Chris D'Elia Quotes

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 got into standup because I wanted to be an actor, and then I ended up loving standup for the next eleven years.

A lot of people get into stand-up as a back door into acting or something. But I really like writing jokes and telling jokes.

Being a correspondent on 'The Daily Show' is some combination of doing a character and doing stand-up. It's a juggling act to find a balance between being you and playing a role.

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

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

I'm not an improv guy.

I was at college doing performing arts, and just spending all my time mucking about, and the lecturers thought I would be pretty good at stand-up, so I gave it a whirl.

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

Stand-up is kind of like my home base, and doing stand-up in New York is what I like doing most.

Stand-up was my entree into the entertainment world. I didn't have to act out somebody else's words. I could just stand there with a microphone, and nobody would interrupt me. It's the most narcissistic thing you could probably do.

I don't necessarily have a traditional stand-up set.

I'm more of a sketch guy than a standup.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

I've always liked and appreciated storytellers like Garry Shandling and Bill Cosby - more long-form comedy. So starting in San Francisco, watching all these great comics - Patton Oswalt, Dave Chappelle - you get to see them a bunch, and you go, 'Wow, this is where I need to be.'

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

The beautiful thing about stand-up is you can create and immediately deliver, perform, and get paid for what you do.

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.

One of my greatest inspirations for stand-up was Jonathan Winters. He was a genius. One thing about him, and also Lenny Bruce, is that they were in the tradition of the one-man show. That's why Richard Pryor was so great, and George Carlin, too. They prowled the stage, they used voices, they were really talents.

I don't consider myself a comic but a performer. A comic tells bad jokes.

Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.

I can do a little bit of comedy. I can be in an in-between place, where I can do a little bit.

Anybody with a sharp brain and a mic can become a comedian, but there's a need to move beyond it. The audience wants to witness the marriage of theatre, comedy and something more.

With stand-up, it doesn't matter who you are. If the audience claps because they love your movies, that clapping stops after five seconds, and then it's your job to make them laugh.

If you can sell that you're the King of Scotland, or Henry V on a tiny stage in a studio theater somewhere, then you can probably sell that you're a starship captain or a time traveler.