Stand up Quotes

I didn't want to be nobody, and that was the only way I could be somebody was to do stand-up.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me.

Every night I had a live audience of 25,000 people to win over. My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

I was 18 when I started. I was hanging out with some friends and they asked if I had tried stand-up before. I hadn't, but I thought: 'What the hell?' So I went to an open mic night, and I liked it.

And if people do like me, I think it's because I'm a stand-up guy.

I've never considered stand-up. Luckily I'm given great lines to say. I'm not sure how great my timing would be if I actually had to come up with my own jokes.

As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.

A lot of stand-up comedy guys, when they get a little famous, just give up their stand-up career, and it cancels out the thing that set them apart.

You work with stand-up comedians or you work with somebody in theater, you work with somebody from 'Star Search' or 'Survivor' or a kid, it constantly changes how you play with people.

I'm a comedian, for God's sake. Viewers shouldn't trust me. And you know what? They're hip enough to know they shouldn't trust me. I'm just doing stand-up comedy.

While awaiting sentencing, I decided to give stand-up comedy a shot.

The judge had suggested I get my act together, and I took him seriously.

Improvisation is almost like the retarded cousin in the comedy world.

We've been trying forever to get improvisation on TV. It's just like stand-up. It's best when it's just left alone. It doesn't translate always on TV. It's best live.

I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.

My ambition was to stop waiting tables.

That was how I measured success: finally, I was able to stop waiting tables, and I was able to pay the rent, and that was by being a stand-up comic. Not a very good stand-up comic, but good enough to make a living.

When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside.

Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.

I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.

You try various things when you're growing up.

I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.

The first time I did stand-up was the summer I was 17.

I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy.

Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.

I always want to go back and do stand-up; I like the freedom.

You know, stand-up comedy is where I pretty much started out.

I hated stand-up.

Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.

Lesbians are likely to be drawn to stand-up, if only because it's cheaper to produce and therefore more accessible for women. But the very form of stand-up is masculine.

Who do I like? I am a big fan of French and Saunders - not that that they are particularly stand-up I have to say, but I think they have been great for women and they are of themselves just incredibly funny whether they are male or female.

My mom and dad are both in stand-up comedy, so that's where I started, that's where I got everything. My roots are holding the mic.

I think a lot comes from having the experience of doing stand-up comedy.

It allows you to figure out the psychology of an audience; what things are funny and not.

I was at college doing performing arts, and just spending all my time mucking about, and the lecturers thought I would be pretty good at stand-up, so I gave it a whirl.

I am not a joke-teller. Stand-up, I couldn't do.

Yeah, I do stand-up, my own type of stand-up.

The success of any stand-up act comes out of life experience.