Quotes & Jokes about Comedians / page 3
I was scared to death because for the comics of my generation, HBO specials are like the pinnacle. I'm thinking of all these unbelievable comedians I've seen on HBO: Chris Rock, George Carlin, Damon Wayans, Richard Pryor and Billy Crystal. I started having a panic attack seeing my name in that list of people. It was pretty overwhelming.
You can't expect everyone to laugh or applaud you for doing edgy things. Sometimes you'll miss. But I think comedians are artists and there's a value in failure. It kind of works both ways between comedians and audiences. The audience has to understand that comedians are going to sometimes tell a joke that doesn't work out with dark subjects, and the comedian has to understand that sometimes they 'll fail and it's not the audience's fault for not getting it or loving it.
When people didn't know me and I was doing stand-up. That's when I was most creative.
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.
When people come to see my stand-up, they get a chance to see my characters interact with each other. I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human. While many comics have a secret persona, I fundamentally want to be myself.
Well it`s been a few years now and I`ve done some crazy stuff, you know... but I reconnected with what made me famous, with that show and that family, and I went back to my stand-up where I can be myself completely.
Four years working in clubs - that's what really made it for me - every night: doing it, doing it, doing it, getting bored and doing different ways, no pressure on you, and all the other comedians are drunken bums who don't show up, so I could try anything.
Comedians don`t get Oscars, so I gave up on that a long time ago. And I can`t really speak about the Oscar-worthiness of my own performance.
I just like doing standup, that's all I'm interested in or good at.
Jamie Masada is paying for comedians, in lieu of paying them well, he’s paying for them to have therapy at the Laugh Factory. I can just imagine the comedians talking to the therapist "I dunno, sometimes the audiences here just seem to suck... It is just me, or does the owner here seem crazy?"
Comedians are therapists. People honestly think we’re doing it for ourselves. No. If we wanted to do stand-up for ourselves, we would perform in front of a mirror and never go to a club. We are giving this away. Some people are going through so much in their lives, they want to hear something else that’s going on in the world and laugh.
Lots of comedians have people they try to mimic. I mimic my shadow.
All comedians are, in a way, anarchists. Our job is to make fun of the existing world.
I would say most comedians have a very cynical worldview of the way the world can work. It's almost like if you didn't, you couldn't be a comedian.