Aziz Ansari Quotes

I've actually never done standup before.

As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

I can never tell when something is funny. I just have to do it onstage and find out.

You say a line and you wait for them to laugh, then you say another line and you wait... It felt weird to me. But it's interesting and the energy is almost like theatre, I suppose, with all the people there.

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

You really have no idea whether or not what you're writing is funny. In stand-up and sketch comedy, you know right away and you can make your changes accordingly.

The basic function of a comic is stand-up because it's so straightforward and simple. If the audience don't laugh, you didn't do your job. I've had some audiences where I didn't care if they laughed or not because they were either too drunk or stupid.

I know what I want to talk about, but I don't really know what's funny about a joke until I perform it in front of an audience.

We've all seen comedians look like they're reaching just a little bit too much for the laugh. This is counterproductive. The conceit of standup is that it is effortless, which makes the prospect of generating new comedy a tricky one: you are trying to be funny without looking like you are trying to be funny.

If you want to do standup, you have to go on stage. That's the only way to get good - stage times.

There is nothing more joyful to me than hearing a live audience laugh. Especially when I planned it that way!

When you're doing stand-up, you can comment if something fails, get a laugh from that.

Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.

Sometimes an actor will stumble on the joke, and I'm right on them. Back it up before the audience hears the bad version of the joke, because humor is 90% surprise. If they know what's coming, they won't laugh as hard.

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

Something about not waiting for the laugh of a laugh track allows you to take lines that otherwise might be seen as just direct jokes, and make them seem realistic.

Stand-up keeps you alive. It is definitely the most specialized field in comedy because you need to stay sharp and well-tuned every night.

There is nothing - nothing - like writing a great joke and having that joke kill onstage.

Any audience that gets a laugh out of me gets it while I'm facing them.

If you are doing stand-up comedy, you have to be confident in what you are doing. That doesn't mean just because you are confident you are funny.

When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent.

You learn what can become a good joke and can be repeatable. You have a shorthand about how to introduce a joke to someone.

You say you're a comedian, you always have to be on guard.

If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?

You can tell on-stage when a joke's starting to lose its pop. It doesn't mean people don't want to hear it anymore; it means I don't want to do it anymore. Because I want to move on to something that has a knee-jerk reaction just like you get when you tell somebody a joke that they've never heard.