Tom Segura Quotes

Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.

With stand-up you can just be yourself on stage. And ideally, you can't see the crowd most of the time - it's just lights in your face. But I still have had terrible stage fright.

Being a correspondent on 'The Daily Show' is some combination of doing a character and doing stand-up. It's a juggling act to find a balance between being you and playing a role.

I started performing as a stand-up comedian on my own in the mid-1990s.

I see myself as a comic but the acting helps sell tickets for gigs.

I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren't hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they're excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.

Any comic is a very good actor. Look at Don Rickles. He is saying the same joke every night for 20 years and making it look like he just thought of it.

When I come out to do my stand-up set, I pretty much get bombarded with lines from movies. You try to play off it a little bit, but that's what people want to see.

It's weird to sit as a comedian. Being still drives me crazy.

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.

I'm attracted to working with comedians because they don't have that stars' idea of what a hero should be. The downside is they're always addressing the camera too much.

When I was doing half-hour shows, I loved it and was preparing myself for the hour shows. Then when I did the hour shows, I was preparing myself for the specials and features.

People come to my shows on purpose as opposed to coming to a 'comedy show.' Which was always my goal.

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.

Stand-up comedy is all you. It's your show, it's your game. You control every aspect of it - of that experience and that expression. There's really nothing quite as satisfying.

The only way to stay sharp is to do live shows. There is no part-time comedy.

I still love to walk on stage and make people laugh, and I work very, very hard at it, and I take it seriously.

I know that, as a comedian, I've made great strides because I've worked as hard as a person can work at being at least wildly amusing.

If I want to be a real comedian, I can't let you dictate my material, so I started creating more new material.

The role of a comedian is to go in and make something funny. That might be a situation where I'm writing, a situation where I'm in control, like standup or something of my own that I'm making, or it might be something like being an actor in someone else's project.

Being able to write jokes is great, but you still have to get used to performing them and being on stage - and enjoying being on stage, not just like tolerating it.

Shows are my saving grace. In between actual jobs, the only thing that keeps me sane is the knowledge that I can go up on stages.

It took me a good eight to ten years to really formulate what I was doing onstage and start to get really personal with comedy. I always really had timing naturally, it was just about trying to figure out how that timing was going to work onstage.

My job is the same if I'm making a new musical or making a play for sixty-five people or doing a live television broadcast. The job is to take care of the actor; the job is to create an environment where they can excel and try to access all their attributes.

We spent night after night out there learning the art of entertaining a crowd.