Stand-Up Performance Quotes

The hardest thing in the world to do is to have someone in a seat in a theater laughing so hard that they're making weird sounds.

I've had jokes stolen a thousand times. But if you can do it better than me, you can have it. I've had jokes stolen from me in the club when I'm next on stage. And my brain will start to turn, and the gears will start turning, and I'll go onstage and create a whole new bit.

I've been doing stand-up for 15 years and I've never even been invited to the Comedy Awards! How mental is that?

We don't apologize for a joke. We are comics. We are here to make you laugh. If you don't get it, then don't watch us.

Specifically in stand-up, I love jokes. I love short, structured ideas and a punchline.

I'm a huge sketch comedy fan, and I think my love of sketch is reflected in my stand-up in that I do a lot of vignettes and voices and characters.

What's the difference between a Dice Clay concert and a Klan rally? Nothing. Trick question.

NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.

Writing your own jokes, you just kind of keep working on something until you think it might work, and then you try it out and hope for the best.

I would be an idiot to say comedy is easy, but it does come naturally. It never feels forced.

The way I view comedy clubs is, people are drinking, they're ordering food, they're out for the night, and there's also a person onstage talking. And with the theater, they came to the theater, and they're waiting to hear what you say. So you'd better have something to say.

I knew I just loved comedy, and I think it was my parents who initially brought up the notion of me trying to do stand-up. I think I actually tried writing jokes just at home, just kind of sitting around. But it seemed like a very real way to step into the world of comedy.

I've never been able to write for stand-up.

There hasn't been an original voice in stand-up since Sam Kinison.

I can't pretend that I'm a great student of the art of comedy because anybody that becomes philosophical about humour doesn't know what he's talking about.

Every once in a while you definitely have to film someone for half an hour saying something that you do not think is funny because for the previous two hours they said a bunch of stuff that you think is really funny.

I thought it would be a funny concept to publish a book about stand-up comedy with Faber, the poetry publisher, and to apply to stand-up the same sort of weight of annotation that you would to a classic work of literature, an epic poem. I thought that would be funny.

I started performing as a stand-up comedian on my own in the mid-1990s.

People keep referring to me as a standup, and that just doesn't sit well with me because a lot of my friends are standups and they're brilliant at writing jokes, and I'm not.

I don't know what people are going to think of my stand-up. If you only know me from 'The Price Is Right' and 'The Drew Carey Show,' then you might be a little bit shocked. I'm a little dirty and a little opinionated but all in fun.

I remember being fascinated by the very nature of comedy from the age of 10; why is this funny, and that isn't?

When I started stand-up - and this is in the '90s - there was definitely people hadn't watched decades of Comedy Central, where people are really much more educated on stand-up comedy.

When they first start doing comedy, new comics or even people that have only been doing it three or four years, they're doing an impersonation of a stand-up. This is what I think a stand-up should sound like.

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

I don't feel bad about the fact that I notice if a lot of people laugh at a comic, and think, 'That worked; I'll do things like that more.'