Ari Shaffir Quotes

The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it... try to fake three laughs in an hour - ha ha ha ha ha - they'll take you away, man. You can't.

As a standup comedian, you have to develop a sense of fearlessness. It's really important for your livelihood and your well-being. And if you don't do that, you're going to fail; you're never going to be able to stand up on the cliff and jump off.

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

If you do live shows long enough as a comedian, you can still hear that rhythm of laughing. It's ingrained in you, and it's not something you can really teach somebody. It comes from doing hours and hours and hours and years and decades on stage, performing in front of live crowds.

I always think of comedy as being spontaneous, and yet everything about filmmaking is not spontaneous.

One place that I really feel comfortable is being a comedienne. I'm very socially inept. There's so many things that I can not do in life, and this is, like, the one thing that I have mastery over. It's my world. And anybody who's coming to the show, it's like they're coming because they know that this is my world.

In my stand up, I think I try to be less energetic because I feel embarrassed about how much enthusiasm I have. There's something about acting like I don't care, or if I act like I haven't spent enough time on it, it seems to go better. If I act like I'm really trying to sell it, it doesn't go as well.

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.

Stand-up, for me, is really more of an addiction, so you have to feed the beast whenever you can.

I could never do stand-up because it's that thing of having to get up on stage. And out of every 10 jokes you tell, nine of them have to get a really good response.

When I was doing stand-up, I was about twenty, and I really think that that's a little too young. I didn't have a whole lot of life experience to draw on.

If I do a bit on stage, I prepare too much. Those bits are all really, really carefully written, and overwritten, and researched. I really don't feel like I can wing it. So I write it out word for word, and when I'm onstage I'll improvise around it.

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 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.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

I had no desire to be a stand-up comic until I decided to do it.

At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.

There's no real preparing at home for stand-up. You just go and you just do it.

It's almost like, when someone plays poker for the first time, they might be a professional poker player out of ignorance, just accidentally winning. That was how it felt in my first stand-up appearance.

When I began doing stand-up, it took me a long time to get an hour's worth of material together.

Before doing my first open mic, I was sitting in the back watching all these comedians banter back and forth and fire jokes and up each other, and I thought, 'This is where I wanna be.'

Bad improv happens with people who are inexperienced with each other and don't know the craft that well. But bad stand-up is something that could happen to someone at any level in their career.

I think a lot comes from having the experience of doing stand-up comedy. It allows you to figure out the psychology of an audience; what things are funny and not.

Improv classes were too expensive, so I just started going to open mics. And the day I did it, I did, like, three because I just loved it so much. It was so much fun. And it wasn't good, it was just fun to do. It felt like a release.

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.