I was always the guy who made jokes and ribbed people at parties. After I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts I got sidetracked into clubs and started doing comedy.
I've always been funny, but I never considered it as a particular career path until my early 30s, when I realized that hip-hop wasn't going to be the long term.
London seems to be a town with a lot of comedy fans and people that really enjoy stand-up.
I'm not a comedian. I didn't study sketch comedy; my background isn't that.
I loved stand-up, but I never thought you could do it as a job.
When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je'Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up.
I always think of comedy as being spontaneous, and yet everything about filmmaking is not spontaneous.
I find comedy to be one of the highest of the art forms.
I've been doing comedy for 20 years now. I started when I was 13 and I think for the first 10 years I was impersonating other people.
When I was in third grade I taught myself ventriloquism... What's hard is to learn to be an entertainer and make people laugh. I was a few years out of college before I felt I had enough material. Then in 1988 I moved to L.A. and started to do some shows at comedy clubs.
I'm not the kind of comic who would try stuff on Twitter, because I have to work up ideas and I can only do that in front of people.
From the age of 14, I remember thinking I wanted to be a comedian. But that was like saying I wanted to be an astronaut. It felt like a million miles away, something I could never do, but would be great to.
If my career path takes me elsewhere, that's great. But comedy is my forte.
I really wanted to, but I just didn't understand how people became comedians. I kind of thought it was something you were born into. And so I wanted to be a veterinarian or an architect. I wanted to be in a band, and for some reason I could understand how you could be in a band because I had guitars and all my friends played music. Comedy was a secret want, but it wasn't anything I pursued.
I knew at an early age that I wanted to pursue comedy.
After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that's where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.
The DC Improv food is amazingly edible for a comedy club.
People who do comedy really are the nastiest people on the planet.
You gotta have the balls to go out there and be funny, man.
Comedy is just complaining in an entertaining way, Enterplaining.
For me, comedians are like the epitome for everything great, and they terrify me. I just want to be them. I want to be like them.
Stand up comedy can be a tough world to break into. It can take years of painful soul searching, disappointing performances, and pounding the pavement day in and day out with very little reward.
The beautiful thing about stand-up advice is that it applies to anybody, any gender, any race, any age. The best thing you can do - everybody will tell you - is get on stage as much as you can. I would add to that: get on stage as much as you can - with the people you admire.
I like New York, I think you've got some of the best comics in the world here.
Comedians really are like a species. That's not to be exclusive. Anyone can kind of become one. You have to pay your dues, though.
