Comedy Origins Quotes

I wasn't particularly funny in high school, but I grew up with three older brothers who were quite funny.

The book is called 'Thanks for Nothing' and it's really the story of how I got into comedy and traces back every strand in my life that is relevant to that story. It's kind of an autobiography but isn't, as it stops about 25 years ago. It goes right up to the first time I do stand up.

When I first started comedy, me and my friends were kids. I claim - although I know that it's a spurious and probably untrue claim - that we were the first generation of kids to act black.

I think I knew I was funny in Elementary School. I think most funny people realize it when they're young. It tends to come out of stress or trauma - something that makes you want to be funny.

I don't think comedy necessarily comes from a dark place. But I do think what a lot of us have in common is that, growing up, being funny was a coping mechanism.

My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.

I started comedy in 2006. I didn't even think it was a thing I could do.

When people say, 'How did you start in comedy,' I say my family was kidnapped by ninjas when I was very young, and to get them released I had to do a killer five-minute set. And even after I did that, you know, I started doing comedy under tough circumstances, I still kept at it because I enjoyed it.

When I came to Chicago, I didn't even know what improvisation meant, as far as pertaining to comedy. I knew about Second City, but I didn't know what the word 'improvisation' meant.

No matter how big a comedian gets, they're ultimately all just a bunch of nerds with their weird insecurities. You realize these are just the people in high school who were making people laugh.

What ignited the rocket that sent you up into the vast regions of comedy, and why? I would say, for me, that philosophical treatise about having black beginnings and wanting love to compensate for that, wanting audiences and wanting attention - I say, "Au contraire." Completely opposite. I want the continuation of my mother's incredible love and attention to me.

Humour is learned behaviour, and I know exactly why I learned to be funny. I did it from a very early age. My dad was a hilarious man, and the way we interacted was being silly together. It was a way to hold his attention.

I had the humble beginnings. I was doing comedy in laundry mats in 1992, literally where I would bring a little gorilla amp and a lapel mike and just start performing.

Comedy came early. I knew when I was a kid that I was silly, and I knew that I liked people who were funny, but I don't think I knew I was funny. I didn't really think about it.

Comics and actors come from such a wide variety of backgrounds and there's a theory that all comedians had tortured youths.

My childhood was lonely. Both my parents were away a lot, working, and the maid basically raised me. And I think that's where a lot of my comedy comes from. Not only was the maid very funny and witty, but when my mother came home I'd use humour to try and get her attention. If I made mommy laugh, then maybe everything would be all right. I think that's where it [my comedy] all started.

I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.

Comedy tends to come out of things which are quite painful and serious.

It's always been said that comedy comes mostly out of the dark side anyway.

I got into musical comedy because of Shakespeare, not because of singing. They needed someone to understudy Richard Burton. I was also going to musical auditions because the agent I had insisted I go to them.

I never really thought of myself as a physical comedian. But when I was a kid, I used to, you know, pretend to trip over things to make girls laugh in school and stuff like that. So I kind of learned how to fall without hurting yourself.

'All Def' is unlike any other comedy show or set because 'All Def' goes back to the essence of how urban comedy started. We give it a 'stoop appeal.' A stoop appeal is important for us because it's where pretty much all black comics started doing their standup: cracking jokes on the stoop, in the hood.

Actually, I started as a ventriloquist and my music teacher said, "Why don't you emcee the talent show?" My act was out of the back of Boys' Life magazine-they had a whole series of jokes in the back of Boys' Life magazine for Boy Scouts. So my act was jokes with my ventriloquist figure, and it was really bad, but I walked into the classroom afterward and the kids went, "Wow, you're cool." I wasn't cool at all, but I thought, "Well, this is a pretty good deal."

We all [Ed Simmons,Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis] started together, so there were no rules - anything we wrote became television.

They shouldn't call anything a boot camp unless you're going off to war. Standup boot camp has been a fantastic thing, for the people putting it on. They keep you out in the woods and won't let you come back until you're funny. Lenny Bruce came up with his Religions Inc. bit on a day hike.