Alternative Comedy Quotes

I like doing the mainstream, right-down-the-pike broad comedies as much as I like doing the kind of unorthodox different stuff.

Everyone was doing alternative comedy. I thought I'd distinguish myself by just telling jokes, with differing degrees of success.

I'm going to do a lot of weird stuff that's not going to be like me prancing around like an insane 12-year-old. I showed everybody that side of me and I think it's time to do different stuff, even when it comes down to the type of humor. I want to do some drier, weirder stuff.

I have always felt that the rise of what became known as alternative comedy was born out of the loins of the alternative theatre movement.

'Saturday Night Live' will always be this amazing, powerful behemoth, but it's also not the only thing happening in comedy anymore.

When I first got to New York, Comedy Central was the only place to go if you weren't on HBO or network. And then FX, Adult Swim, and other sort of ventures came up, and all of a sudden there were other places to go, and I think Comedy Central is making a concerted effort to become a place where smart, funny weirdoes can come and do their stuff.

I remember performing on a punk stage with no mic in the middle of a mosh pit. My act was called "How to Be a Domestic Goddess."

Most stand-up is incredibly boring. It's time for people to do something else.

I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there're comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.

At its best, alt comedy can be challenging, surprising, and innovative. And at its worst, alt comics think that being awkward.com/FAQS is a substitution for punchlines.

There's an assumption that my audience is all these bearded twats from Dalston. But actually, quite a lot of older people go. For them, it's like pre-alternative comedy, when there was Dave Allen or Jackie Mason or someone. Also, weirdly, because I don't really swear, they're not scared off.

Growing up, there were TV shows that were very funny but very traditional. Classic things like 'Fawlty Towers,' obviously, and 'Blackadder' were pretty traditionally shot. And then there were the ones that start to break the mold or be really ambitious. The ones that spring particularly to mind would be 'The Young Ones.'

When I came into comedy in 2005, I didn't even know there was discrimination against musical comics in the alternative-comedy strain.

I really enjoyed doing stand-up. Andy Kaufman was a big hero of mine. I tried to do conceptual stuff like he tried to do.

When we were doing 'Viva Variety,' we knew, 'Boy, this really cracks us up, but this is not for everybody. This is a little weird.'

Neck-down comedy was no longer valid after the 1980s alternative comedy revolution. Everything became about the cerebral. And with that came positive things - it helped get rid of some of the sexism and homophobia - but it also meant a lot of physical comedy was lost.

The alternative comedy scene is actually pretty small, I guess.

As I see it, there's mainstream comedy - and then there's me, out in the badlands.

People used to make fun of alternative comedy because sometimes it would be someone being funny, and sometimes it was a crazy man with a flute making no sense. And it's very easy to be like, yeah, that's not really comedy.

I'd done an Edinburgh show before, in 1981, called 'The Importance of Being Varnished' - I was in the pun trade at the time.

I met a bunch of people and they said, "We're gonna do a show [Second City]." So we would buy the theater out and do a show, and we did that for five years and we ended up becoming popular. It was before sketch comedy was hipster-time - when you would hand out a flier, people would roll their eyes. Now it's kind of cool.

What they call 'alt-comedy' now is basically what comedy was like in the '80s. People tried different things, and everybody went to the clubs; there was no other place. Then somehow, the clubs became infiltrated by Dice Clay and Carrot Top types.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

For a lot of comics who aren't as silly or physical but more intellectual, we get looked at as 'alt comics.' No, I'm still a black comic, and there are black people who want to hear my type of black comedy, but that space hasn't been built out for us.

I'd like to explore the more abstract side of people's minds, as opposed to the usual sitcom stuff. I don't want to do the typical sitcom-type humor. I'd want to do stuff like go bowling with pineapples.