Michael Caine Quotes

As a comedian, I'm forced to have a tough skin. Until people laugh, they are detractors. You walk into a new audience where nobody knows you, they go: 'Make us laugh. Show us what you're made of. Prove why we should be listening to you.'

I never used to tell jokes on stage. Now I'm cutting up jokes all night long.

Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

TV is easier: it's all planned out for you and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over.

As you get older as a comedian and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.

Impressions are still kind of hard for me and not what I love to do the most, but with characters, I think there's an element of fearlessness. You try to figure out the best reading and wording of the jokes before the show, and then you just really have to go hard.

I feel that I'm a stand-up comedian more than anything else, that's my job.

I've got too much respect for stand-ups to call myself one.

Stand-up, for me, is really more of an addiction, so you have to feed the beast whenever you can.

I could never do stand-up because it's that thing of having to get up on stage. And out of every 10 jokes you tell, nine of them have to get a really good response.

The greatest comedian I've ever seen is Jack Benny. He wasn't afraid of the silences.

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.

The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh.

My stand-up is quite good now, people say. It's just like a big conversation each time. Every gig is a rehearsal.

Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can't have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.

I wanted to be a comedian.

When I do stand-up, I'm basically doing a one-man show.

TV is easier: it's all planned out for you, and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up, but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over. To me, that's more pure.

Making people laugh is magic. I feel like if you have humility, then you can do anything in comedy.

When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.

A lot of the time, you're supposed to play to the top of your intelligence, as truthful as possible. But when you're on stage making people laugh, you're still acting. I think it helped me a bunch to go on stage two or three times a week.

Doing stand-up takes the fun out of being funny.

When I began doing stand-up, it took me a long time to get an hour's worth of material together.

Bad improv happens with people who are inexperienced with each other and don't know the craft that well. But bad stand-up is something that could happen to someone at any level in their career.