The best comedy I ever did was when people didn't know who I was.
When I became a standup comic, my hero, one of them, was Richard Pryor, and you know, I think that comedians, like, comedians talk about hacks, and what a hack is, is someone who does stuff that's not original.
There's a lot of brilliant comics who are amazing, but you can see them doing the same 20 minutes that they were doing five years ago, verbatim. I think that doesn't lend itself to progressing.
Stand-up comedy is a really lonely profession: you 'perform for 2000 people, then you go to a hotel room by yourself and stare at a wall.
Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.
I don't know why comedians moan about touring; you get driven to a town, stay in a hotel, work for an hour and a half with nice people, and eat fatty service station food. There's nothing not to like.
I stopped doing standup because it stopped being fun. And the reason it stopped being fun was it was harder to write - and this was before the Internet - it was harder to write new stuff. It had gotten so crazy.
Live performance really terrifies me. I haven't done it, really, in years. I think that's why I retired from my brief career in stand-up.
With stand-up you've just got that one chance. Audiences can be quite fickle.
An actor's life is all about rejection. It's you they don't want; it's you who's too tall or too short or too fat. With stand-up, it doesn't matter what you look like.
A touring comic's typical day roughly amounts to an hour of being laughed at and 20 minutes of being photographed. The other 22 hours and 40 minutes are spent in silence.
We all know showbiz isn't easy, but being a comic - especially being a female comic - can be quite punishing.
There are a lot of comics at the top end making staggering amounts of money and selling out stadiums. I think stand-up is a more intimate thing than that. Maybe because of the kind of comedy I do. It's like a discussion, but I'm the one with the microphone.
I don't think there's hardly a comic out there that does clean material all the way around. There's a couple of guys that are clean, but I'm not one of them.
Every time I go onstage, it's a little less 'Chris Rock's brother.'
I don't go to comedy clubs unless I'm working. And when I do work, I come in, I do my time and I leave. I don't hang out.
Is it my end-all and be-all to become a standup comic? No.
The hardest part, for real, is probably when you just don't feel like going on stage and being funny.
I don't just like to use punchlines anymore, especially in arenas. They freak me out. There is nothing worse than 15,000 people waiting for a punchline.
I'm a big fan of George Carlin's.
I'm a big eater. I mean, a lot of my stand-up is about food, and you write about what you know, and that's the only thing I know. I don't know anything else.
You can play a gig as a band and not know that they hated you; with standup, after every line, you know.
Inside was the second LP album of a comedian's performance before an audience.
The most dangerous place I've ever performed standup is in my home state of California.
I like George Carlin's jokes. I like his humor. He's one of my heroes, and I like what he did with talking about everyday things.
