Ron Funches Quotes

The only way to stay sharp is to do live shows. There is no part-time comedy.

You get very comfortable doing the open mic circuit, turning up to the same places and playing to 20 people. In that situation, it won't matter if you aren't great on that night because no one will really remember who you are. Then suddenly you are doing rooms to 400 people and you have to up your game.

I feel like every time I go out, I want to do a good job. I want people to say that he's just as good at stand-up as he is in some of the movies I've seen him in, so I try to do the best every time I go out there.

I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-'60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn't the night before.

I left school and couldn't find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I've always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.

I feel like I'm always performing in Vegas around Christmastime.

Being able to write jokes is great, but you still have to get used to performing them and being on stage - and enjoying being on stage, not just like tolerating it.

When I am on 'Raw' and 'Smackdown,' I try to make the best of it.

I love doing stand-up, and the more you do outside of stand-up to raise your profile, the better your stand-up becomes in terms of the quality of gigs.

I did a standup show called 'Show Me the Funny,' so from that I got some TV stuff and people would book me for gigs. I wasn't really good enough at that point, so had to catch up with expectations.

Playing to a stadium is not for everyone because you are essentially gambling, big-time. You have to go all in on production. You can't hold back.

Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.

I call it 'new forms'. When you're starting out, they ask you to do four or five minute sets, but once you're a headliner, you do like 90 minutes. I try to think of different things to divvy up the show, like doing drawings, playing music... I gotta carry the show, that's the problem.

I started going to the open mics every day in 2003. You make the comics laugh, they get you work, and you build up your reputation. It was a slow process.

You can succeed as a terrible director, but try doing that with stand-up: try being a terrible comedian and getting up on stage. The funny will win out very, very quickly.

It's such a high-pressure form of live entertainment that I found, once I got out there, being on a movie set isn't that different from being on 'Monday Night RAW.' It's all stuff that I was prepared for.

The more you work in this business as a comedian, the closer you get to just being yourself onstage, on camera, the more well received you are.

I was always just like, 'Standups are making it up.' A lot of people have that myth about standup. And so it wasn't until I was in college for theater school in Boston that I realized I can actually start going to open mics and figuring this out.

I'd been doing standup since college.

When it's my show, I know that everybody is there to see me - but I like a challenge, and I like the fact that at festivals not everybody is there to see me, but I have the chance to convert people.

I haven't been offstage for more than two days since I started doing comedy.

The camera is no one's friend - you have to leave your problems at home and make people laugh. That's never an easy thing to do.

I did so many open mics. I would write jokes on Twitter constantly, and then slowly, over time, open mics turned into shows. If you can get a joke to work at an open mic, it's a good joke.

Open mics are a great way to rework your material to see what punchlines land best.

I remember being captivated by Steve Coogan and Eddie Izzard and wanting to do what they did. That generation of comedians was my main influence.