Anthony Jeselnik Quotes

I am a wild orchid of comedy, so I can only do well under specific conditions... There are people who I think can do any room, and do stadiums and thousand-seat theaters, and then there are people like me who just perform for my parents.

I loved Stephen Wright, and I loved Mitch Hedberg, but they seemed like geniuses you could never emulate. You'd just be ripping them off.

I started when Chris Rock did 'Bigger & Blacker.' I used to watch that before I went onstage as inspiration to get hype, but I noticed I started taking on his cadence and talking like him. I was also doing the New York-style comedy thing, which was angry and annoyed. I was creating a persona instead of trying to embrace my own.

I'm topical as hell. That's not going to change if I lose weight. There are a lot of comics that do 'fat jokes' better than I do - Louie Anderson, John Pinette, Gabriel Iglesias. These guys are phenomenal.

I kind of was raised at The Comedy Store by comedians. When you see my dad on stage before me and then you see me, you'll see where I got a lot of my stuff.

I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.

When I started out I was definitely more traditional. It was 1988. Everyone was doing the Jerry Seinfeld.

I don't think there's hardly a comic out there that does clean material all the way around. There's a couple of guys that are clean, but I'm not one of them.

With stand-up you've just got that one chance. Audiences can be quite fickle.

As a kid, I loved Paula Poundstone and Richard Pryor. But my mother was a huge influence on my comedy.

It was a decision to work clean. I just prefer to work that way. I have no problem with comedians who don't work that way. There was a temptation in the early '70s to reconsider. I decided against it.

It's not until you develop your own voice, your own persona onstage that you become your own comic, who you really are.

Chevy Chase and Bill Murray - we thought those guys were funny. We love Bill Murray, but we didn't think they were right for Airplane! because it would step on the joke if there was a known comedian.

I'm hardly a known name, but I don't want to go, like, 'Oh, people call me a storyteller comedian, let me just go up and just talk about my day.' I don't want that to happen.

I'm wildly different than Maria Bamford or Sarah Silverman, and might be more similar to some male comics.

I'm a Brooklyn guy onstage, and I try to really feed my fans with the kind of material they expect from me.

When I became a standup comic, my hero, one of them, was Richard Pryor, and you know, I think that comedians, like, comedians talk about hacks, and what a hack is, is someone who does stuff that's not original.

The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes.

A lot of female comedians will go up there in a sweatshirt and Converses, trying to dress themselves down, because it is sort of a boy's club. I'll go up in my heels. I like that people don't think I'll be funny. I'll take that on. I don't do standup comedy - I do standup and I do comedy, but I don't go up there and do jokes.

I don't like somebody saying to me in their performance, 'Look at this. Isn't this funny?' I pray that I don't do that. I'm sure I fall off the horse every once in a while, but I try not to.

I'm not a comedian who wants to spend far too long on stage.

I don't think it's any secret that the bigger the venue, the subtlety and artfulness of comedy declines.

Every time I go onstage, it's a little less 'Chris Rock's brother.'

In most specials, the performer's up - not only not surrounded, but up on a stage - and there's a distance between them and the audience, and I think my comedy doesn't work as well in that way.

I worshipped guys like Bill Maher, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld, and was doing my variation of that. But as a young person with no political point of view or life experience, it was as funny as you can imagine.