Jon Stewart Quotes

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

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

Comedians work great as actors because they're good under pressure. With a lot of actors, you have to make them feel like everything's going really well to get a good performance out of them. But, if you have a comedian on the set, you can tell them, 'Hey, you really are screwing this up,' and then they just get better.

Improvisation is almost like the retarded cousin in the comedy world. We've been trying forever to get improvisation on TV. It's just like stand-up. It's best when it's just left alone. It doesn't translate always on TV. It's best live.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well.

Ultimately, when I go back to the stage, I want to be able to do everything. I want to be able to do music and comedy and all that stuff; that's what all this stuff is leading to.

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 really good stand up comedians can be angry but relatable, and they have interestingly humanizing personalities. Their observational skills are far greater than mine, so I'll just stick to reading lines off a page.

I've done lots of improv things but not a whole movie.

Little did I know that earning a living at stand-up is the hardest thing you can do. But once I started doing it, I just loved it, and I realized that I was actually kinda good at it, and then that was it.

I tend to a lot of improvisational ranting, and that's fun. For me, stand-up has been, performance-wise, a really good outlet.

If you are doing stand-up comedy, you have to be confident in what you are doing. That doesn't mean just because you are confident you are funny.

At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.

There's no real preparing at home for stand-up. You just go and you just do it.

If I do a scene with an actor who doesn't have much experience, I say, 'I tell you what we're going to do: You just listen to me, and then you respond. We don't have to do any acting.' And that's good advice because you shouldn't see the acting.

If you can jump up onstage and make people laugh, shouldn't you also be able to inhabit a character?

It's a tough transition really for theater actors to adjust to television or film, and all of these years later, I still have a tendency to play it too big.

The success of any stand-up act comes out of life experience.

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.

I love working with other actors and other people - you know, stand-up - it's lonely; it's just you out there and the audience. But it's fun working with other actors. I love doing that, too.

My first improv was Second City in Chicago. Before that, I worked at - with a partner, doing comedy sketches.

I have a tough time with stand-up because I am an improviser. I can riff; I can do crowd work, so I don't prepare.

I'm from Chicago. And I was an actor in high school and college, and I wanted to see if I could make a run of it in this job. So, I went downtown in Chicago, and I went up on a stand-up stage and did an open mic. It went well, so I'm like, 'Alright, I'll give it another try.'

When you put comedy in the room it's supposed to be in, you start learning it's a process. Not everything is a home run. You have singles, and you ground a few out. But ultimately, it's the journey you have with that comedian, whether it's ten minutes or an hour.

I'm not a natural comic, I don't think. That's why I gave up stand-up. It was hard. It involved a lot of death. Dying. Dying on stage. But it's one of those jobs you can only learn by doing it.