TV is easier: it's all planned out for you and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over.
Stand-up is the kind of gig that'll show you where you're at.
TV is easier: it's all planned out for you, and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up, but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over. To me, that's more pure.
I don't get many hecklers now but answering them is an art form in itself.
Open mics are a great way to rework your material to see what punchlines land best.
I really admire stand-up, and I think I would have loved to learn how to do it. I think it's terrifying and thrilling. A really cool thing to do. It's a dying art, in a way.
Comedians walk out, get a feel for the crowd. If it's not going good, we change directions. If we got to drag your momma into this thing, we will. Whatever we got to do.
As a stand-up comic, you have to do the road.
Once you become a comedian, you accept that people are just going to yell stuff at you.
I have a tough time with stand-up because I am an improviser. I can riff; I can do crowd work, so I don't prepare.
With stand-up, it doesn't matter who you are. If the audience claps because they love your movies, that clapping stops after five seconds, and then it's your job to make them laugh.
I've been doing stand-up since I was 19. There have been times I've had to step away because of my schedule, but now I'm able to go out and do theaters and not smoky little bars.
I don't know any comedian who tailors his act to his audience. Maybe people say they do, but I can't even imagine them.
People say I'm good at standup. I don't even think I'm that great at standup. I just hit hard. I don't think I'm super technical or anything like that. I got a couple knockouts. I think I just hit hard more than anything.
When you go out there to do comedy, you feel like you're doing battle with the audience a lot of the time. You're either going to get 'em, or you're not.
To be a true comic, you have to have a signature move. You ever watch wrestling? And your favorite wrestler has the one move that he always does to finish his opponent off, right? Like when he climbs on the rope, and he always jumps off the top rope and finishes off his opponent - that's what a comic has.
I'm a comic; we get hecklers every night! It's really just part of the job.
Being able to write jokes is great, but you still have to get used to performing them and being on stage - and enjoying being on stage, not just like tolerating it.
It's important that when you do standup, you do small places like coffee shops and also big places like colleges. It helps you find the little nuances in your set that don't work, and you can shave off the excess.
I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it's a doddle because you've got an audience.
As a comedian, I'm forced to have a tough skin. Until people laugh, they are detractors. You walk into a new audience where nobody knows you, they go: 'Make us laugh. Show us what you're made of. Prove why we should be listening to you.'
You say a line and you wait for them to laugh, then you say another line and you wait... It felt weird to me. But it's interesting and the energy is almost like theatre, I suppose, with all the people there.
My stand-up has a lot of performance in it, and I loved doing it so much that, after years, I put the idea of having a show on the back burner.
In standup, you don't have anything near you except a microphone.
I think the challenge is going out in front of a paying audience with absolutely nothing and trying to entertain them for two hours. Thankfully, I only think about that right before we go on, and then once we're out there, everything's fine.
