Stand Up Comedy Quotes

I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.

I mean, there's an aspect I've always said that is - it's, you know, it's not poetry but it's kind of like it. It's not song lyrics but it's kind of like song lyrics. It's not rap but it's kind of like rap. And it's not stand-up comedy but it is kind of like stand-up comedy. It's all those things together.

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

I'm a stand-up comic. Anything else I do besides that is a plus, but stand-up comedy is what I do, it's what I've been doing and it's what I'm going to keep doing.

The two things I understand best are stand-up comedy and martial arts. And those things require an ultimate grasp of the truth. You have to be objective about your skills and abilities to compete in both.

I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.

About a year after I moved to Los Angeles, I decided I wanted to be a joke writer for a late night talk show. So I met with a late night joke writer and he told me that I should start by doing stand-up comedy, because that would really hone my sense of humor and joke writing ability. Eventually I took a stand-up class and a few months later I had a seven-minute act.

I can do more than just stand-up comedy, and the only way I'll be able to show that is if I do it myself. Because nobody trusts that I can do it.

You know, it wasn't even that I'm a funny guy, I just loved stand-up comedy and I wanted to do it. It was one of the few things in my life that I knew I was going to be able to do, and I also felt as though I'd be able to do it the way I wanted to do it.

I've seen stand up comedy, and after a while you start to notice that a lot of people are doing things that are like a lot of other people. There can be a bit of a herd mentality, and that's obviously less interesting because there's less going on. I'm just being totally frank with you.

I think a lot comes from having the experience of doing stand-up comedy. It allows you to figure out the psychology of an audience; what things are funny and not.

Stand-up comedy is mine: it's my entity; it's my brand; I own it. I do it when I want to do it.

Stand-up comedy in the end, unlike the rest of the entertainment industry, is a meritocracy. There's a certain level of undeniability you can work toward.

You're on stage and because stand-up comedy is one of the few meritocracies in the entertainment industry, there's some kind of - at least for me, there's some kind of idea of control.

Stand-up comedy is the most relaxing thing I do. If I want to unwind and de-stress, I go out and do stand-up, often several shows in a night.

For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.

Stand-up comedy had an interesting effect on me in terms of how I started to think about constructing things, because I really loved the interstices, the linkages, or lack thereof.

I do think that stand-up comedy in general heavily favors masculinity and so I like to act a little feminine onstage.

As a live stand-up comedy performer, I have the benefit of choosing real entrance music.

I usually have sex to my stand-up comedy album. Power move.

I think that people who do enjoy my stand-up comedy and the people who get it and the people who are taken in by it, they see that I'm a guy that has love of the game.

I go to a lot of stand-up comedy. I find more inspiration from observational stuff than from rap.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

I don't like stand-up comedy that requires a lot of props. I really respect people who can walk out onstage alone and with no other tool but their own minds and can make you laugh and maybe even think a little.

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

A lot of stand-up comedy guys, when they get a little famous, just give up their stand-up career, and it cancels out the thing that set them apart.

I think people tune in to watch a football game because they want to watch a football game. If they wanted to watch a stand-up comedy show on HBO, that's where they'd go

I think of a lot of comedy being watched alone, for some reason. It's surprising to me that people are getting together to watch stand-up comedy.

I took a job in a comedy club - not doing stand-up comedy, because that's my idea of hell, but in the office - and I went traveling.

I was a screenwriting major in college, and really wanted to do that after I graduated, but there are no job listings for that, as we all know. I had many classmates that made it in the business, but stand-up comedy was my way in, and my first film 'Sleepwalk with Me' was based on those autobiographical experiences.

I do some of my best stand-up comedy during sound checks.

I keep my stand-up comedy notes in a pile on my desk. I don't organize my act. I keep myself in a state of confusion. It stresses me out, but I prefer creative chaos.

When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

I was doing stand up comedy when I was 11, that's how I got started; not because I wanted to do comedy, but because we were broke, living in Echo Park in Downtown Los Angeles, from 1986, I saw the Rodney King riots; my parents didn't really work. But I wanted a new backpack, that's how I got into this business - I wanted a new backpack.

Stand-up is not just an American thing anymore. It's global. In some places, stand-up comedy is brand new. South Africa has only had a scene for 15 years.

My road to success was a long road to success was a long road. You get out of something what you put into it. I put blood, sweat and tears into stand-up comedy and the entertainment realm in general. For me to just know be coming around is a blessing. It's a blessing and it's an honor. It makes me say I can get more and I can do more.

The beautiful thing about podcasting is it's just talking. It can be funny, or it can be terrifying. It can be sweet. It can be obnoxious. It almost has no definitive form. In that sense it's one of the best ways to explore an idea, and certainly much less limiting than trying to express the same idea in stand up comedy. For some ideas stand up is best, but it's really, really nice to have podcasts as well.

New York State is giant and has some of the most beautiful landscape on the Eastern seaboard. There is so much history in New York State, from the Erie Canal to the Catskills, the birth of American stand-up comedy.

I'm more than a little suspicious of humor in poems, because I think it can at times be a way of getting a reaction out of a reader, or an audience, that is something closer to relief: i.e., thank god this isn't poetry, but stand-up comedy. Some poets are really funny, but more often poets are fourth rate stand up comics at best. But they benefit from the sheer relief of the audience.

An aspiring comedian must be determined to get to his or her true feelings on a subject and convey that to the audience. Figure out what you're feeling or interested in because the goal is to get the audience interested in what you're interested in. Good stand up comedy is drawing people into your head.

I can't imagine being a woman in the world of acting, like where you age starts to weigh you down - you go from being attractive to where they [directors] decided you're out... I feel like with stand-up comedy, it doesn't matter if I've gotten fatter.

If you tell the reader it's funny, then the audience is like an audience at a stand-up comedy club and they expect you to be funny, and if you're not, they notice. Whereas if you read a regular op-ed about Israel or the family or medicine, you're not starting with the assumption that you're supposed to laugh.

When you're standing around for an hour doing stand up it's no big deal but when you're standing around watching a show for an hour - it's a big difference. It's annoying - your feet hurt, your back hurts - it's just not the most comfortable way to see stand-up comedy.

People need to write articles and they need to have angles in them and I'm grateful when people are doing articles, but I always say there's not a great mystery to stand-up comedy.

To me, being brave is an element that is so important with stand-up comedy. It's not essential. There are many comics who were just funny, and that's fine, too. But that's never been what I was trying to do in comedy. I was always trying to do something that involved not pandering to the audience.

I made a career goals list for 2017 and it's so funny. I have low self-esteem or something, so I put both wishes and goals. The goals were things I'm going to do anyway, because I have no choice because my job is to do stand-up comedy so I have to tour and I have to write stuff. The wishes were all things that could be goals. As in, I bet people who have achieved these things called them goals at one point. But I haven't looked at that piece of paper since.

I just liked stand-up comedy so much. I used to memorize Bill Cosby albums and other people's albums, George Carlin, Flip Wilson.

The whole acting and Hollywood [thing], it's just work to me. Stand-up comedy ruins you so badly for doing television. I don't really need to be known anymore than I am. The slight sliver of fame I do have is hard to deal with. If I was actually well-known - I don't even know what to say to people who are at my show when I walk into the venue, much less having waitresses in diners asking for my autograph.

I play these sort of comical instruments I invented, like the electric rake and the electric plunger. I do a lot of almost stand-up comedy material. Just the juxtaposition of the different styles in itself sometimes is funny. Like, I do sort of an acoustic version of 'Purple Haze' that has some bluegrass licks in it.