and I have jokes about matriculation!' At the time I was like, 'Why is no one laughing?'
I think expressing yourself and working hard can't help but have great results. Look at Zach Galifanakis. He didn't tweet. He didn't have a podcast. He just went out and did the funniest standup you'll ever see in your life. And he was rewarded for that.
People often tell me that they have no idea how I can do standup. The idea of trying to make a large group of strangers laugh is, for many, absolutely petrifying - and it is - but there are ways of gradually developing the material that can ease the fear.