Allison Janney Quotes

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

A lot of my best stuff is just ad libs on stage, and that's one thing that I've gotten back to at the live show.

My comedy is different every time I do it. I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

There's nothing like live radio. I like the challenge. Throw it my way. Let me go!

It's a really nice way to cut your teeth, doing live shows. It's like going to the gym because you do have to think fast. You are constantly under the threat of people not laughing. Instead of getting hit, people could just not laugh, so you really are trying to mine quickly for the funniest thing you could say in that moment.

A mimicry artiste should be spontaneous and he should be able to crack jokes on the spot.

I don't think it's necessary to do stand-up to be a presenter, but I like it, because it keeps me sharp, especially when something like 'Take Me Out' is 80% is ad-libbed, so that works for me.

Everything I do on stage, I made up in saloons. I started doing it in front of people, and that became my performance. I never had writers.

When you do see me, you'll get the idea from when you see me that it's all off the top of my head. A lot of it is a beginning, middle and the end. But it's different every night. I have a lot of jokes in my back pocket I've said over the years.

The beautiful thing about stand-up is you can create and immediately deliver, perform, and get paid for what you do.

Usually, if I think something is really funny, I'm not gonna test it. I'll just test it when I'm onstage.

Theatre sports is the best improv training period.

I don't sit and write stand-up material; I come up with an idea onstage.

I think a show is for fun, and the thing about playing live is that you make mistakes, and that's what's sort of exciting about it.

I gravitated toward stand-up because there's no overhead. I mean, literally, there's no overhead: Often, you're outdoors performing in front of groups of people.

I came away from 'Saturday Night Live' feeling very well represented. I felt, and I still feel like, they let me do so much stuff that I wanted to do. Stuff that I almost didn't even know what it was.

If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.

It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.

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

When I was younger I always thought, 'If I were ever a comedian I'd make it like a rock concert.' I wanted to generate that type of enthusiasm and excitement.

I think you're a better comedian when you're in the moment and you're kind of reacting to what's happening like a real person instead of doing rote memorization.

I love improvisation.

With comedy, I like to not rehearse and just have fun with it, because I think being spontaneous is the best thing for a comedy, in my opinion.

My gigs are built on improvisation: I go out there and I'm like the Energizer bunny.

I was a failed actor but I still wanted to show off, so I ended up doing live comedy.