I don’t have a specific plan except for as long as people want to listen to me talk, I’m going to keep talking. I can’t imagine a life without doing standup.
I had a standup act, and I ended up turning it into something that was really watered down and accessible. Something that went from scary and threatening to something that was almost to the point of being corny.
I used to do standup about footballers; they are easy targets because they are traditionally seen as stupid.
When I quit my internship and started doing standup to pursue my dreams and do that full time – I feel like that’s when I ‘Americaned.’
I was a kid, and I would watch standup comics do the ‘Tonight Show,’ and if Johnny Carson liked you, he’d wave you over to the desk; that pretty much meant you were about to be the most successful comedian in the country for the next few years.
I think that standup has always been an acquired taste and there was always only a handful of performers that were really inspired.
Standup is like shorthand. Every bit must be both brief and profound or the audience will lose interest.
I’m a big fan of Louis CK – I think he’s a master of standup.
My standup is years and years of me working things out on the road. I’m really proud of it! A lot of it is about, well… I don’t know why I feel this way, but I feel like every special or show I do is some variation on how I feel like I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.
I had a great time on News Radio, I got to make tons of money in relative obscurity and learn a lot about the TV biz and work on my standup act constantly. It was a dream gig.
Standup is a tough job and a gritty job.
As a standup performer, I’m onstage, and it’s important how the audience is looking at me. I’m looking at whether they’re leaning forward or not, those types of things. You read an energy. And it’s the same thing in a scene with other actors.
The role of a comedian is to go in and make something funny. That might be a situation where I’m writing, a situation where I’m in control, like standup or something of my own that I’m making, or it might be something like being an actor in someone else’s project.
From fear to bonding with the audience to getting more open – that’s what standup is. It humanises you.
You have to have a thick skin, yes. If you’re going to do something as foolhardy as standup, you’ve got to be able to take it on the chin if someone has a go at you.
People would say, Can we develop a sitcom around you? and I would say, Not interested. I’m very happy doing standup and writing and taking my kids to school.
The very first time I did standup, I went to an open mike on the Lower East Side at a place that doesn’t exist anymore. And it was one of those open mikes that wasn’t really just for comedy.
I don’t know what the secret to doing standup well is, but I do know the goal is to be yourself as much as possible. And working harder than everyone else.
When I was doing standup, I always wanted to get out of the standup world and take it back into the theatrical world, like with ‘No Cure For Cancer.’
I was a standup comedian, which is kind of like writing and directing yourself.
When you go to standup, there seems to be a common denominator of some form of need or want for validation from the audience that maybe you were lacking as a kid.
Growing up, I didn’t really watch a lot of standup. I didn’t know you could be a low-energy comedian. It was something I did daydream about, but in the way you daydream about becoming the president or something – it could never happen.
I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn’t include someone the size of the Hindenburg.
I have seven brothers and sisters, and they could all be standup comics!
I did a gig as a standup when I was eight years old. I went on holiday with my family to this holiday camp and they had a talent competition and I entered as a standup.
I started writing sketches when I was 13. I liked Vic Reeves, Fry and Laurie, and Paul Merton, and I thought you could just send sketches to the BBC, and they’d go, ‘Great. We’ll put these on telly.’ But I gradually realised that you either had to go to university and join a club, or do standup.
The podcast movement was really a creative survival mechanism for standup comics.
Acting is completely different from the standup world. You have these 12- or 14-hour days, but you have a great time doing it. It’s like hanging out with your friends.
Early on, people told me I was making Chinese people look bad. I’ve been living with this accent. I had already been doing standup for a while. I knew my voice already. I myself never wanted to make my accent the butt of the joke. I never want it to be, ‘I’m laughing at your accent.’
I’ve always been a comedy nerd, and ‘Partners in Crime’ was probably more influential for me than anything else because it was not only standup, but Robert Townsend had those short films.
I think standup is pretty good for an introvert because you are performing, but, I mean, it’s on your own terms. There are so many people in the room, but it’s a one-sided conversation. And you actually don’t have to interact – unless you want to.
I’m a singer and performer in a hybrid show that’s standup, music and audience participation.
If it were just a dream to be famous, then I probably would have died a really quick death, because there is nothing about me that equals fame. I’m not a standup comedian. I don’t sing.
My mom ending up passing away, and I got really depressed and didn’t have money for therapy, and so I started doing standup to cope with my mom’s death.
There’s no one on the road that I tried to pattern myself after. There’s no one in history that I tried to pattern myself after. Because one thing I was told that in standup you want to develop your own voice.
People see a lot of my standup, and that’s what I’m known for since I was trained in karate and kickboxing, but I also have ground game.
When I got a part in ‘All American Girl,’ in 1994, I remember thinking, ‘Now I have a series, I’m not going to need to do standup,’ but every night I’d go out afterward and get onstage somewhere.
At the end of the day, I’m not really trying to make a statement with any of my standup.
I started doing standup because of Hugh Grant’s best-man speech in ‘Four Weddings,’ which is basically a standup routine.
When you’re a standup comic, you get up and you try stuff, and you’re always kind of seeing how far you can push things.
But I also know in standup, there’s nowhere to hide. You get on stage and you deliver, or you are eviscerated and you are thrown into a pile of bodies at the bottom of a mountain.
When I was at university, I did essays on political theatre. And it was really frustrating that the ideas weren’t reaching the people they were talking about. Standup is the one place where you are talking to every level of society.
In standup, you don’t have anything near you except a microphone. There’s something a lot more self-conscious feeling when there’s cameras coming in for close-ups. It makes you very aware.
I had never done a roast, but I really wanted to, because it’s so different from standup.
You can play a gig as a band and not know that they hated you; with standup, after every line, you know.
I’d decided to write about stuff that I would like to hear standup about.
I think as a standup performer you have to feel the audience. So the audience kind of dictates what they get, you know?
I’ve done a lot of dramedies in my career. You know, I started as a standup comic, and then the movies that I was doing, like ‘Up Side of Anger’ were kind of like – they’re hard. They’re hard to sell; they’re hard to get made, you know.
Standup comedy is inordinately difficult. If doing something else for a living will make you equally happy, choose that instead. I’m serious. Comedy is punishing.
The most memorable performance was my appearance in concert in Carnegie Hall. The first standup to do so.
I never liked the glossiness of highly produced standup specials in general – I like it where it has more of a feel of the type of places I usually perform. It seems kind of weird when you do a special to go perform in a place unlike the place where you perform 95% of the time.
I will always love to perform standup comedy.
The most dangerous place I’ve ever performed standup is in my home state of California.
I started doing standup when I was in college, and I would incorporate a lot of characters into my act.
Ross Noble at the Leicester De Montfort Hall on his Randomist tour – it’s the only time I’ve hurt from laughing at a standup comedian.
Before I started doing standup, I knew that I had what it takes to develop an act. I went down to clubs with not many people there, and I just worked on it, man. A lot of my friends are comedians, so that part had a lot of encouragement, even though the shows were very caveman-like.
I was working at Nordstrom Rack, Borders Books, and I was cleaning yachts on the weekends for private parties and being a busboy. I had to break down the tables and roll the forks up in napkins. And I was still doing standup.
My dad’s pretty funny. He’s funny for all of the wrong reasons. The first time I did standup at Edinburgh he sat in the front row and wore sunglasses because he didn’t want to put me off.
