Quotes & Jokes by David Steinberg / page 2
Jewish comics today are less jokey. Their humor comes at the end, rather than as in Vaudeville where the jokes came at you.
Being a Jewish comic today is a lot different than it was years ago. In fact I changed my name from Dudy to David when I first started to make my name less ethnic. Years later, agents urged me to change my name to something shorter and less Jewish and I told them I had already done that.
The thing about stand-ups is you can't really get good unless you're failing in front of a large number of people. That makes stand-up comedy unique: you need a tremendous amount of reserve within you to take the rejection from the audience, and without it, you can't do anything.
Comedians talk to other comedians the way jazz musicians can talk to each other.
And it was a huge emotional thing to leave the law and become unemployed - to be a student again.
I don't believe any particular ethnic group is smarter than any other group.
My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.
The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile.
In comedy, looking back is more important than looking around at your contemporaries because they are too much influenced by the same time period as you are.
I rewrote it and I took all your notes. Read it again, that kind of persistence paid off.
Great Canadian comics are often outsiders and insiders at the same time. That's a great perspective for a comedian.
Today being a stand-up means that you have to throw them a joke, then another and then another and then follow up with some kind of storytelling.