Vir Das Quotes

Stand-up comedy is an art form and it dies unless you expand it.

I never thought I'd end up doing comedy, but actually, it's been something I've really relished the challenge of and ended up doing quite a bit of.

My job is mostly to entertain and be funny.

In my mind, I was always a comedian who was going to branch into writing.

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

I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.

My younger sister's a comedian. She has a sketch comedy group in Chicago called Schadenfreude and I look at her with such admiration and envy because it's such an amazing thing to make someone laugh.

If I'm not in the theatre, I'm in an open mic night or doing a guest set at the Comedy Club, or whatever, just trying to develop stuff.

I just like to build. Don't get me wrong: I think stand-up is great, and when someone like Richard Pryor or Steve Martin does stand-up, there's nothing better in the world. But I don't want to watch a lot of stand-ups for two hours. So I can do 45 minutes of stand-up and then say, 'Can we do something else now?'

I really like to do comedy, and I did comedy the first 2 years after I graduated college, so I really love it and appreciate it.

I can work as a writer, but I wanted to do stand-up.

But I just think I was lucky enough to figure out early on that I wanted to do comedy, so that's what I put all my effort into.

So many of these comics are just frustrated singers or actors - they want to get a gig doing a sitcom. It's paint-by-the-numbers comedy, lame joke-telling. They're drawn to it as a career move.

Comedians have to write to survive because you don't get cast for your beauty.

Some people use stand-up to get something else in their careers, but it's truly the art form of stand-up I love.

Stand-up will always be my first love, and it has been the primary way I've expressed myself since I was 17.

But long story short, I didn't start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up.

I'm in a sketch comedy group in school and I also do stand-up.

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.

If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

At one point when I was very young, when I was first starting out, I thought, 'Well, one day I'll be able to put all the music away and become a real comedian.' But then I realized there are amazing musical comedians out there, that musical comedy is probably something I'll always want to pursue.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

Stand-up is the foundation to my career. It's what I started out doing.

I have worked with a great many comedians as opposed to comics, although I have worked with comics as well, I make the distinction.