Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.
In comedy you feel you need to go back to the theatre every now and again, you feel you need to go back to an audience every now and again to see if you're still getting your craft right, making people laugh at the moments you think they should and that sort of thing.
'Hedwig' was pretty much all the things I wanted to do that other people said I probably shouldn't do: drag, punk rock, stand-up comedy... You know, combine them all in a thing that's supremely uncommercial from the objective point of view.
My real name is Joseph Herbert. My dad is white; my mom's Asian, Filipino. And when I started stand-up 22 years ago, I used to go up as Joseph Herbert, and I would just have to defend my name. Every time I went onstage, it was so annoying. People would heckle.
I never really consider myself an awkward person, but once I got into stand-up, I kept hearing that word. The only thing I can trace it back to is that my mom had a similar sensibility. She always made people uncomfortable.
I tried to make the punchline as close to the setup as I could. And I thought that was the perfect thing. If I could make the setup and the punchline identical to each other, I would create a different kind of joke.
London seems to be a town with a lot of comedy fans and people that really enjoy stand-up.
I do think, with people in comedy, you can have your time, as it were, and then you don't realise that it might have gone. I hope it hasn't for me. I think what I do is, I just... I just try to plough my own furrow, in a way.
Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.
I'm more focused or try to be more focused on my acting and writing and comedy and let the other stuff fall where it may.
The first time I did stand-up was on a dare.
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.
I find comedy to be one of the highest of the art forms.
In stand-up, there's that idea that comedy comes from a dark place, but it's not a rule.
Around year seven or eight, you'd kill yourself when you realized Norm had to enter and you had to come up with a new beer joke.
I always think of comedy as being spontaneous, and yet everything about filmmaking is not spontaneous.
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 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.
Hollywood wanted a certain type of comic - that Def Jam comedy style of comic that was very loud, very brash, very much from the ghetto, had that sensibility.
Shall I crack any of those old jokes, master, At which the audience never fail to laugh?
I think Ferguson is underrated. I think it's an amazing show. They all have something different to offer, but I think Craig Ferguson has one of the most interesting monologues in late-night because he basically does stand-up.
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.
That's a lovely experience when you make an audience laugh. Then the nerves go away for a bit. And sometimes you do things then that you've never done before that are really funny.
