Comedy Material Quotes

I think it's always a good time to be in a political film in America because there's so much material for comedy.

When you do an hour and a half and you destroy, like tonight was great. I had an awesome time. I realized that I'd been up there for about an hour and a half and I realized, "Wow, I'm gonna get out of here without doing Walken." It is a bit of a moral victory.

I never really write the jokes. I just sit down over a week or two and try to figure out what I want to talk about. Once I narrow that down, then I start working on the material, like "How do I make this stuff funny?"

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.

Like every comedian, if I heard a joke that I thought would work, I used it.

A lot of my stand-up early on was stories from my childhood. And my childhood is over - there's not new childhood stories to come. They've all been mentioned.

Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.

I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill... as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything.

I talked about everything, man. I've always written material that everyone can laugh at. I talked about growing up. I did a lot of physical comedy. That was my thing. I was a physical comedian. I did anything and everything from running on a treadmill, I can paint a picture on stage of anything.

When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.

I know the fashion is that everything is fair game [for comedy material] but I don't believe that.

I don't think it's unfair to have writers. I think if you're going to do a roast on television, as if you were doing a play or you were reading a script of a movie, you would have the best possible material. And those are the people who score, the people who are willing to listen to the roasting experts and then come out there and own that material.

I often think it can often be very difficult for comedians to revisit the same gag. I think Russell's a bit more than a comedian.

I've been doing stand-up for so long, I think 19 years, that I love topics I can also expand on. Once I identify a topic like, say, seafood, which is a big one right now, it's like there are different kinds of tangents I can go on to build a larger chunk.

Second City Las Vegas is very different from Second City in Chicago on the main stage, where they do improv sets. That's how they kind of hone material, kind of work up to new material.

The whole idea of comedy, there is nothing normal about going up on stage to make strangers laugh. But I'm also not an exhibitionist like other comics. I'm not up there talking about masturbating.

I don't do any jokes that old. I might have maybe one or two jokes from high school that I still do.

There's something so scary about trying out new material and being completely comfortable jumping into the abyss with a comedic idea.

I've never done a comedy club in my life. It's weird because I don't have the same background as most comics. I don't have a history of going up and only doing eight minutes.

I remember when I got my first Adam Sandler CD and it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard in my entire life, and continues to be.

You know, my first album, some of those jokes I'd done for twelve years because I couldn't throw 'em out.

I've been a musician and a songwriter for years, since I was a teenager, and made my living doing that on and off for a long time, so when it came to writing comedy material, it was the thing that came easiest to me, the most natural way of writing.

A special validates you as a stand-up by documenting your material.

I come up with my jokes by thinking of a topic.

For aspiring comedians? Don't listen to me. Just go on stage and do what you think is funny.